Linux Hosted
Over the weekend with some holiday time I’ve been back to my home town for a little break from city life. I went back Thursday night and came back to Birmingham very late monday night/early Tuesday. I was late as I had randomly ended up in Leicester with one of my good friends and we had gone to see Alice in Wonderland, which was pretty good.
It had been quite an eventful but great weekend, saw the family and friends, witnessed a car crash in which the offending party hopped up and drove off and moved my website to my linux host. I’m trying to make room for another server so I’m consolidating various services so I can free up an IP address but a new virtual machine running exchange2010.
The move didn’t go as smoothly as I had planned, the application I used to create a dump of the DB has filled it with random text doubling the file size and caused lots of issues when I went to load it up. I instead reverted back to using MySQLDump on the Windows command line console.
Didn’t have many issues with the new setup, Apache 2.0 didn’t like the previous .htaccess and reported an “Internal Error Page” was quite annoying as I didn’t know what was going on until I checked the logs. After loading up the proper .htaccess file I just needed to enable mod_rewrite using the following command.
a2enmode rewrite
I’m pretty happy everything is working now, one thing that did annoy me running WordPress in ISS 6.0 is that the WordPress iPhone apps did not work but now that do as I’m back on linux so look out for a few more picture uploads.
Just one more site to move and I should be able to setup Exchange2010.
A Sign Of Speeds To Come!
Just been reading a few interesting blog posts on BT Infinity and as a networking student quite excited of the speeds BT could be selling. Soon to be available but only in some areas of course BT are offering 40Mb download and 10Mb upload speeds (here). I’ve thought for a long time that ISP’s need to be increasing uploads speeds. It make sense. So many people are now uploading digital content to sites like YouTube and Facebook. Although they can download websites super fast uploading those pictures from the night before can take hours! Virgin Media have said to be testing a 200Mb package but seem to have run in to issues when finding a domestic router that can handle these speeds.
Although I would be very happy to have a 200Mb connection to the outside world I have to wonder if I’d actually use it. There are little or no services that would max out that connection or even use a substantial amount, it does open up a whole new doorway though as services and websites once bogged down by slow Internet speeds could benefit drastically. COD6 / Xbox live comes to mind as IW has dropped dedicated server support for the latest COD. I suppose I could quickly find a certain protocol to max out the connection.
I think a lot of business with lots of users would benefit from these speeds. As the connection is shared and they’d be able to host quite a lot of services internally. Instead of having to pay and arm and a leg for a leased line which sometimes isn’t all that fast or even data centre space which is quite expensive.
Xtreamer, No More Issues
I’ve noticed over the weekend that since I fitted the add-on cooler to the Xtreamer I have not been having any issues as I had described when I first purchased the little media streamer. This is quite awesome as I did start to wonder if I had just wasted £109 on a new heater.
The only issue I have come across is when I replaced the router with my D-Link Dir-655 as the old router had started to randomly drop the connection to the Internet. The dir-655 was setup as an access point for the Xtreamer on Wireless-N to get the best speed streaming downstairs to the TV. When I came to swap the routers I completely reset the d-link to factory settings. I suspect I didn’t setup the wireless on the same settings as before as now the Xtreamer fails to connect to the Wireless-N network and get an IP address. However the old router which is Wireless-G still has some life in it to act as a access-point for the Xtreamer. The laptops are on the Wireless-N network which keeps the airways clear enough for the Xtreamer to stream HD surprisingly!
One day I’ll end up fixing it as it was connected to the d-link but if it isn’t broken don’t fix it. Right?
Passwords
A recent study has been published identifying the worst passwords used on computer systems. “123456″ claims the top stop with others such as “Password” and “123456789″.
1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123
(Source: PCWorld)
Although some may have, many seem to not be aware just how easy it would be for hackers to brute force attack someone’s account and again access.
“To quantify the issue, the combination of poor passwords and automated attacks means that in just 110 attempts, a hacker will typically gain access to one new account on every second or a mere 17 minutes to break into 1000 accounts,” Imperva said in its report.
Just looking at the SSH logs from my two Linux servers they are subject to thousands of login attempts everyday. Internet bots trying to gain access.
Its not just users that are the problem I find by not picking good, strong passwords. I have several passwords for various services/accounts etc. Some passwords make sense, some don’t, some I don’t even know by memory. Sometimes I forget these and go though the password recovery steps on websites. I find there is about 50% chance that the website will send me my password in an email. I have even come across one certain website that will send me a password reminder whenever it chooses to. Although that’s great and I have my password its not great in the fact I now have an email displaying my password sitting in my in-box. What happens if my email account gets compromised? You’d just be able to search my inbox for various passwords. Although I delete these emails I suspect a large sum of people don’t. This is one trick someone used in gain access to various things relating to twitter.
I think in some respects you can hardly blame users when companies are sending out passwords in plain text which is just as bad. This shows two potential problems which would have dangerous consequences if account details ever became leaked or compromised 1) They store your password in plain text or 2) They store your password in reversible encryption.
So.. Change your passwords, don’t have the same password, delete those password recovery emails would be my advice!
Exchange 2007
I’ve pretty much finished setting up Exchange on my newish server over at UKS. I say pretty much but I started this post in December last year so its been going for some time now! I’m pleased with it. I found it quite usful installing it as it helped me fix some issues with the Exchange server I manage at work! I’ve been using the webui to access my email which I have quickly got annoyed with. As most do, I prefer firefox and as some may know you don’t get the fully featured OWA anything other than Internet Explorer, one main thing you can’t do is create message rules (Unless I am totally blind). Good news though as Exchange 2010 which is currently at RC stage fully supports all features in Firefox and other browsers.
Just with my current setup I can not upgrade / install Exchange 2010 as I have run out of IP addresses / have no compatiable servers… yet… so I will have to stick with 2007 for a while.
On other note I’m appreciating how awesome WordPress is, its so easy to upgrade/add plugins unlike PHPBB which I have been working with lately, it reminds me why I did not follow a career in Wed Development / Design.
Although, when is anything easy?
Fitted The Xtreamer Cooler
I fitted the Xtreamer cooler the other night. I was a little concerned how easy the how-to made the whole process look, nothing is easy. To be fair though once I’d got the side panel off, which must have been stuck down with the worlds strongest double-sided tape the whole thing was a breeze to complete. It even looks good as an end product with the cooler attached. On a plus note it worked afterwards. I hadn’t slipped and ploughed a screwdriver across the chipset.
I haven’t however watched it enough since to see if the cooler actually works but reading around others seem to think so. Its also stopped acting up. After a little playing around after my previous post, here. It turned out the Windows Home Server wasn’t 100% happy with the Xtreamer on the network. Its fine now, the problem was the WHS, at idle spun down the hard drives when they were not in use and when the Xtreamer started to stream a file there was a delay while the hard-drives spin back up. This is ok when your streaming to Boxee, a PC etc as there is about a 2 second delay the Xtreamer however seems to get confused. I think I’ll file a bug report when I can test this more.
On a similar note the Xtreamer with its HDMI output is pushing me towards getting a HD TV. I’ve been watching the new series Life on BBC/iPlayer and the awesome shots they have in HD are just amazing but I’m stuck watching it on my PC monitor… for now.. any recommendations?
