Author Archives: Laz

Good password practices

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Passwords, and why the heck are they so important?

Everyone has passwords, some have only a few, and some of us have bunches of them. In some cases, literally hundreds or thousands to manage, and let me tell you it’s a pain in the rear. However, password management is not the main thing this article is about, although it pertains to the subject. No, what I want to talk about today is the area of good passwords, strong passwords, passwords that will defend your server and shun any attack by the bad guys that try to get in while you are away playing Quidditch. I have seen lots of passwords in my day, and let me tell you that there are lots of servers that could be compromised using either “ncc1701” or “corona”.

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Basics of securing a Linux server

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One of the most important jobs that someone who calls themselves a “System Administrator” has is securing their servers. Whether it’s a personal server you are tinkering with, or a production server at work somewhere, keeping a server secure is paramount for many reasons, not just keeping your data safe. If your server were to get compromised, depending on what happened, it could be used as a zombie to target other machines in a massive DDoS attack. It might be used to send yet more spam out to the users of the world, or it could even be setup as a platform to launch more viruses and attacks against unsuspecting users all over the Internet.

The point is that there are a great many reasons to keep your server secure, and I don’t think there is anyone out there who would disagree. That being said, I have written up some basic steps that I go through to begin the process of securing my Linux boxes, thus hoping you can use it to help you secure yours. I decided to start with Linux because many people are testing and playing with it since it is very powerful and free. These are guidelines, as well as examples of how I do it. It’s too simple to say that there are better or worse ways of doing things. Read what I have below here and apply it to your situation, lots of things in this article can even be applied to Windows, as they are good practices regardless of the OS. Let’s get started shall we?

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Super Cool Text Editor

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One thing that I love is text editors. No, I don’t count notepad in the list, but I do count Notepad++ for Windows. It’s one of the best text editors I have used, and it has some very impressive and awesome features. Now, before I go any further, for the record let me state that my favorite, and the best text editor of all time is Vi/Vim, hands down. Whatever platform, whatever you need, it’s the best (it’s better than emacs, get over it!). It is also however, rather a pain to learn to use and most people who aren’t already using it on UNIX/Linux, aren’t going to bother learning it just to have a good text editor on Windows.

Saying that gets me back to Notepad++, which is a very full featured replacement for little old notepad that comes with Windows. A couple of the main things that I like about Notepad++ is that not only can it handle text files created on UNIX/Linux platforms, it can convert between the two! Yes, I said convert between Windows formatted text files and UNIX/Linux formatted text files, and back again. That alone makes it a damn fine tool. Throw in syntax highlighting, a tabbed interface, installer-less operation if so desired and lots more stuff to get a powerful and free tool for your kit. So, go check it out and you can thank me later!

Solaris and CD ROMs

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Here’s a quick tip for anyone who is tinkering with a Solaris box, and it stems from a question I get from folk who are new to Solaris, and that is “How do I mount a CD ROM?”. The short answer is to use the mount command, but there is a little more to it. You need to know what device your CD drive is, and the easiest way to find out if you don’t already know, is to use the iostat command, specifically running it with -En so that the (iostat -En) results look like this:

c0t0d0 Soft Errors: 0 Hard Errors: 0 Transport Errors: 0
Model: ST3120026A Revision: 8.01 Serial No: 4JT0S129
Size: 120.03GB <120034123776 bytes>
Media Error: 0 Device Not Ready: 0 No Device: 0 Recoverable: 0
Illegal Request: 0
c0t2d0 Soft Errors: 4 Hard Errors: 0 Transport Errors: 0
Vendor: TSSTcorp Product: CDW/DVD TS-H492C Revision: SI00 Serial No:
Size: 0.00GB <0 bytes>
Media Error: 0 Device Not Ready: 0 No Device: 0 Recoverable: 0
Illegal Request: 4 Predictive Failure Analysis: 0

From the output you can see that one drive is a hard drive by the line Model: ST3120026A and Size: 120.03GB, and the other drive is the CD ROM then because it says Vendor: TSSTcorp Product: CDW/DVD. There you go, find the one that says it’s a CD ROM and we know the device we need to mount is c0t2d0.

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iTunes, QuickTime, and Errors

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Let me start this article by saying that I finally broke down last year and bought myself an mp3 player, specifically an iPod. I didn’t choose the iPod because it was trendy or hip or whatever, I chose it because for what it could do and the space it had, for the price, it was the best deal. Now, with an iPod you need to use iTunes (I realize there are other 3rd party tools out there, but call me a purist, I want to use it the way it was intended). In many ways, iTunes rocks, and in many ways, iTunes sucks. Whether you love it or hate it, you are pretty much stuck with it.

That being said, let me share with you a couple of errors I received recently, and what I did (finally) to make them go away. In my dealings with these errors, my searching on the Internet didn’t find any solution to the problem, although some information pointed me in the right direction. Ultimately, I spent enough time troubleshooting and testing (a.k.a banging my head against the wall) that I got the problem resolved, so I thought I would share, just in case anyone else runs across this issue. Judging from the number of posts I saw about it, lots of folk other than myself have had this come up too.

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