This is how I quickly set up the Red5 streaming server for testing and evaluation. It worked on Fedora 11 and older Fedoras, and it might work on other distributions, or it may not. Here’s how I did it.
Downloaded the latest Java JDK:
Thanks MG for giving the tip on some free issues of BSDmag / Linux+. When I went to check them out they were older articles (Fedora 6) on Linux but some interesting topics and still some relevant information. The BSD issues were newer. If your interested in the articles, you can read the comment on the Tether iPhone through the cable, on Linux post, or hit the jump. Here is a list of the free issues:
(Read on …)
So you got an iPhone huh? perhaps you’ve got an SSH client and maybe you jailbroke your iPhone and have done some iPhone wifi tethering (That’s not the best way, and not free), but have you been able to use SSH through the cable? Me neither until a little while ago.
The benefits of connecting by the cable are slightly obvious to anyone who wants to do it:
BATTERY!
With your phone plugged in, you’ll get better battery life, or perhaps just prevent the battery from getting discharged any further.
No Wifi Setup
This was really the biggest problem for me, having to reconfigure wifi on my laptop then getting the laptop and phone to talk. Some times wireless connections mysteriously dropped or just acted plain funky. Any one who’s ever typed in a WEP key on the iPhone also knows what a pain it is, so not having to use Wifi is a plus.
Privacy
Since the cable is used, there should be no wireless network for others to fool around with.
Data Transfer Rates
I have not yet confirmed this, mostly because I’m lazy, partly because I don’t have the time to produce any stats but, 480Mbps with USB2.0 Vs. a theoretical 54Mbps on 802.11G
Enough already, how do I do it?
Thanks to Jing Su there is a LGPL’d piece of software called itunnel that can be found here. Installing itunnel will vary by distribution. It’s fairly straight forward on Fedora, provided you have the library libiphone installed you should be able to download, untar, make, and run.
Once you’ve installed itunnel, you run it by using:
sudo itunnel <port>
If you don’t specify a port it listens on port 3023.
Connect to localhost using your normal SSH Socks proxy method -D <port> and your username, default being mobile with your new port.
ssh -D <yourport> -p 3023 mobile@localhost
Type “Yes” to accept the fingerprint (you may need to eventually change your fingerprint when you upgrade your phone) and then type in your password which should NOT be “alpine”, because you did change it right?
Once you’re SSH’d in, you can set up your browser to use the socks proxy as you would with Wifi tether version on the port you specified with -D.
There you have it, a way to Tether your iPhone through the cable on Linux! Rumor, (well not really a rumor, since I’ve used itunnel.exe) has it that this also works with a Windows box, just try to find a non-virus infected version of the iTunnel suite.
Happy Hacking!
Having a brain that is somewhat comparable to a sift for remembering acronym’s, I’m always asking a friend which (I, probably incorrectly call) CPU extension is for virtualization. So I figured I’d blog about this topic. This page CPU feature flags and their meanings clearly explains each of the flags that may be on your machine, which you can check what your CPU supports by typing:
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep flags
Secure Virtual Machine. (AMD’s virtualization extensions to the 64-bit x86 architecture, equivalent to Intel’s VMX, both are also known as HVM in the Xen hypervisor.)
So to answer my own question SVM and VMX are what to look for when considering a CPU for virtualization. My laptop supports VMX, but my desktop doesn’t. Considering I’d rather do my virtualization on my desktop, I’ll have to upgrade my CPU. Now all I need to do is find out where to find this information for AMD processors and hope I can get a CPU for my outdated socket type. I don’t even think that it is AM2 :(
Want to learn about Linux for free? Well, Fedora has a thing called the Fedora classroom which holds classes that teach a group about related technologies. As a casual Fedora user, I find the classes useful but I’m a little bummed that I’ve missed a couple of lessons that I’ve wanted to take in the past.
However tonight, at 9:00 EST (1:00 UTC) Kevin Fenzi is going to be hosting a class on PreUpgrade which is a pretty neat project. I might try to jump on if I get the time, if not it will be reading the chat logs and documentation for me.
For more information on any upcoming classes, or archives of old classes visit https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Classroom and be sure to bookmark it for future reference.
I’d love to see video or slides along with the classes. Has anyone taken any of these classes or have any thoughts on them?
This review is sort of a long time coming. The book is simply called SQLite. SQLite (the book) was written by Chris Newman (0-672-32685-X) and is one of the books in the Developer’s Library from InformIT. Books in the Developer’s Library are designed for programmers as high quality references and tutorials on technical subjects. I believe that this is the first book that I have read and personally owned in the series. The book’s “tag-line” so to speak is:
A practical guide to using, administering, and programming the database bundled with PHP 5
and hits it right on the mark. While the book is small it packs a punch. Chris Newman makes it a point to go into detail where needed and skip the parts that are not necessary. One one of my gripes about programming books is that they contain too much programming and logic basics.
The book is split up into three logical parts, Part I consisting of General SQLite Usage, Part II Using SQLite Programming Interfaces and Part III SQLite Administration.
Part I has four chapters the first not being entirely necessary for the SQL guru, but I learned a few things that I would not have known otherwise, and it was a quick read if you skip the basic SQL stuff. The second through forth chapters are on actually working with SQLite such as the structures, syntax / usage and query optimization.
Part II is a chapter for each interface (PHP, C/C++, Perl, Tcl and Python.) Whether you use each of these technologies or not is irrelevant since it is invaluable as a reference if you wished to use your existing databases with these languages. Reading all of these chapters are not needed if you have no intention of using the language right away.
Part III discusses administration and the SQLite Virtual Database Engine. For me just wanting to learn SQLite the section on the VDBE was a little overkill, but interesting none the less. I like that it was included and think it will be useful in the future.
Overall I think SQLite has a good balance for SQL newbies and seasoned gurus just wanting to quickly get up to speed and implement SQLite. It has everything I’ve needed and then some for my tinkering with SQLite.
I haven’t posted here in a while so here is a presentation that I did at a local security meeting about the Snort IDS. Not much on its own but gives an introduction on Snort with a few slides about IDS’s a few on writing Snort Rules. On the demonstration slide is where I did a demonstration that didn’t exactly go as planned. I swear it worked at home using Nikto, but its all good since I had a friendly crowd. The additional resources slide shows some great resources for learning about the Snort IDS. So hit my document on scribd!
I was e-mailed an interesting project from the folks that run AyeTea (Pronounced IT) that I thought people might be interested in. Here is the description they sent:
A Room Without Windows is a new project set to launch on the 1st of June 2009. Scheduled to last for 31 days, the basis of the project is to take long term Windows users and deprive them of their familiar software. Our IT lab rats will have one month to find open source software that will replace the function of their Windows based machines.
This is an interesting concept and one that I think will succeed. It will either open or close doors by letting people try out Linux and those that like it will stick with it, and those that don’t will go back to using whatever they were using before, which seems to be Windows. There are two “lab rats” which will be experimented on, I’ll definitely tune into see how it goes.
As far as learning, and replacing everything they do with an open source application, it should not really be too hard. There are replacements for just about everything with the exception of perhaps very popular large cad engines, but again, they’re IT folk so what are they going to be using cad for? Anyway, letting Windows go is sometimes the best way to use Linux and learn. Hopefully they’ll do ok.
So Derek and Blair, you have a DOS background, and you’re going to be using Linux for a month, it should bring back memories. Just don’t be hating if it turns out badly, and try not to lose your job over this.
Full details of the project are available here: http://www.ayetea.com/announcing-a-room-without-windows.html
Until today I had never installed PostgreSQL from the Binary provided at postgresql.org since it’s pretty much always in some form of repository provided by most distributions. Today, for the first time ever I installed it and have to say I’m very impressed with the installer. I some what shuddered as I saw a “install shield” type installer interface, as my past encounters with these have generally tended to not work out so well. What I noticed about the PostgreSQL installer though was different from the “install shield”, it was BitRock. BitRock is a cross platform installer for “Windows, Linux, OS X and more…” as this was my first experience with BitRock with a Linux machine I have to say it was a positive one. It allowed me to install PostgreSQL with some custom components pretty effortlessly. While most won’t need to do a custom installation as PostgreSQL will probably be in a repository, its handy to know that the installer works.
BitRock does not appear to have a completely free license but they do seem to give open source projects a “free copy.” Not sure how I feel about this, but I guess if they’re out to make money then it could work for them. Apparentely it doesn’t take much to please me on a mundane Monday morning, I’d have been perfectly fine with a tarball and manual configuration but the GUI has brightened up my day. Thanks BitRock! Does any one else have any encounters or shocking experience with installers? What about BitRock in general?
After my mistake downloading the Alpha, I was able to update to the Beta by doing some pretty basic stuff.
First to aid I set up sudo, and changed my default run level to 3. I installed bash-completion (a mandatory package) and then changed to run level 3 with telinit. Once down to a reasonable run level for a systems upgrade, yum update -y was issued. I believe this failed, so I read the release notes and did the yum –skip-broken update command. It was rather scary since the broken libraries were glibc’s and those can be a pain. After a hour or more I was back to the prompt. Another yum update -y just to make sure and I was ready to reboot.
Rebooting actually worked first time and my Fedora was updated from 10.91 to 10.92. Using this method does not give you ext4 but, at least it will upgrade you to the latest Beta. Now, if only my production installation upgrades would have gone this smoothly.
The Fedora Project Announced today that they were releasing the Beta version of Fedora 11. Stupidly I went and downloaded it. After installing from the live CD which I had never done before (It went really smoothly) I had realized I’d installed the Alpha release. Nice!
So now I’m trying to figure out how to update from the Alpha to the Beta and reading over the Fedora 11 Beta Release Notes. A lot has changed and I really wanted to give ext4 a shot but I guess I’ll just wait till the stable comes out.
