Freeheart.Me

I know I don’t write here often, and I know I have no regular readers, but that’s okay.

I’ve been getting back into tech again as a hobby, rather than the day to day stuff that’s mundane at work. I love my job quite a bit, but due to the corporate nature change is excruciatingly slow, even though we’ve got a massive project underway that enables me to make a lot of positive changes.

In my personal space, I have no such constraints.

I’ve been recently concerned more and more with online privacy and not just the “typical” concerns. I actually, for the most part, trust major players in the cloud space. I don’t always like all of the decision they make with regard to features or policy, but I do trust them. I’ve far more concerned with government intrusion into that data, however. So I’m aiming to create a privacy-focused product for average folks. I won’t say much more than that as it’s in Pre-Stealth mode, but it’s going to happen if that’s left to my will and resources alone.

So, my latest project was to build a cluster to house development environments, forward-facing services for myself (I eat my own dogfood!), and eventually, alpha testing to select users. Along the way, I’ve already become a bit more savvy with regard to oVirt and Gluster, and I’m only recently at the point of being able to spin up machines. I’ve also switched my personal Linux workstations from Ubuntu to Fedora. While Fedora is new to me, it’s a well-regarded distro with lots of users and documentation, but they’re not all people who have been using Ubuntu since day one, so I might run across obvious tips to share.

As part of a long-due cleanup, in prep for moving my personal stuff to the cluster, I found an old backup archive for my now long-dead site, Monochrome Mentality. The domain is long-gone, taken by squatters, but I still have most of my content, so that will be put up in some way, shape or form.

Yesterday was an interesting day in IT land, as I purchased a new laptop (Eluned) and upgraded my sound card on my living room PC (Athract).

The sound card installation originally borked my install of Windows 7, so I was forced to reinstall. Of course, my backups are centrally managed and this wasn’t an issue for me.

I figured I would take a few moments to list out apps that I consider “critical” – just because.

First and foremost, Google Chrome. I expect most people know what Chrome is, but for those still living in the Dark Ages, it’s a web browser. Much, much faster than Internet Explorer, comes with Flash built in, and is even faster than the next best browser, Mozilla Firefox. It’s got a bunch of nifty extensions as well.

Secondly, VLC. This media player is hands-down the best I’ve seen. More, it’s open source, free, and can be used on just about every platform. It plays damn near every format imaginable, handles video and audio and seamlessly plays content from my DLNA server.

Transmission Remote Dotnet comes next. Transmission is a great torrent client, but it’s not available for Windows. uTorrent is what I prefer on Windows systems but what is horribly lacking all around is a way to integrate it all. So, what I did was install transmission-daemon on my “network hub” and manage it remotely on the PC side. This is what Transmission Remote Dotnet does. Once launched it opens a connection to my server and displays me the torrent list, statistics, and options as if I were managing torrents on this PC. It saves, however, to my 2.5TB fileserver. Even if I shut down my PCs, so long as the server is up my torrents are going. This is great when trying to get a good seed ratio like I value. Additionally, I can expose this to work and add torrents while on the job that download to my home server. Quite nifty!

Dolphin Emulator is something I use to satisfy my cravings for The Legend of Zelda. Paired with Wiimotion Plus controllers and a wireless sensor bar, Dolphin lets me play pretty much any Wii game I want. It’s a little more clunky than actually buying a Wii, but there are certain benefits to playing on the emulator – higher resolution for one.

Duck Capture is a screenshot application. It’s always annoyed me that Windows makes screenshot capture annoying as hell by default. Linux has the right idea – push PRNTSCRN, file is on your desktop. Macs are a little worse, requiring one of three (that I use) multiple-key commands. More flexible by default as it gives you various options. Duck Capture on Windows changes this, combining the best of what Linux and Mac offer. Properly set up (options, change three drop boxes), PRNTSCREEN grabs a snap of the entire screen. ALT+PRINTSCREEN snaps a cropped section of the screen and CTRL+PRINTSCREEN grabs a selected window. There’s another option for “scrolling capture” but I never use it. Once the image is taken, I can press save to have the file put on my Desktop OR upload directly to the web from a single click. Quite handy.

I am anal about properly tagged and organized music. mp3tag is my app of choice to aid me in that. A simple interface lets me pull up and list files, edit metadata, change or apply album art directly to the file (none of this folder.jpg crap!). Even better, it will search Amazon, Musicbrainz or Discogs for all of the appropriate tags and art as well. Finally, the killer feature is the batch renaming (Called “Covert) function that will use my new metadata to rename the file itself in my personal naming convention.

WinCDEmu is one I’ve only recently added to my list. Previously, I’ve used Daemon Tools, and this serves the same purpose. Namely, to take ISO images and mount them like physical disks (only faster). Like Daemon Tools, this supports CDs, DVDs, Blueray images, but it will also mount .bin/.cue files as well as a few other formats I use more rarely. WinCDEmu is open source, completely free of cost. But where it blows it’s competition away is in simplicity. In the old days, Daemon Tools was pretty simple. With the installer now sporting toolbars, homepage redirects, and all kinds of other cruft, the clean straight-forward WinCDEmu rocks. More, it integrates right into Explorer, making mounting ISOs or .cue files a three click process. The interface is simple and the whole application is speedy.

Last (for this post at least) is 7zip, an archive utility. Windows handles .zip files natively, but it doesn’t support .rar files. 7zip handles them well, plus adding in a plethora of others. This is especially useful for a mixed OS household like mine – 7zip gives Windows ability to work with tarballs.

 

I work in a corporate office that is heavily Windows based. In fact, I am one of the two people who have a dedicated machine on their desk running Linux and the other is my manager. I am the only person that focuses exclusively on Linux in the entire office. Needless to say, going from ground up with a fresh install can be a bit painful.

Our office is behind an ISA proxy that requires authentication and sadly, none of the distros I’ve used can handle this on a system level. To use an authenticated proxy on Linux, you need to proxy your proxy connections (Yo dawg!).

The service you need to do that most simply is CNTLM. It is open source and packaged by all of the major distros. Install it using your method of choice keeping in mind that you may need to download it prior to the install depending on what traffic you’re allowed out prior to authentication.

Configuration on my work LAN only requires a 5 line config. The first three should be painfully obvious:

Username testuser
Domain corp-uk
Password password

Username is the username you’re authenticating as (for me it’s my Active Directory sign on. I’m not sure if that’s the entire point of the ISA server or just how ours work. I’m not very well versed in Windows-side complexities.

Domain is the domain of your network. Password is your password.

There are options to generate a hashed password which is FAR more secure in most cases than a plaintext file. I instantly recognize this and if you want to do that the option is there. For me, I don’t care. Every password I use is different and the people that would be “stealing” this password have the capacity to change it at will. Furthermore, I encrypt the drive with a strong key and if that’s compromised, a hashed password is the least of my issues.
The next important line specifies the location of the ISA proxy.

Proxy 10.217.112.41:8080

There are actually two proxy lines specified in the default config, so take note of that. I only have one assigned proxy, so I need to comment out the second one. Hostnames are also acceptable values for this.
The last important line is the listen port.

Listen 3128

This specifies the port that cntlm should accept connections to. This is where your traffic will be authenticated and passed on to your outbound proxy server. Take note of this port.
cntlm is now configured. Configure your OS to start the daemon at boot for convenience. You can do this with either update.rcd or chkconfig, depending.
You should now point all proxy connections that require authentication to localhost on the port you specified in the cntlm configuration. In Gnome, for instance, you would point the Network Proxy settings to 127.0.0.1 and port 3128. Authenitcation is now transparant and survives reboots.

Because I work in a “mixed shop” when I head into the office, I need to fuddle around with proxies in order to get on the internet at work. Given that I work at an internet company, this means I need to mess around every time I install a system.

Finding directions for getting apt working on Debian based systems is easy. It’s usually in the first or second post. Fedora, however, is a bit different.

Simple, but different.

To get Yum working with a proxy, one must edit /etc/yum.conf and add the following line:

proxy=http://hostname:port

Assuming your proxy is yoshi.lan and the port you use is 8080, it would look like:

proxy=http://yoshi.lan:8080

It seems obvious but it took me several searches and tried before I found this. The advice of editing bashrc and adding the http_proxy variable to my bash profile did not work.