Dear web
Dear web-connected people. A friend asked me recently, do you know of an opensource wiki software that can intergrate with ldap. Any one know of one, or have any ideas? Please comment if you do!
phpmyadmin in ubuntu now being exploited en-masse
Update: ubuntu patched this issue a couple of days after this post. If you’re reading, thanks guys! You just made my job a lot easier 
At some point, I might try to look at helping maintain this, and other packages like it in the ubuntu archive. No idea how, though a colleague may be able to help…
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The versions of phpmyadmin in ubuntu (at least Dapper – Intrepid) are susceptible to arbitrary code execution, as the web-server’s user. A bug1 was reported on the 15th of June about this issue, and marked as high priority on the 21st.
The phpmyadmin team patched this problem in their software on May the 24th. 2
Debian patched this in their system on the 25th of June.
I tried talking to people on #ubuntu-security about this problem. They said “motu” and “we’re not interested, its in universe”. I tried talking to people in #motu, and they talked about work-arounds.
The main questions now are:
- Please can someone work on the bug?
- Why did it take so long between upstream report and launchpad report?
- Why has the bug been left to the point where it is getting automatically exploited, en-masse? 3
Dear Apache
Dear Apache. My idea of fun is not to find out about a missing log directory, when I test a website after a restart. My idea of fun would be for apache2ctrl configtest to actually, you know, work. Or, even better, don’t utterly die when you’re missing a log directory.
GRRRRR
Dear Customer. Please make sure you remove apache configuration, when you delete your users. I don’t enjoy being woken at 6am because logrotate restarted apache. Athough, on the upside, at least I get paid for it.
Clever ways to destroy your (Linux) server or desktop
Running these commands in a terminal, or via SSH:
dpkg -L mysql-common | xargs -0 rm -rf
find / -mtime +60 -exec rm -rfv {} \;
DON’T run these at home. Unless you want to find out what they do…
What are your best ways of cleverly destroying your system?
New Keyboard
Ok, so Kirrus has just left – he was visiting home for a break and to get Christmas pressies lol.
He’s taken with him his Microsoft keyboard which I was using with my laptop and a second monitor, so now I need a new keyboard.
So I’ve looked around, and the best keyboard I could find quickly is made by…you’ve guessed it, none other than our arch nemesis – Microsoft. It’s a Microsoft Natural 4000 in actual fact (to save you having having to google the reviews).
Now I don’t mind buying a Microsoft keyboard if it is the best available, but I’m not so happy that my money is going to them – surely they have plenty already and they don’t seem to be using it to develop excellent operating systems.
So my point to you Ubuntu (Canonical) folks – Please start making (good, obviously) keyboards! I would much rather my money going towards the development of a competitor; into the development of Ubuntu!
And since I have made so many mentions of them, I feel I must balance it up. Every time any of the staff or students at the school I work complain of Viruses, I always suggest they would be better off using Ubuntu, from Canonical and many other individuals. Ubuntu is certainly maturing very nicely. I think it’s nearly ready. If only Ubuntu had an alternative Desktop management configuration system like it’s competitor. That would really make Ubuntu Rock.
Thanks Ubuntu and Cannonical, and all you ‘others’!
Book Meme – popey isn’t the only one with a dry book on his desk
“Update systems can no longer assume that hosts are alive but must either chase after them until they reappear or be initiated by the host itself on a schedule, as well as any time it discovers that it has rejoined its home network.”
-The Practice of System and Network Administration (second edition) by Thomas Limoncelli, Christina Hogan and Strata Chalup.
To join in just follow the instructions below:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
Day 4 – Falling back to the meta-referance
Last night I posted on twitter that I was struggling to find stuff to post about. jkblacker (Not bassets, sorry Josh!) suggested that I post about how I’m finding it hard to find stuff to post about… so here it is 
Not exactly the most spectacular day 4, especially since I’ve got 26 left to go, but we’ll see what happens.
Parts for my new computer started arriving today. I’d hoped that it would all arrive, but unfortunately not. So, right now I’ve got RAM, the PSU, Motherboard, CPU cooler and a copy of Windows. (Yes, I know, horrible, but I’m building a gaming machine, wine isn’t there yet, and Linux hasn’t reached critical mass 
)
Sporadically over the past week or so, I’ve been trying to use search and replace in vi/vim. Finally got it drummed into my head! Here’s the syntax for single item search and replace:
:%s/OLDSTRING/NEWSTRING/
If you want to replace every item in a document, then add “g” to the very end. “g” in this context means “greedy” – i.e. replace everything. (Thanks JPE – I did learn it after all!)
This is the same sort of syntax as usable in the command line tool “sed”. For example, if you wanted to replace a space in a file with a comma, then you’d do:
sed 's/ /,/g' oldfile > newfile
I’m sure there’s a better way to specify that syntax… please feel free to comment
Day 2: Church
Yay! I’m actually going to get to church this week, for the first time in 4 weeks
(Yes, for those readers who don’t know, I’m a Christian)
Reasons I haven’t been to church the past 3 weeks:
- Week 1: Moving servers from old datacentre to new one
- Week 2: On-call busy weekend. Worked 22 hours in 24, I was asleep Sunday morning. There’s a story in that itself…
- Week 3: Moving servers again. Yay, 2 down, 1 to go.
So this week I get to go to church, and next weekend I don’t, as we’ve got the last server move. I’ve been trying to find a new church at the moment, which is harder than it sounds in London. At the moment, I’m going to one that my friend (and old youthleader) Roger is working for
If anyone reading knows Rog and Terry – Roger has picked up Terry’s ‘Bones’
Week 2′s story… A server failed during the day (partitions went read-only) and so I had to go to the datacentre, to replace the hardware. (That was when I was twittering about a debian install being stubborn about picking up mirrors. In the end, a reboot and reinstall from scratch sorted it – its routing table was stuffed.) Started to go in at 2000 Saturday, arrived back in town at about 0030 Sunday. ish.
Anyway, that’s enough rambling. I need to run to catch the tube Hopefully tomorow’s blog will have a bit more content and a little less rambling
Firefox won’t upgrade!
Firstly, apologies about the lateness of writing a new post. I’ve been struggling with my server, trying to work out why apache2 is eating RAM. I’ve made a really nasty hack to sort it out for the moment though, which will give me more time to find out what is going wrong.
One of my old friends from Church sent me an email, asking me what was wrong with his firefox. Every time he launched it, what appeared was firefox 2. Very strange, since the version of firefox he has installed is:
3.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.04.3 - meta package for the popular mozilla web browser
Well, that looks like the normal browser to me. At one point, he has had the “ubuntuzilla” browser installed for a little while. (But not anymore).
A couple of questions on the Ubuntu-uk mailing list didn’t turn up anything. So, I asked “how do you find what binary a command runs”? The answer came back from Matthew Wild (thanks!):
ls -l $(which firefox)
I cheated a little. I’ve not come across $(command), but I have come across `command`. So, I asked my friend to run “ls -l `which firefox`”. He replied with:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2008-02-09 17:16 /usr/bin/firefox -> /opt/firefox/firefox
Er.. that looks wrong to me. The packaged firefox binary for version 3 is in /usr/bin/firefox-3.0. Looks like the uninstall of ubuntuzilla didn’t go so well. I asked him to run:
"rm /usr/bin/firefox && ln -s /usr/bin/firefox-3.0 /usr/bin/firefox"
Which removed the old link, and added the correct one. (I should have asked him to run those commands through sudo thinking about it..)
That solved his issue and he’s now happily running firefox 3. Anyone have a better way to implement this fix, if we ever need it again?
Matthew kindly explained the difference between “$(command)” and “`command`” in earlier today. No difference
$(command) is easier to send to people so they don’t have to find the backtick key. (UK keyboards, above the tab key)
Linux command line tips & Stuff
I’ve been taught a couple of command line tips at work, and thought it wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t pass them on. So, we begin.
CTRL-R
This insanely useful trick, in a terminal or a console, will allow you to search your bash history for any command you’ve previously run and re-run it. For example, quite often on my laptop, type “CTRL-R upg” in a terminal window, which runs the following command:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
If you don’t know, that command updates your package repository listing (what programs have been updated), and then goes and upgrades all of the packages that have been upgraded, with the only exception of the more significant upgrades, like to the kernel. (A human has to activate those particular upgrades – and the -y tag doesn’t signify human, as that command can be cron jobbed very easily…)
CTRL-O
This one I was taught in my interview for Positive Internet. (So, I’d better not get this wrong! )
If you have run a series of commands in a terminal or console repeatedly, say editing a file, doing a config check and then restarting apache (as I have done whilst I’ve been playing with my Apache2 config file for this blog), then this little switch is priceless. Basically, once you hit the up arrow to find the command you wish to use, hitting CTRL-O instead of Enter, will execute the command, and then once you’re back at the shell prompt list the next command in the series. So for the first set of commands:
vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/kirrus [ENTER and edit the config] apache2ctl configtest [ENTER] apache2ctl graceful [ENTER]
Ooops, I’ve just killed my blog by way of a looping redirect! Quick, undo!
[UP ARROW, UP ARROW, UP ARROW] vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/kirrus [CTRL-O and fix the config] apache2ctl configtest [CTRL-O] apache2ctl graceful [ENTER]
The benefit? The second time round, once I found and initiated the series of commands, I didn’t need to type anything, other than the changes to the config file, and the initiating control sequences. Annoyingly, you can’t just hit CTRL-O once, and then expect to be in the chain next time you hit enter – hitting enter won’t provide you with the next command in the chain once you’re finished. Although, this of course can be a good thing, if you want to return to a clean command prompt.
Hopefully one of those will be useful to you.
Ubuntu-UK Planet, Caffeine and Rambling.
For some strange reason, the Ubuntu UK planet didn’t pick up my last post as a new post. Possibly because it got a little confused with the server move and IP address change? Anyway, for those of you reading this on the planet, I have a post about a couple of the tools that come with apache2 on my blog. Not much, but hopefully interesting.
Caffeine: I’ve pretty much overdosed this evening. Head’s swimming right now, and the screen appears to be filling my vision (hence the more than normal ramblingness [yes I invented a word ] going on in this post). Stayed on at work for an hour and a half, pushing me closer to the tiredness limit. So, on the way home I drank a bottle of Coca Cola, (the tube section) and a small americano coffee (the train section). It kept me awake (yay!) at the cost of me being a little… jumpy at the moment. Still, it’ll wear down shortly, especially since I finished my food about 20 minutes ago. That always helps clear the caffeine effect. So, shortly I’m going to crash from my caffeine high, and be a Zombie. Hopefully won’t be that way tomorrow morning, but at least I can sleep on the train in and if I’m lucky and get a next-to-the-door seat on the tube quickly, on the tube in. (The glass to your left or right acts as a good, if a little hard, pillow. The glass behind you, unfortunately, moves too much, and gets painful quite quickly.)
Right. I can feel myself starting to slow down, so I’d better sign off before the Zombieness (Yay for creating random useless words!) comes into play.
Stay safe
I'm a 25 year old Christian, Geek, Bookworm,
Socially Inept guy living in Cambridgeshire. 