Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2020

fail2ban and sshutout for Mageia Linux

Fail2ban  "Fail2ban is an extensible Swiss-army knife of brute-force authentication prevention and it comes with an additional filters to detect other attempts to compromise your system. If you do nothing but install it, run it, keep it updated and turn on its filters for any services you run, especially SSH, you will be far better off than you were otherwise." --  Greg Bledsoe $ sudo urpmi fail2ban Once installed, it will be started automatically. The configuration file is located in /etc/fail2ban.conf .  $ sudo urpmi sshutout Sshutout Sshutout is Bill DuPree's system daemon that is intended to be run from the server startup script. It periodically monitors log files looking for multiple failed login attempts via the Secure Shell daemon (sshd, or optionally, sshd2). The daemon is meant to address what are known as "dictionary attacks" which are scripted, brute-force attacks that use lists of user names and passwords to attempt unauthorized intrusions.  You can

DOSBox for Mageia Linux

 Mageia7 does provide a pre-compiled package for DOSBox, but does not provide any graphical frontend for it. Since DOSBox may typically need special configurations for specific application, a GUI frontend is handy for managing these configuration files. DBoxFE is available; version 0.1.3.0 dated 21 September 2007 is the most current. Both  32-bit and 64-bit RPM packages are available as well as a win32 version . This installs on Mageia7 with only a warning about the package being unsigned. When launched, the following screen displays. You must create a Profile (here named "Basic") and also provide the path to the dosbox executable (  /usr/bin/dosbox , in the Preferences tab). The named configuration files are kept at ~/.dboxfe Once configured, select the appropriate profile and click Start. But what about configuring DOSBox itself? The default configuration file is found at ~.dosbox/ and named dosbox-0.74.conf . It is well commented and provides a set of sane defaults. Add

TigerVNC Server for Mageia8 and SSH tunneling

" Ti gerVNC is a high-performance, platform-neutral implementation of VNC (Virtual Network Computing), a client/server application that allows users to launch and interact with graphical applications on remote machines. TigerVNC provides the levels of performance necessary to run 3D and video applications, and it attempts to maintain a common look and feel and re-use components, where possible, across the various platforms that it supports. TigerVNC also provides extensions for advanced authentication methods and TLS encryption." There is an excellent tutorial at Vitux.com  describing step-by-step how to install and configure the TigerVNC server on a CentOS7 host, launch it as a systemctl service   and connect to it over tunneling SSH (in case the remote site blocks port 5901 or the firewall can't be configured by the user). To use this recipe on Mageia7, only the application installation is different. # urpmi tigervnc-server is all that is required. Note that the dire

The Sims Complete Collection on WinXP

On February 2, 2000, Maxis Software released the first of a series of life simulation video games, The Sims . Microsoft XP was released on October 25, 2001. There were several expansion packs released for The Sims and several Service Packs released for Windows XP. My goal is to install the most current version of Windows XP on 32-bit hardware and install the DVD version of The Sims Complete Collection . The motherboard used is a Microstar MS-7061 with an AMD Sempron 3000+ and 2GB of RAM. There were no IDE hard drives or CDROM drives available, so IDE to SATA adapters were used on SATA drives. The video card is an nVidia GeForce 6200  compliant with Microsoft DirectX 9.0c specification and OpenGL 2.0. This is adequate to run The Sims satisfactorily. Installation began with an on-hand copy of Windows XP SP2, but it turned out that the game would install but not run on that, so an update to SP3 was needed. I did find an unofficial "SP4" and installed that without issue. Se

Installing Zoom Videoconferencing for Mageia Linux.

Zoom is a popular, if somewhat insecure, videoconferencing application in wide use. It does offer Linux support, just not for Mageia7. However, if you head over to the Zoom Linux download page , and access the Download center for Fedora 21+, you can install the appropriate 32- or 64-bit RPM package which will install all the correct dependencies and Zoom will work on your Mageia7 system! Back on the site's Zoom Overview page, there is adequate help to get you started with the app itself. I'm using an older Logitech USB camera and had it working with cheese , a good way to test out your hardware. If you have video/audio issues, get them worked out before you install Zoom. That kind of hardware troubleshooting is beyond the scope of this short article. Remember that  Google Is Your Friend . There are some FOSS alternatives to Zoom , but unless you're just videoconferencing with your Linux buddies, you'll probably be forced to use Zoom. Google Meet seems to be po

Configuring urpmi-proxy for Mageia

Not much has been mentioned about urpmi-proxy for Mageia. In theory, urpmi-proxy works as a local proxy for a Mageia repository. You set it as the source repository for all your machines and it downloads and distributes only what packages you need. For the most part, little configuration is needed "out of the box". It is configured by default to use the existing repositories that are already configured on the host/server machine but as pointed out, this creates a recursive loop should you update the server itself. The Wiki docs explain how to circumvent this issue. There are other package management systems available from Mageia, notably dnf which will become the standard system only after the Mageia build system, dependent on urpmi, can be translated to dnf .  Configuring the Server Simply invoke $ sudo urpmi urpmi-proxy And this will also install the apache webserver, which is used to serve the files to your other machines. Then restart Apache. $ sudo systemctl res