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Web Proxy for Mageia Linux - Privoxy

From the homepage , "Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk. Privoxy has a flexible configuration and can be customized to suit individual needs and tastes." The typical use is to block ads. While ad blocking extensions are available for modern browsers, ad blocking can be useful for devices that don't have ad-blocking software available. Privoxy can also manage cookies. I have a standalone Mageia8 installation that I use for various things and thought that I would install Privoxy on it to see what I could do with that. Using ssh to access the machine and urpmi to install privoxy, $ ssh 192.168 .1.2XX Once logged in, $ sudo urpmi privoxy Privoxy needs no special configuration out of the box, so to enable the service, $ sudo systemctl enable privoxy.service and to start privoxy, $ sudo systemctl start pri

Booting ISO Images in Mageia Linux

Years ago, I used GRUB and memdisk to boot directly from ISO images I kept in /boot/. Things like SpinRite, F4UBD, PLPBT and so on. It was pretty straightforward on 32-bit Linux using GRUB. Then GRUB2 came along and I found it frustrating. What made it even worse was that much of what I found on the Internet was specific to Ubuntu and the non-standard way in which Ubuntu implements things. As well, for the Ubuntu crowd, solutions were presented as recipes, so copy-paste ruled the day without any explanation as to why certain settings were chosen and what options were available. In other words, it was difficult to translate these "solutions" to anything but Ubuntu Linux. For Mageia, it is helpful to know what the distro uses as the default directories. Mageia provides the following file: # /etc/grub-customizer/grub.cfg # Configuration file for grub-customizer #(not to be confused with grub.cfg for grub2) #Command name changes for Mageia.MKCONFIG_CMD=grub2-mkconfig INSTALL_CMD

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