FarhanFaisal

Network monitoring plays an important aspect in a system admin life. You will be managing some servers, and you might have problem taking care of their respective ‘health’, making sure its serving fine and performing best of it. There are some monitoring tool, for example, mrtg, nagios, cacti.

For our setup, we are utilizing cacti, a web-based host monitoring tool, that can monitor hosts through snmp. Its a php tool, and customizable. Its powerful enough to give you what you want, just the matter of configuration. The first thing, you have to make sure every host you want to monitor is snmp enabled.

SNMP stands for “Simple Network Management Protocol”, can be harmful if not configured properly. It can reveal you private information of the host. I will just put a simple snmpd.conf configuration file, that will have enough privilege control on host and community string.

com2sec local localhost YOUR_COMMUNITY_STRING
com2sec mynetwork 202.190.123.144/28 YOUR_COMMUNITY_STRING

group MyRWGroup v1 local
group MyRWGroup v2c local
group MyRWGroup usm local
group MyROGroup v1 mynetwork
group MyROGroup v2c mynetwork
group MyROGroup usm mynetwork

view all included .1 80

access MyROGroup "" any noauth exact all all none
access MyRWGroup "" any noauth exact all all none

syslocation YOUR_LOCATION
syscontact YOUR_EMAIL
sysname SYSNAME


You can verify that your snmpd daemon is responding to snmp request using snmpwalk. For snmp version 1, you can use,
snmpwalk -v 1 -c YOUR_COMMUNITY_STRING 127.0.0.1
For snmp version 2,
snmpwalk -v 2c -c YOUR_COMMUNITY_STRING 127.0.0.1

This configuration is for the end host you want to monitor. In Cacti, you will need to add the community string, and the IP of the host you want to monitor. Then, cacti will start polling information from these hosts through SNMP with the credential given.

Cacti – http://www.cacti.net/
Nagios – http://www.nagios.org
MRTG – http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg

As google have introduced to their google apps to all users for free, I think a simple guide on how to utilize the free service to our optimum use.. This should be a reference for me myself, and other who would see this useful.

For me, I would just want to use google mail, as inside google apps package. Google mail really a good thing we have in the internet world nowadays, as the email interface, emailing experience is different, and really useful. Just a few cons like no folder management. But you can still use labelling to categorize your email.

There are 2 ways you can use google mail on your own domain. Either registering for google apps at http://www.google.com/a/ or using your current gmail email account.

Using google apps.

Go to http://www.google.com/a/, and register for google apps account with your domain name. With google apps, you can have google docs, google chat, google site, calendar and a few more. But this example, google site will be ignored, as I’m using my current hosting account for site, I’m just using Google Mail in my google apps.

After the registration process, you will have to verify domain ownership. You can choose either 1 of 2 method, either configuring your MX record, your html verification. I think HTML verification will be easier, as you can simply create the file, with specific filename and content provided by Google, on your hosting account, and Google with check the file later.

After your google apps have been created, you need to modify your DNS record of your domain, specifically your MX record to tell where emails of your domain to be sent to. Please check it here, http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33352. You can just refer below, the list of MX record to be changed.

MX Server address Priority
ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 10
ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 20
ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 20
ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 30
ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 30
ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 30
ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 30


Google also suggest you to add this additional SPF Read the rest of this entry »

I just found a new Photoshop tutorial, Its a simple tutorial, to create a Web 2.0 button for your website. It will look like glossy crystal look, some kinda elegant. The article is available here.

The tutorial is simple, showing a few suggestion on blending options that needed to give the glossy look. You will find it very easy Eventhough I’m not really into graphic and multimedia stuff. Huhuhu..

http://www.xtutorial.info/2007/11/19/13/

This is really a companion for web developers, a website that could test your design compatibility for different browser, just from this single website. This will be a time-saver tricks to check your work, and make sure everything will displayed smoothly on your viewers screen.

You can test your design for different browser. For Linux browser, test it on Epiphany, Firefox, Galeon, Iceweasel, Konqueror and Opera. For Windows, you can test it for Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari. BrowserShot can also check for Max OS browser, Firefox and Safari.

With a few click, you can know how ready your design to be delivered

Once in a while, you might caught at a computer, updating your blog maybe, and you need to edit your pictures. Some would suggest a portable image editor in your pendrive. Another alternative would be online/web-based image editor.

One that you could try is rsizr. It will immediately prompt you to open a image file to edit. You can easily resize and crop any image file you uploaded. Rsizr use a special technique to keep the quality of the image edited. You may experience image quality loss, blurred text after resize, but not with rsizr. I have tried rsizr with 800 x 600 image, it resizes the image from 191kb to 121kb. After editing, the image can be save directly to your computer, or to your ImageShack account.

Another one that you could try is flauntr. Flauntr have a lot of feature for image editing. Just enough to make you comfortable without Adobe Photoshop. You can change hue/saturation, brightness, resize, crop, and you can also applying effects to your image, for example blur, greyscale or sepia. Give it a try

Rsizr – http://rsizr.com/
Flauntr – http://www.flauntr.com/

Just found this useful tool, once installed, it will create a new drive named “GMail Drive”. You can store your files in the drive, that actually store it in your gmail account space.

Gmail Drive will actually send an email to yourself, with the files added to Gmail Drive to yourself. Gmail Drive will login to your gmail account, and perform search function to sort the files viewed in the drive. You may want to make a filter, for emails with prefix “GMAILFS” to moved to your archived mail folder.

Bare in mind, Gmail Drive will break if Google changes its new system. The developer might provides and update with new system. So, dont panic if the tool breaks, and don’t highly depends on the drive.

GmailFS – http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

Previously I have posted about batch image resizing, in Windows, using a Window tool, Portable Batch Image Resizer. Currently now I’m using Fedora, and I need a tool to automatically resize all my images for uploading.

I found an article telling how to do this. I moved my pictures, to a temporary folder, in case I misresize it

mogrify -resize 800 *.JPG

The command will resize all file with extension JPG in that particular folder to 800px width and keep the image aspect ratio. You can also change it or put it with exclamation mark, to resize it to that particular size.

mogrify -resize 320×240! *.JPG

mogrify is tool comes with ImageMagic. Install ImageMagic, and you’re ready to go.

There was an article I found in my surfing time about viruses, from PcWorld, Google Binary Search help Identify Malware. Google have a little-known capability to search binaries, that will be useful to search malware and virus binaries across the internet. This google hacks have been implemented by metasploit research team, to provide a good interface and signature database of viruses and malwares. The malware search interface is accessible at http://www.metasploit.com/research/misc/mwsearch/.

In the project information, there are description on how it works, and they also provides ruby script to generate signatures, search for binaries from the signatures and also to download them, basically just wget it.

The installation I did on Fedora works just smooth, installed ruby 1.8.6, ruby-google and also soap4r. ruby-google connects to Google API using SOAP, therefore I have to install Soap4r first, then ruby-google.

This is a sample of 1 virus found, Message.pif (Worm.Bagle.N-1)
this is the clamscan result:

Message.pif: Worm.Bagle.N-1 FOUND

———– SCAN SUMMARY ———–
Known viruses: 152764
Engine version: 0.91.2
Scanned directories: 0
Scanned files: 1
Infected files: 1
Data scanned: 0.02 MB
Time: 2.592 sec (0 m 2 s)

This is the sample usage of the ruby scripts:

$ ./mwsig.rb Message.pif
4053c6c2:00010000:0000e5b0:00005000
$ ./mwsearch.rb 4053c6c2:00010000:0000e5b0:00005000
1 http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2004-04/att-0795/Message.pif
# ./mwdownload.rb bin to_download
–09:17:57– http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2004-04/att-0795/Message.pif
=> `bin/0.bin’
Resolving archives.neohapsis.com… 72.32.12.210
Connecting to archives.neohapsis.com|72.32.12.210|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 21,871 (21K) [text/plain]

100%[=================================================================================================================>] 21,871 21.57K/s

09:17:59 (21.55 KB/s) – `bin/0.bin’ saved [21871/21871]

This is the sample search in google.com. It have 4 main information to search for:
1: Virus/malware name
2: Time & date stamp
3: Size of Image
4: Entry Point
5: Size of code

All of these information are basically the last 4 segment in the signatures, created by mwsig.rb

Just installed conky on my fedora desktop. My fedora itself took some time to be installed, as I’m having problem with harddisk recognition, I’m having 2 harddisk. Now its booting Fedora Core 7.

I just need a good workspace, and conky have add up some spice to it. Conky, a lightweight system monitor. It will display system monitor on your desktop. You can customize it, what you want to see most. Most sample configuration I found have what I need. I dont have much time to go into customizing my own config file, just copied from others.

I’m using this config file, .conkyrc. I grab it from cstamper blog. You can see there’s more .conkyrc config file sample from conky official website. Its a good start for your own custom configuration script.

Run conky, and it will load conky with configuration file at $HOME/.conkyrc

For some people, RSS might be a new thing. This would be an introductory article, on how you could use this feature available at most websites.

RSS stand for Really Simple Syndicatio, where you can pull out the information from a website, and display it anywhere you want. This is a cool feature, where you can put all pieces of information from all your favourite website into a single page, you can get updated from a single page visit!

I would like to introduce Netvibe, an online RSS reader. With Netvibes, you can read RSS feeds from your friend’s blog, myspace, flickr gallery, and also your emails! The easy and simple navigation will never get you lost with it.

The contents of your feeds can be split into different tab, where you can add new one with one click, and you can also arrange it with drag and drop. Drag it to anywhere you want. Each RSS feeds also can be moved easily with drag and drop anywhere, even to another tab.

Try it now, you’ll have a better way to keep things updated easily.

http://www.netvibes.com