Andrew Schwabe's Blog - Linux

Android OS on iPhone ?

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:03:00 -0400

Yes its actually true... This may be a little old (released in April 2010), but quite interesting! So many of us are wondering what turn Apple will take next, and when, if ever, they will every start playing nicely with Adobe. Seems that the underground community isn't thrilled with that lack of progress, so people have been actively working on getting linux to run on iphone hardware, and now have managed to get a build of android OS to run on iphone 2G (1st generation). Yes, this potentially means the ability to have flash apps running on your iphone hardware. Not yet, but potentially. Check it out: Source: http://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/2010/04/ive-been-working-on-this-quietly-in.html

Railo 3.1 Install on Linux -- Caucho security note

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:56:00 -0400

Now that Railo 3.1 is out, I think we will see a jump in commercial usage. I have done a few installs on production machines now, and wanted to point out a security note. By default when you install Railo 3.1 (with caucho) on Linux (prob the same for OSX), it adds the following to your apache httpd.conf file:


LoadModule caucho_module /usr/lib/httpd/modules/mod_caucho.so

ResinConfigServer localhost 6800
CauchoConfigCacheDirectory /tmp
CauchoStatus yes

The bottom one is the problem -- it enables CauchoStatus by default. That means that you can open up a web browser to http://your.host.com/caucho-status and see status info, but there is a lot of detailed info there, including the names of each of the hosts you configured in resin, so people can snoop and see all the railo-enabled sites on that machine. This might also give a would-be-attacker the info they need to plan a DOS attack, SQL injection attack, etc.. especially since they can see how the server is responding to their attacks. Pessimistic, I know, but who can you trust on the Internet anymore ? Kid hackers are emerging just following directions posted online, and some don't even really know what they are doing, but they are causing trouble for you and I. Better to be safe. So the simple fix is to update your httpd.conf file and set the status option to no:


CauchoStatus no

For those so inclined, check out Nessus, an open source vulnerability scanner, which picked this up on one of our servers.

Upgrading CentOS 4 or RHEL 4 to use PHP5

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:40:00 -0400

This seemingly simple task was more work than I expected. Here are some of my notes in the hopes that this helps somebody. If it does, and you want to donate to my cause, or just encourage me to keep blogging about stuff like this, email me :) Ok, there are a bunch of sites out there, that helped me get 75% of the way. Download the RPMs, try to install, and error, dependancies i've never seen before. This tutorial got me 75% of the way: http://www.lampdeveloper.co.uk/linux/installing-php-525-suhosin-php-eaccelerator-on-centos-4-with-yum.html (By the way centos 4 and RHEL4 are pretty much the same, but this is focusing on the specifics for RHEL4) All said and done, here are the RPMs I ended up needing (to get to 90% success)

php-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10.i386.rpm
php-cli-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10.i386.rpm
php-common-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10.i386.rpm
php-gd-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10.i386.rpm
php-ldap-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10.i386.rpm
php-mysql-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10.i386.rpm
php-pdo-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10.i386.rpm
php-pear-1.4.11-1.el4s1.1.noarch.rpm

FYI Don't be daft and ask me for download links, if you need to know where to download these, google for it, took me all of 3 minutes. Some of them came from all over. Now when you try to install these, you get the dreaded dependancy error: Needs libmysqlclient.so.15 So i went searching, and ended up finding this gem: MySQL-shared-compat-6.0.10-0.rhel4.i386.rpm which installs multiple mysql version libraries. That did the trick, and a simple "rpm -U *.rpm" >> success cheers

FusionDox 2009 is released!

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:53:00 -0400

After many months of hard work, we have released the 2009 edition of FusionDox. Lots of fun things in this edition, including PDF previews of documents, a document conversion API so you can write your own code to convert documents, split/merge PDFs and more. New Flex/AIR based FusionDox client (aka the FusionDox Authoring System) for live editing MS Office/OpenOffice documents directly through your browser, and it works for Macintosh and Linux computers too! There is some preliminary info online, with more to come. http://www.fusiondox.com/

Now this is progress: Linux on the iPhone!

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:02:00 -0400

It is still quite young, but it is very exciting to see that linux has been ported to the iphone! This means that we may yet have some options for a friendly open-source way to use the excellent iphone hardware. Read more here: http://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/2008/11/linux-on-iphone.html

Open source routers for WAN load balancing

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 02:00:00 -0400

Get ready for acronym overload.

A while back, I write a blog entry about pfSense, and mentioned that it was a worthwhile project. Now I want to mention Vyatta, which is another open source router project. While pfSense is based on BSD and has a fancy web interface, Vyatta is based on Linux, and only has CLI (command line interface).

As a general rule the CLI is not really a huge problem for me, especially since Vyatta has a PDF reference manual outlining the different commands.
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Ghost for Linux ?

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:05:37 -0400

I have long been a supporter of using Ghost for imaging disks. See a previous post on how to use Ghost 2003 with Windows Vista.

I have never, however, been able to find a replacement for Linux... until now.

I just came across this -- and pardon me if this is old news -- which seems very promising!

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

This is an open-source project based on NetBSD that allows you to boot from a CD, connect to an FTP site, and backup-to-image, or restore-from-image to the local drive, using the FTP site as the image storage location. This sure sounds like what Ghost should have been!

I intend to try it out very soon.