brian habbe | window to my world

October 16, 2008

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex beta

With the latest release of Ubuntu coming up thought I’d give the beta a try for a few days. It served me well when moving from Gutsy to Hardy earlier in the year. The install was routine no problems and the only real changes were to manually partition the drive. By default /home is not on it’s own partition and doing that makes upgrades and backups a better experience.

After loading and logging in did the normal updates with apt-get and added a few apps like Geany, Bluefish, vpnc, Liferea, gFTP, irssi and some others. The latest version of GNOME has a modified network manager as well as some changes to user switching and logging off, obvious to me at least. You can see the complete list here.

Evolution also had some changes.

Message Templates
WebDAV Contacts support
Google Contacts support
Custom header support while sending mails
Single Model view for Calendar
Sqlite Based message summary (aka Camel On-disk Summary)
New Bonobo-less composer for Evolution
Quota support to IMAP/POP accounts
Gtk+ Recent manager integration in Composer
Contact-list for Exchange

I had some initial trouble with the conversion where the indexed messages didn’t match the db. But removing files in .evolution/mail/local leaving the mbox files fixed the problem.

So far no real show stoppers, until this morning when updating caused a firmware / driver mismatch with the wirless nic, ipw2200. Not to keen on digging into that at the moment so will go back to Hardy for now. More than likely another update in a few days will fix it or it will be resolved in general release.

Update: Oct. 20 – After further investigation the firmware was removed. Putting it back in /lib/firmware resolved.

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October 10, 2008

SSH bots

Checking logs the other day I noticed another instance where ssh bots trying to get access to my home server. Monitoring auth.log for less that a minute revealed 11 failed attempts.

$ tail -f /var/log/auth.log | grep Failed
Oct  8 20:53:37 boss sshd[27267]: Failed password for invalid user peru from 68.216.125.39 port 43047 ssh2
Oct  8 20:53:40 boss sshd[27269]: Failed password for invalid user china from 68.216.125.39 port 43974 ssh2
Oct  8 20:53:44 boss sshd[27271]: Failed password for invalid user uk from 68.216.125.39 port 44570 ssh2
Oct  8 20:53:48 boss sshd[27273]: Failed password for invalid user ok from 68.216.125.39 port 45358 ssh2
Oct  8 20:53:52 boss sshd[27276]: Failed password for invalid user navy from 68.216.125.39 port 46298 ssh2
Oct  8 20:53:55 boss sshd[27278]: Failed password for invalid user spring from 68.216.125.39 port 47694 ssh2
Oct  8 20:53:59 boss sshd[27280]: Failed password for invalid user summer from 68.216.125.39 port 49883 ssh2
Oct  8 20:54:03 boss sshd[27282]: Failed password for invalid user autumn from 68.216.125.39 port 50796 ssh2
Oct  8 20:54:07 boss sshd[27284]: Failed password for invalid user winter from 68.216.125.39 port 51960 ssh2
Oct  8 20:54:10 boss sshd[27286]: Failed password for invalid user snow from 68.216.125.39 port 52885 ssh2
Oct  8 20:54:14 boss sshd[27288]: Failed password for invalid user skyrix from 68.216.125.39 port 53493 ssh2

It’s probably not a bad idea to add some security. For now we’ll enable the MaxStartups function in sshd_config. I’d prefer to run Fail2Ban but have some dependancy problems with python. I’ll have to look into that or other options.

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