Category: World

Indeed after doing a search in google i am able to find out a blogging tool for windows thats live write. Well, it is a product of microsoft and it is good. As i haven’t tested it a lot. but i am finding it usual till now. After downloading it from here and some teawking in my proxy settings i am able to configure it to work on my office’s XP machine.

Enable them:

Turn on these three using chkconfig on both the nodes: rexec, rsh and rlogin.

# chkconfig rexec on
# chkconfig rsh on
# chkconfig rlogin on

xinetd

Restart xinetd to be sure.

# service xinetd restart

.rhosts

On hostA’s root home directory (usually /root), create a .rhosts file, which has hostB in it.

# cat .rhosts
hostB

Similarly, create a .rhosts on hostB’s root home directory which has hostA in it.

# cat .rhosts
hostA

hosts.allow

Now, edit /etc/hosts.allow on hostA:

#
# hosts.allow This file describes the names of the hosts which are
# allowed to use the local INET services, as decided
# by the ‘/usr/sbin/tcpd’ server.
#
ALL : hostB

Edit /etc/hosts.allow on hostB:

#
# hosts.allow This file describes the names of the hosts which are
# allowed to use the local INET services, as decided
# by the ‘/usr/sbin/tcpd’ server.
#
ALL : hostA

hosts.equiv

Edit /etc/hosts.equiv on hostA to have

# cat /etc/hosts.equiv
hostB

Edit /etc/hosts.equiv on hostB to have

# cat /etc/hosts.equiv
hostA

/etc/securetty

And finally, knock off /etc/securetty (rename it or worse, purge it) on both hostA and hostB

Now you are good to go.

Disclaimer: Use at your own risk. Don’t flame me. It sure worked for me. Actual results may vary. Use ssh in place of rlogin/rsh/telnet and the like, as ssh is more secure.

Here i will try to demonstrate how to use ssh keys to login to machines without password.
Since i did not got it to work with putty now. i will do it with two unix machines and will soon continue this post on to configure it with putty.

1. Check the ssh-server installed on your machine or not. if not download the packages openssh-clients and openssh-server from the respective downloads site.

2. create public and private keys using ssh-keygen

user@home$ ssh-keygen -t dsa ##this will create public and privatye keys.

3. scp the public key to the remote host on which you want to gain the access without password.
user@home$ scp .ssh/id_dsa.pub user@machineB:~/.ssh/authorized_keys ## from machine a to machine b.

4. Now login from Machine A to Machine B and check. it will work without password.

Points:
1. you must login from the account where you have kept the private key. since, you try to login from a diferent account you private key wo0n’t be there and that time you will be thrown to a password prompt.
2. Check the permissions of the directory .ssh to be 700 and the permission of the authorized_keys files must be 600. or else it won’t work.

Indeed a very good article from Sunday Times which talks about our views of changing perception with time. How much we know and how much we have to learn. Basically, we have to see a lot more to understand.

Written by : Shobhan Saxena
[ 11 Feb, 2007 0046hrs ISTTIMES NEWS NETWORK ]

 Reality is a question of perspective. It depends on your location on the GPS. Earlier, people with yellow hair and blue eyes believed that all Indians had a tiger in their backyard and filthy men made venomous cobras dance. We hated this kind of Orientalism.

We always believed that we had too much culture here and we didn't need to learn anything from anyone, at least not from the "ignorant" West which saw us as a nation of medieval freaks. Now, with the changing times, the perceptions about us have changed.

Now the world probably thinks we all live in slums, smell of curry, speak in funny accents, work in call centres and leak customer data for money. We don't like this. We feel others do not understand us. But we seem to be more ignorant of the world than the world is of us.

That's why when two Indian hacks go to Kabul to make a film, they get into trouble with the quintessential side-kick Arshad Warsi cracking some jokes about Afghan men liking other men and the Hazaras being ruthless barbarians who kill people by "stroking long, rusted nails into their heads".

Funny, isn't it? Not for the Afghans who banned Kabul Express. Imagine going to Afghanistan, standing in a fallow land which has turned red due to an eternal war and indulging in some gay-bashing.
 Our angle is so skewed that we miss the complete picture: This land has been a crucible of global wars from the Great Game between the Tsars and the British, the Cold War, the bloody battles between the Russians and the Mujahideen and the ideological clashes between the leftists and the religious zealots.

We know nothing about their music, poetry and food. We know nothing about their customs and language. The only thing we know about them is that they like to kill each other and they love to play Buzkashi, a game where wild horsemen fight over a dead goat.

We know that much because we saw Mr Stallone playing the game in Rambo III. We understand our next-door neighbours through Hollywood.

We cry till hoarse about the world stereotyping us as "the Indians", but the fact is that we don't understand the world as it exists. Forget Paraguay and Morocco, our understanding of China is quite warped.

Ask an average Indian about China and he would probably say: chow mein. We see China, the world's biggest nation, as the land of noodles, fried cockroaches and snake soup.
 The middle classes may associate China with new age mumbo-jumbo like Feng Shui, Tai-chi and the Laughing Buddha, and a booming economy that shines in the Shanghai skyscrapers. But that's it. We dismiss Japan, the world's second biggest economy, in a few words: judo-karate, Su-Doku, haiku, sushi, saké, kamikazes and harakiri.

Of course, we know about their cars and electronic watches. That's it. For us, Brazil, the biggest Latin country, that's three times the size of India, is a nation of semi-nude, samba dancers and crazy footballers. In our imagination, Argentina means Maradona. That's it.

A nation is an imagined community. The world lives in our imagination. The "others" are imagined people. But, so limited is our imagination about the others that we don't think beyond certain stereotypes.

We associate the Australians with kangaroos, the Russians with vodka, the French with romance, the Italians with fashion, the Latinos with sex and the Africans with HIV. And the Middle East is all about oil and beauties behind the veil. You cannot have an imagination worse than this.

We don't know what we are missing. China's rich culture rivals ours: thoughts from Confucius to Mao Zedong, writers from Zhuang Zi to Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian, short poetry, long operas, Mandarin guitar and classical music. It's quite sickening to reduce Brazil to a carnival of hot babes on its beaches.
 It's a melting pot of cultures: from Europe, Africa, Asia and Amazon jungles. The beach is the most democratic place in Rio, where the rich and poor, homeless and intellectual, musicians and writers all meet and mix with each other.

The country has great traditions of music and arts. And politics: one entire generation grew up fighting the military dictatorship. But we don't care to know and understand all this.

In the age of globalisation, such a little understanding of the world is dangerous. Not for us, but for others: a white man straying into an Indian village is beaten to death for no reason; two Africans carrying meat in their bags are attacked for having "beef with them".

It's a dangerous way of looking at other people. At one level, people are the same everywhere. They are all trapped in their human condition: living, liking and helping each other; loving, hating and destroying each other. But if we do not know the details of their life, they don't look real. They look like freaks.

—
Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.
<b>Voltaire </b>
http://om-prakash.blogspot.com

It takes years maybe decades to master the commands available to you at the Linux shell prompt. Here are 10 that you will have never heard of or used. They are in no particular order. My favorite is mkfifo.

1. pgrep, instead of:

   # ps -ef | egrep '^root ' | awk '{print $2}'
   1
   2
   3
   4
   5
   20
   21
   38
   39
   ...
   

   You can do this:

   # pgrep -u root
   1
   2
   3
   4
   5
   20
   21
   38
   39
   ...
   

2. pstree, list the processes in a tree format. This can be VERY useful when working with WebSphere or other heavy duty applications.

   # pstree
   init-+-acpid
        |-atd
        |-crond
        |-cups-config-dae
        |-cupsd
        |-dbus-daemon-1
        |-dhclient
        |-events/0-+-aio/0
        |          |-kacpid
        |          |-kauditd 
   
        |          |-kblockd/0
        |          |-khelper
        |          |-kmirrord
        |          `-2*[pdflush]
        |-gpm
        |-hald
        |-khubd
        |-2*[kjournald]
        |-klogd
        |-kseriod 
   
        |-ksoftirqd/0
        |-kswapd0
        |-login---bash
        |-5*[mingetty]
        |-portmap
        |-rpc.idmapd
        |-rpc.statd
        |-2*[sendmail]
        |-smartd
        |-sshd---sshd---bash---pstree 
   
        |-syslogd
        |-udevd
        |-vsftpd
        |-xfs
        `-xinetd
   

3. bc is an arbitrary precision calculator language. Which is great. I found it useful in that it can perform square root operations in shell scripts. expr does not support square roots.

   # ./sqrt
   Usage: sqrt number
   # ./sqrt 64
   8
   # ./sqrt 132112
   363
   # ./sqrt 1321121321
   36347
   
   

   Here is the script:

   # cat sqrt
   #!/bin/bash
   if [ $# -ne 1 ]
   then
           echo 'Usage: sqrt number'
           exit 1
   else
           echo -e "sqrt($1)\nquit\n" | bc -q -i
   fi
   

4. split, have a large file that you need to split into smaller chucks? A mysqldump maybe? split is your command. Below I split a 250MB file into 2 megabyte chunks all starting with the prefix LF_.

   # ls -lh largefile
   -rw-r--r--  1 root root 251M Feb 19 10:27 largefile
   # split -b 2m largefile LF_
   # ls -lh LF_* | head -n 5
   -rw-r--r--  1 root root 2.0M Feb 19 10:29 LF_aa
   -rw-r--r--  1 root root 2.0M 
    Feb 19 10:29 LF_ab
   -rw-r--r--  1 root root 2.0M Feb 19 10:29 LF_ac
   -rw-r--r--  1 root root 2.0M Feb 19 10:29 LF_ad
   -rw-r--r--  1 root root 2.0M Feb 19 10:29 LF_ae
   # ls -lh LF_* | wc -l
   126
   

5. nl numbers lines. I had a script doing this for me for years until I found out about nl.

   # head wireless.h
   /*
    * This file define a set of standard wireless extensions
    *
    * Version :    20      17.2.06
    *
    * Authors :    Jean Tourrilhes - HPL
    * Copyright (c) 1997-2006 Jean Tourrilhes, All Rights Reserved. 
   
    */
   
   #ifndef _LINUX_WIRELESS_H
   # nl wireless.h | head
        1  /*
        2   * This file define a set of standard wireless extensions
        3   *
        4   * Version :    20      17.2.06
        5   * 
         6   * Authors :    Jean Tourrilhes - HPL
        7   * Copyright (c) 1997-2006 Jean Tourrilhes, All Rights Reserved.
        8   */
   
        9  #ifndef _LINUX_WIRELESS_H
   

6. mkfifo is the coolest one. Sure you know how to create a pipeline piping the output of grep to less or maybe even perl. But do you know how to make two commands communicate through a named pipe?

   First let me create the pipe and start writing to it:

   

   Then read from it:

   

7. ldd, want to know which Linux thread library java is linked to?

   # ldd /usr/java/jre1.5.0_11/bin/java
           libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0x00bd4000)
           libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00b87000)
           libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x00a5a000) 
   
           /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x00a3c000)
   

8. col, want to save man pages as plain text?

   # PAGER=cat
   # man less | col -b > less.txt
   

9. xmlwf, need to know if a XML document is well formed? (A configuration file maybe..)

   # curl -s 'http://bashcurescancer.com' > bcc.html
   # xmlwf bcc.html
   # perl -i -pe 's@<br/>@<br>@g'  bcc.html
   # xmlwf bcc.html
   bcc.html
   :104:2: mismatched tag
   

10. lsof lists open files. You can do all kinds of cool things with this. Like find which ports are open:

    # lsof | grep TCP
    portmap    2587   rpc    4u     IPv4       5544                 TCP *:sunrpc (LISTEN)
    rpc.statd  2606  root    6u     IPv4       5585                 TCP *:668 (LISTEN)
    sshd       2788  root    3u     IPv6       5991                 TCP *:ssh (LISTEN) 
    
    sendmail   2843  root    4u     IPv4       6160                 TCP badhd:smtp (LISTEN)
    vsftpd     9337  root    3u     IPv4      34949                 TCP *:ftp (LISTEN)
    cupsd     16459  root    0u     IPv4      41061                 TCP badhd:ipp (LISTEN) 
    
    sshd      16892  root    3u     IPv6      61003                 TCP badhd.mshome.net:ssh->kontiki.mshome.net:4661  (ESTABLISHED)
    

    Or find the number of open files a user has. Very important for running big applications like Oracle, DB2, or WebSphere:

    # lsof | grep ' root ' | awk '{print $NF}' | sort | uniq | wc -l
    179
    

–

This article has been taken from sunday times – mumbai edition dt: 18/02/2006

I am posting it here as it gives a lot of meaning to the indian software industry and the boom which we had seen in the past because of this.

They are the poster boys of matrimonial classifieds. They are paid handsomely, perceived to be intelligent and travel abroad frequently. Single-handedly, they brought purpose to the otherwise sleepy city of Bangalore.

Indian software engineers are today the face of a third-world rebellion. But what exactly do they do? That’s a disturbing question. Last week, during the annual fair of the software industry’s apex body Nasscom, no one uttered a word about India’s programmers.

The event, which brought together software professionals from around the world, used up all its 29 sessions to discuss prospects to improve the performance of software companies. Panels chose to debate extensively on subjects like managing innovation, business growth and multiple geographies.

But there was nothing on programmers, who you would imagine are the driving force behind the success of the Indian software companies. Perhaps you imagined wrong. “It is an explosive truth that local software companies won’t accept.

Most software professionals in India are not programmers, they are mere coders,” says a senior executive from a global consultancy firm, who has helped Nasscom in researching its industry reports.

In industry parlance, coders are akin to smart assembly line workers as opposed to programmers who are plant engineers. Programmers are the brains, the glorious visionaries who create things. Large software programmes that often run into billions of lines are designed and developed by a handful of programmers.

Coders follow instructions to write, evaluate and test small components of the large program. As a computer science student in IIT Mumbai puts it if programming requires a post graduate level of knowledge of complex algorithms and programming methods, coding requires only high school knowledge of the subject.

Coding is also the grime job. It is repetitive and monotonous. Coders know that. They feel stuck in their jobs. They have fallen into the trap of the software hype and now realise that though their status is glorified in the society, intellectually they are stranded.
Companies do not offer them stock options anymore and their salaries are not growing at the spectacular rates at which they did a few years ago.

“There is nothing new to learn from the job I am doing in Pune. I could have done it with some training even after passing high school,” says a 25-year-old who joined Infosys after finishing his engineering course in Nagpur.

A Microsoft analyst says, “Like our manufacturing industry, the Indian software industry is largely a process driven one. That should speak for the fact that we still don’t have a domestic software product like Yahoo or Google to use in our daily lives.”

IIT graduates have consciously shunned India’s best known companies like Infosys and TCS, though they offered very attractive salaries. Last year, from IIT Powai, the top three Indian IT companies got just 10 students out of the 574 who passed out.

The best computer science students prefer to join companies like Google and Trilogy. Krishna Prasad from the College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai, who did not bite Infosys’ offer, says, “The entrance test to join TCS is a joke compared to the one in Trilogy. That speaks of what the Indian firms are looking for.”

A senior TCS executive, who requested anonymity, admitted that the perception of coders is changing even within the company. It is a gloomy outlook. He believes it has a lot to do with business dynamics.

The executive, a programmer for two decades, says that in the late ’70s and early ’80s, software drew a motley set of professionals from all kinds of fields.

In the mid-’90s, as onsite projects increased dramatically, software companies started picking all the engineers they could as the US authorities granted visas only to graduates who had four years of education after high school.
“After Y2K, as American companies discovered India’s cheap software professionals, the demand for engineers shot up,” the executive says. Most of these engineers were coders. They were almost identical workers who sat long hours to write line after line of codes, or test a fraction of a programme.

They did not complain because their pay and perks were good. Now, the demand for coding has diminished, and there is a churning.

Over the years, due to the improved communication networks and increased reliability of Indian firms, projects that required a worker to be at a client’s site, say in America, are dwindling in number. And with it the need for engineers who have four years of education after high school.

Graduates from non-professional courses, companies know, can do the engineer’s job equally well. Also, over the years, as Indian companies have already coded for many common applications like banking, insurance and accounting, they have created libraries of code which they reuse.

Top software companies have now started recruiting science graduates who will be trained alongside engineers and deployed in the same projects. The CEO of India’s largest software company TCS, S Ramadorai, had earlier explained, “The core programming still requires technical skills.

But, there are other jobs we found that can be done by graduates.” NIIT’s Arvind Thakur says, “We have always maintained that it is the aptitude and not qualifications that is vital for programming. In fact, there are cases where graduate programmers have done better than the ones from the engineering stream.”

Software engineers, are increasingly getting dejected. Sachin Rao, one of the coders stuck in the routine of a job that does not excite him anymore, has been toying with the idea of moving out of Infosys but cannot find a different kind of “break”, given his coding experience.

He sums up his plight by vaguely recollecting a story in which thousands of caterpillars keep climbing a wall, the height of which they don’t know. They clamber over each other, fall, start again, but keep climbing. They don’t know that they can eventually fly.

Rao cannot remember how the story ends but feels the coders of India today are like the caterpillars who plod their way through while there are more spectacular ways of reaching the various destinations of life.

The PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) module pam_tally keeps track of unsuccessful login attempts then disables user accounts when a preset limit is reached. This is often referred to as account lockout.

To lock out a user after 4 attempts, two entries need to be added in the /etc/pam.d/system-auth file:

auth        required        /lib/security/$ISA/pam_tally.so onerr=fail no_magic_root
account     required        /lib/security/$ISA/pam_tally.so deny=3 no_magic_root reset

The options used above are described below:

• onerr=fail
  If something strange happens, such as unable to open the file, this determines how the module should react.
• no_magic_root
  This is used to indicate that if the module is invoked by a user with uid=0, then the counter is incremented. The sys-admin should use this for daemon-launched services, like telnet/rsh/login.
• deny=3The deny=3 option is used to deny access if tally for this user exceeds 3.
• reset
  The reset option instructs the module to reset count to 0 on successful entry.

See below for a complete example of implementing this type of policy:

auth        required      /lib/security/$ISA/pam_env.so
auth        required      /lib/security/$ISA/pam_tally.so onerr=fail
no_magic_root auth        sufficient    /lib/security/$ISA/pam_unix.so likeauth nullok
auth        required      /lib/security/$ISA/pam_deny.so
account     required      /lib/security/$ISA/pam_unix.so 
account     required      /lib/security/$ISA/pam_tally.so deny=5
no_magic_root reset  password    requisite     /lib/security/$ISA/$ISA/pam_cracklib.so retry=3
password    sufficient    /lib/security/$ISA/$ISA/pam_unix.so nullok use_authtok md5 shadow password
required      /lib/security/$ISA/$ISA/pam_deny.so  session
required      /lib/security/$ISA/$ISA/pam_limits.so session
required      /lib/security/$ISA/$ISA/pam_unix.so

For more detailed information on the PAM system please see the documentation contained under /usr/share/doc/pam-

For information on how to unlock a user that has expired their deny tally see additional Knowledgebase articles regarding unlocking a user account and seeing failed logins with the faillog command.

contributed by David Robinson