"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." (Robert A. Heinlein)

Sunday 29 March 2009

Apache Tomcat on my Linux server

I installed Apache Tomcat on my little Linux server (PIII-550Mz) since I'm going to test some java server application at home. I mainly based my installation on this howto with some little variation.
I first installed Java jdk 
 sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
 Then I downloaded Apache Tomcat from my nearest mirror server
wget http://apache.fis.uniroma2.it/tomcat/tomcat-6/v6.0.18/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.18.tar.gz
 Then I installed it
tar -xzvf apache-tomcat-6.0.18.tar.gz
sudo mv apache-tomcat-6.0.18 /opt/
sudo ln -s /opt/apache-tomcat-6.0.18/ /opt/tomcat

Saturday 14 March 2009

Installing TrueCrypt on EEEBuntu

Short after buying the EEEPC I also bought a 320 GB external USB hard disk to be used in support to EEEPC small internal drive. I decided (mainly because of my job) to secure, using cryptography, at least one disk partition. I'm not sure the cryptography settings I did choose would work against any professional hacker but they should be enough to stop  most 'curious' people who might, in any way, gain access to my disk . I decided to install TrueCrypt mainly because it's a multi-platform application so I could possibly prepare encrypted partitions to be used from both Linux and windows computers.
 Installation
I first downloaded  truecrypt-6.1a-ubuntu-x86.tar.gz  (the x86 32bit ubuntu compiled version) from its site downloads page. then I extracted and executed the installation program ...
 tar -xvf truecrypt-6.1a-ubuntu-x86.tar.gz
./truecrypt-6.1a-setup-ubuntu-x86 
The installation graphic user interface started and I simply had to click the 'Install TrueCrrypt' button and then agreed with the software license. Once installation was completed TrueCrypt icon was automatically placed in the 'other' folder.

Thursday 5 March 2009

Experimenting with Linux: MLDonkey

My little Linux server (PIII-550) works usually as Bittorrent download machine with Torrentflux running on the Apache server.  I desired to expand my little machine capabilities by installing some more download software. MLDonkey is a peer-to-peer client which let you download shared files in various network protocols.
 I did choose the easy way to install it using apt-get command:
sudo apt-get install mldonkey-server
 then I stopped the mldonkey server and edited the downloads.ini file in order to enable web acces from computers in my local network:
sudo /etc/init.d/mldonkey-server stop
cd /var/lib/mldonkey/
sudo vim downloads.ini
 I so edited the file adding my local network address range to allowed ips variable:
...
allowed_ips = [
  "127.0.0.1";
  "192.168.30.2/254";]
...