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February 2007

Ubuntu: networking tip

But when i tried to ping some other machine, this didn’t work 🙁 I checked /var/log/messages and the onboard Broadcom Interface showed up as eth1, but i was not able to start it. When i ran $ sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart i got some error messages like: SIOCSIFADDR: No such device eth1 eth1: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device No clue what went wrong, i googled a lot and finally i stumbled upon this forum entry: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=221768 Then i ran: $ ifconfig -a and got a list with my network interfaces and more importantly with it’s MAC address.

Ubuntu Server insecurity?

i just found out that my Ubuntu Server 6.10 has login shells for almost all users set in the /etc/passwd file! That’s a very bad idea because this maybe enabled someone to install “Data Cha0s Back Backdoor” on my machine 🙁 I checked this with 2 other fresh Ubuntu Server 6.10 installations and both also had the login shells for users like daemon, mail, www-data and so on. Especially www-data should not have a chance to create a shell in my opinion!

Feeds made easy to understand – for everyone

I love news feeds, podcasts, photocasts, all that fancy feed stuff, i really do 🙂 The only drawback on feeds is, you need to use a feedreader or a modern browser with the ability to display the RSS/Atom feed in a human readable manner…. Some weeks ago a really cool project i was involved in with podcasting was stopped in the last minute, because the people in charge were afraid that the users can’t deal with the raw xml output in their browsers – and they were right, people don’t want to see the XML code, the feed has to be readable.