paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors

One of the projects i've noticed and liked the look of is the rapache project, to quote from the site

At the moment my main machine is a 1.75ghz laptop running heron, i had a DVD to make from a movie on my camcorder, not a hard job at all, but my god, don't do it on a laptop it takes aaaaaaaaaaaaaaages :).

1, use dvgrab to grab the video from the camcorder

2, import movie into kino and add a few text items

3, Encode the video using the DVD settings which output it to an mpeg file [this took 3 hours]

4, use dvdauthor to make the vob files and various other things.

5, use mkisofs to make the dvd into an .iso file to burn with your fave application.

Did all that and 3.5!!!! hours later had a dvd to watch, surely, apart from the obvious and get a faster machine, there has to be a better way?  I'm seriously looking into macs.

Mental note, don't try to install the windows version of the vmware server console under wine it b0rks your system.  Well it did mine :(  Always try and go with the native install no matter how rubbish the installer is.

Discovered this today, thanks to John M Anderson for the heads up

Dear Lazy web

To the prick that cut me up this morning, "fuck you" and don't ever let me find you.....

I've been playing with a minimal interface on my Ubuntu Laptop lately.  I've been using the ion2 window manager, and becuase of this i've wanted to find decent command line applications.

The first one ive found is Opheus, it's a command line audio player, take a look here for a screen shot [apologies to the author, if you let me know your name, i'll credit you with the link]

To read more about it, check out the website

The hunt continues.....

Just for your updates, i'm no longer using twitter, you can now follow me at http://identi.ca/moodoo

I've had rather a large amount of connections to my FTP server lately trying to login with the username of administrator, it turns out that they are all ip's from china. I've known about iptables for awhile, but never really learned about them. My first instinct was to just drop the IP with the command

sudo iptables -A INPUT -s xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -j DROP

This worked a treat and is all well and good but i didn't fancy typing in that line for every IP that tried to bugger my connections so here's what i did

1, sudo touch /etc/iptables.sav
2, sudo chmod 777 /etc/iptables.sav
3, sudo iptables-save > /etc/iptables.sav
4, vim /etc/iptables.sav and add these lines into it. The lines with DROP at the end are IP ranges from china and surrounding areas. The last 4 lines tell the system to drop the ip after 3 failed connections for 120 seconds.

-A INPUT -s 222.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 220.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 218.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 210.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 202.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 124.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 120.0.0.0/252.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 116.0.0.0/252.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 114.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 60.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 58.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 200.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 188.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 186.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -i eth1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name DEFAULT --rsource
-A INPUT -i eth1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 120 --hitcount 3 --name DEFAULT --rsource -j DROP
-A INPUT -i eth1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 21 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name DEFAULT --rsource
-A INPUT -i eth1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 21 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 120 --hitcount 3 --name DEFAULT --rsource -j DROP

5, save the file and run sudo iptables-restore < /etc/iptables.sav
6, run sudo iptables -L and make sure all your rules are added [please note if you've a big list this can take awhile as it does do DNS lookups.

I've moved my Ubuntu webserver to a VMWARE platform, as i've done this i now have a spare machine, with 3 hdd's in it.  So i figured i'd use this as a backup server.  now what's the best way to do this?  samba? rsync over ssh?  Nah i'm going to use NFS.  Here's how i did it.  Thanks to Ubuntu Geek

On the Server

1. sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server nfs-common portmap
2. make a folder where you want to mount, mine was /backup_nfs
3. sudo vi /etc/exports
4. add the line - /backup_nfs 192.168.1.1/24(rw,no_root_squash,async)   obviously change your IP range and backup folder location
5. sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart
6. sudo exportfs -a  [ you need to run this every time you add something to /etc/export

On the Desktop/Other Server

1. sudo apt-get install portmap nfs-common
2. sudo mount <ipaddress>:/backup_nfs /backup_nfs
3. Alternatively you can add the following to the /etc/fstab and then reboot - <ipaddress>:/backup_nfs /backup_nfs nfs rw 0 0

I'm playing with mail servers at the moment, so if you know me and would like a mailbox that's pop/imap/smtp and webmail and you don't mind that it's only 10 meg storage, and @fabmail.org then can you email me at paul.mellors@fabmail.org with the username [the bit before @] and i'll set you one up.

Please note if you do use a mailbox on my server, it's not quick, it's not a commercial server and it can go down at any time for any length of time [my own email is on there so i do like to keep the server up]

I'm only doing this for 100 users at the moment.  First come first served.