Show Notes: Episode 168

  • Power Tech. Tech that powers our world.
    Akash Sablok
    Technology Journalist

    APC BE750G ES Series Battery Backup, $119.00
    www.apc.com

    Targus Targus Auto/Air Power Inverter Slim Line Style, $79.99
    www.targus.ca

    Energi to Go, $29.99
    www.energizer.com

    Belkin Compact Surge Protector
    www.belkin.com

    Belkin Conceal Surge Protector
    www.belkin.com

  • Pimp Your VLC Player
    Amber MacArthur
    New Media Specialist

    If you’re looking for a media player that will play just about anything, VLC is it. It works on all platforms, and the software is tweaked regularly to offer new features. What you might not know, is that you can pimp out your VLC player on your Windows computers with free software that does more than just make your screen look pretty.

    videolan.org/vlc

    kantaris.org

  • Build a web server in under five minutes (and learn a little *nix)
    Wil Knoll
    Security Analyst, chekmate.org

    PLEASE NOTE: Mac OSX is not based on OpenBSD. It’s userland is of FreeBSD
    descent, but it’s kernel is all it’s own.
    Here is a pretty good link that sums it up.
    http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_xnu.html

    Why OpenBSD?

    When I first attempted to learn a Linux/BSD, I spent a fair amount of time reading reviews of distros to try and get a feel for what I wanted to brand myself. Penguin? Deamon? Puffer Fish?

    I settled on OpenBSD for several reasons. Theo DeRaadt (lead developer) lives in Calgary and it was possible to hand him cash for the team’s hard work. It stresses Security and Documentation. They get to brag that there have been “Only two remote holes in the default install, in more than 10 years”. OpenBSD also has a reputation for being caustic to new users; especially on install. I felt up to the challenge, and in honesty, the install alone taught me much about the way the file system works in BSD.

    The basics in this segment do translate to other Linux/BSDs. Navigating the file system, starting and stopping apache, and editing files are shared across most Linux/BSD distros.

    Although I show methods for finding files below, personally I did a lot of poking around in the file system. Every distro lays files out a little differently, and sometimes poking around can uncover parts of an OS that are unexpected and fun.

    1.Locate the apache config file. One way of doing this is to use the “man” command, which is short for Manual, as in, the manual for whatever command or server your running. Running “man httpd” will show us lots of info for the apache webserver. At the bottom of most Man pages they show related commands and files. Two items that are important, the location of the apache config file, and it’s name.
    2.Edit the apache config file. “vi /var/www/conf/httpd.conf” This will bring up the vi inline editor. Although many people have preferences for varied inline editors, I have not found a single system that does not have vi on it, from HP-UX to small embedded distros. Learning vi will become an important tool.
    3.To just get the webserver working, nothing needs to be changed in the config file. However, it might be a good idea to take a look around. Your going to discover a lot by reading through the config files.
    4.Once outside of vi (try hitting ESC and then typing “:q!” without the double quotes and then enter), we are going to try and start apache. First do a “ps aux” to get a list of all running processes. Notice the lack of a httpd process running.
    5.Use “apachectl start” to start the web server. Type “ps aux” again and you will see several httpd processes running now. “apachectl” will also accept “stop” and “restart” as commands.
    6.If we browse to the machine now using a web browser, we should see the default apache index page. To change that page, we need to find it. The index page lives in the document root. We can find that by checking the apache config file. With most distros it is going to be located somewhere under /var. In the case of OpenBSD, it is under /var/www/htdoc/. We type “cd /var/www/htdoc” to get to that location.
    7.Now here, a “ls” will list the files in the directory.
    8.Using vi from before, we can edit the index.html file to something that we like.

    (Note: Some of these commands may fail because of lack of privileges. During the install you most likely created a root user and a normal user. The normal user may need to “su” (super user) to run the “apachectl start” command properly.)

    This is a very basic start. There has been no discussion of the firewall, permissions, or the fact that the OpenBSD apache server is chrooted and at 1.3 (for licensing reasons). But it’s a good place to go in and start poking around.

    RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
    http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html - OpenBSD install guide
    http://www.devx.com/security/Article/28059 - Older OpenBSD install guide, quite helpful still.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0cPFRdT7mQ - An OpenBSD in under five minutes.
    http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=review-openbsd - Older review on distro watch, but with helpful install information.

    http://www.eng.hawaii.edu/Tutor/vi.html - A vi tutorial

    http://distrowatch.com/ - A good place to start finding a distribution that suits you.