Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Command line BitTorrent client for Linux

According to this post at Yahoo News " A third of all traffic on the internet is .torrent orignated ". How much of that legit content sharing / distribution ??

BitTorrent released a command line based client for Linux and it works well with python 2.4 and it is really useful if you wanna download a file remotely via a ssh session.

You can download python based linux Command line BitTorrent from http://www.bittorrent.com/

Once downloaded just extract remember to use Python 2.4 (thought it should work with old 2.3.xx python with some warning )

Simply run btdownloadheadless.py http://www.yoururl.com/my.torrent file, for example


$ chmod +x btdownloadheadless.py
$ ./btdownloadheadless.py http://www.yoururl.com/my.torrent< $ ./btdownloadcurses.py http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/gnome-livecd-2.10.torrent
If you get [Errno 2] No such file or directory then you need to use wget or lynx to download .torrent file to local hard drive first. For example


$ ./btdownloadheadless.py ‘http://www.mininova.org/get/some_file[222].torrent'
Then run any one of the following command to download .torrent first


$lynx ‘http://www.mininova.org/get/some_file[222].torrent'
It will ask to save the file to disk.

OR
$wget ‘http://www.mininova.org/get/some_file[222].torrent'
Then start the download as follows

$./btdownloadheadless.py some_file[222].torrent
If you get error like ‘This seems to be an old Python version which does not support detecting the filesystem encoding. Assuming 'ascii'’, then upgrade your python version to 2.4.xx.

Happy Torrent'ing to alll what i do is to call it through cron and the file gets downloaded overnight :)

Source : Vivek


Nitin :)

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Fedora, is the fastest growing Linux distribution in the web server survey

Fedora, the community-driven Linux distribution started by RedHat, is the fastest growing Linux distribution in the web server survey. Based on distribution names contained in the server banner, Fedora has outpaced all its rivals over the last six months, growing fastest both in absolute numbers and in relative terms.

RedHat's strategy of reserving the RedHat brand for its commercial offerings, while using community-driven development in Fedora to try new features, seems to be working well. RedHat seems to have the best of both worlds at the moment: market-leading status for RedHat Linux, plus the fastest growing community distribution in Fedora. While share for RedHat itself is falling, taken together with Fedora its share is around 50% and rising slightly.


Source : Netcraft

Nitin :)

GRE Tunelling and clrearing the DF bit

A question sometimes is

Why Can't I Browse the Internet when Using a GRE Tunnel?

Sometimes when traffic goes through a generic routing encapsulation (GRE) tunnel, you can successfully use the ping command and Telnet, but you cannot download Internet pages or transfer files using File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This document explains a common reason for this problem, and offers several workarounds.

Solutions

One of these four solutions should solve the problem.

Find out where along the path the ICMP message is blocked, and see if you can get it allowed.

Set the MTU on the Client's network interface to 1476 bytes, forcing the SMSS to be smaller, so packets won't have to be fragmented when they reach R2. However, if you change the MTU for the Client, you should also change the MTU for all devices that share the network with this Client. On an Ethernet segment, this could be a large number of devices.

Use a proxy-server (or, even better, a Web cache engine) between R2 and the Gateway router, and let the proxy-server request all the Internet pages.

If the GRE tunnel runs over links that can have an MTU greater than 1500 bytes plus the tunnel header, then another solution is to increase the MTU to 1524 (1500 plus 24 for the GRE overhead) on all interfaces and links between the GRE endpoint routers.

I would be using the route map to reset the DF bit.So here is an example of how to do this on a Cisco router:
route-map nodf permit 10
set ip df 0
interface FastEthernet2/0
ip policy route-map nodf

Note that the "ip policy route-map nodf" command must be applied on the interface receiving the packets for which the DF bit must be cleared, and not the interface with the reduced MTU itself, where the packets are subsequently transmitted.

For more information refer to article at cisco site.

What security breach could cost you your job?

Worth Reading on the current security scneriao.

Virus? Spyware? Loss of sensitive data... what's going to get you a P45 the quickest?

IT bosses are fearful of losing their jobs in the event of a security breach – despite a survey on silicon.com today which would appear to show they have little grasp on the threats their companies are facing.

Top fear and the fastest route to a P45 is an internet security breach, with 30 per cent of respondents to a recent survey claiming one would cost them their jobs.

More than a quarter (26 per cent) believe the loss of intellectual property due to a security breach would result in their dismissal.

Third biggest concern (cited by 22 per cent of respondents) is their existence of pirate materials on the network, such as MP3 files or illegal software.


Source : Will Sturgeon at silicon website

Some of the IE 7 Features

The features he listed are below.

  • it's likely be a tabbed browser - real tabs!

  • international domain name (IDN) support

  • Portable Network Graphics (PNG) support, which will allow for the display of overlayed images in the browser

  • simplified printing from inside IE 7.0

  • likely to include a built-in news aggregator (read RSS aggregator)

  • reduced privilege mode will be the default

  • no cross-domain scripting and/or scripting access

  • improved Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) user interface

  • possible integrations between IE 7.0 and Microsoft's Windows anti-spyware service

  • Support for CSS2? a maybe - likely some upgrades to the current CSS support but not the entire CSS2 standard outlined by the W3C.


  • The Feature sound interesting though i am Microsoft Buff when it comes to desktops or personal machines.

    Source Sophos on ittoolbox site.

    Wednesday, March 16, 2005

    Fedora Core 4 Test 1 has been released

    Fedora Core 4 Test 1 has been released. This release comes with prereleases of GNOME 2.10, KDE 3.4, OpenOffice.org 2 as well the latest server software like MySQL 4.1.10 and PHP 5.0.3.

    Notable features of FC4test1 include:

    • gcc 4.0 as the primary system compiler

    • GNOME 2.10.0 Beta 2 included

    • The Eclipse IDE included along with some featured plugins

    • A solid foundation of Java packages for developers (ant, gcj, tomcat, struts, more classpath stuff) and
      the ability to possibly run Java apps through gij.

    • Lots of package updates

    • Started movement of packages to Fedora Extras

    • Did I mention PowerPC support?


    Source : linuxcompatible.org

    Linuxcompatible.org has a list of download mirrors for those who wanna be early birds to get hands on it.


    Nitin

    Friday, March 11, 2005

    How Miscommunication Takes Place in Office

    I picked it up via kiruba.com.

    A nice PIC on how Miscommunication Takes Place in Office.

    Worth a reading for sure

    Wednesday, March 09, 2005

    Wildcard DNS + Phishing = Convincing Bait URLs built

    Netcraft.com has a great article that discusses tricks that phishing scumbags use to create their latest rounds of deceptive emails.

    The trick described in this article combines wildcard dns, encoded URLs (surprise!) and the typical combination of HTML emails and authentic-looking websites.

    Some of the URLs function only in selected browsers. For example, the URLs using the pipe character will resolve on Windows XP, but not Linux. Windows XP browsers support a broader character set to accommodate migrations from Windows NT4, which allows the use of the pipe character in identifying network assets.

    I guess the Netcraft.com toolbar is good for catching on this and you can get it from toolbar.netcraft.com


    Nitin :)

    Tuesday, March 08, 2005

    Hey All Wishing you all a Happy Maha Shivratri

    Hey Friends to all who may be wondering why did i stop posting well it was no blog nostagalia as ppl might say but i have decided to get back to part time studying to increase my professional knowledge. Well I am doing my CCIP and about to give my BGP paper.

    Well Happy Maha Shivratri to all My Indian readers.

    Will soon be posting a lot on BGP i mean i am not an expert at it but would post tips and tweaks to the best of my knowledge.

    Till then take Care and have a good time

    Nitin :)