As any big company that has a complex site, google makes it easy for us to find help topics on most of its pages. Still, if you will want to perform something specific you will probably find it not very easy and have to digg a little in their complex help system for the answer. Yesterday I was so annoyed by one spammer that was sending the same mail over and over, and since the broadcast email was sent using gmail servers, I tried to report the spammer to google. Since it was not so easy to find those links for this action I have documented them for future help in similar situations .

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A few days after getting 5.1 out the CentOS team announced yesterday the release of Centos4.6 their updated version of the distribution’s legacy 4.x branch: “The CentOS development team is pleased to announce the release of CentOS 4.6 for i386, x86_64, s390, s390x and ia64. This release corresponds to the upstream vendor 4.6 release. Also released in the updates repository for CentOS 4.6 are all updates through December 15th, 2007. Major changes for this version are: Samba has been updated to version 3.0.25b; Autofs5 is included in this release as a Technology Preview, it resolves several long-standing interoperability issues in multi-vendor environments; there is a technology preview of OpenOffice.org 2.0 included in the updates directory; a new yum included in CentOS 4.6 requires the installation of a metadata parser for yum.” See the complete release announcement for full details.

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Sunday we walked to the old city town to see how the European Capital of Culture is preparing for Christmas this year. We took our 10 months old baby with us hoping he will enjoy this too, but by the time we arrived in the center he was already sleeping . I took this opportunity to take some pictures along the way and post them for all my friends that are interested to see how Sibiu is looking these days. I am by no means a professional photographer and can’t say these are the best night shots I took, but still I think they are acceptable…

“Piata Mare”

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A few days ago I was trying to install the reCAPTCHA plugin for phpBB2 to stop the increasing number of spam registrations on one phpbb forum. I’ve followed the instructions, but the usercp_register.patch was failing:

patching file usercp_register.php
Hunk #2 FAILED at 278.
1 out of 4 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file usercp_register.php.rej

The phpbb installation was the latest version available of the 2.0.x stable branch at this time (2.0.22) with no custom changes or modifications done on the core phpbb files. I have even tried to install the reCAPTCHA phpBB MOD that required to install easymod 0.3.0 but that failed also. I could not find any useful information anywhere on the phpBB forums or recaptcha ones. Read the rest of this entry »

There are several good howto’s explaining how you can reset a lost phpBB admin password, but all of them use phpMyAdmin for mysql access. Since I had to do this a few days ago, I thought other might benefit from such a howto that uses only command line utilities if phpmyadmin is not available.

Identifying the MySQL user/password

Locate the config.php file under your main phpBB installation directory. If you are using the debian phpBB package then the particularity of this package is that the config.php from the installation folder /var/www/phpbb2/site/config.php just calls the real config file from /etc/phpbb2/config.php

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Guardian Digital released yesterday, December 4, 2007 the latest version of their security targeted distribution: EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.18 (Version 3.0, Release 18). ISOs for i686 and x86_64 are available for direct download and also as torrent images. The download size is very small ~570 MB but it includes all the necessary tools to run a secure standalone or application server.

Changes in 3.0.18 include among others:

• New Guardian Digital Health Center for proactive hardware monitoring
• FwkNop and PSAD Tools for new levels of Security (featured in the the new Linux Firewalls book by Michael Rash)
• New stress-kernel package with a new stress testing suite
• Several new packages such as drbd (8.2.1), dsniff (2.3), psad (2.1), quota (3.15), sdparm (1.02), stress-kernel (3.0).
• The latest stable versions of MySQL (5.0.45), asterisk (1.4.14), kernel (2.6.23), openswan (2.4.10), samba (3.0.27a), syslog-ng (2.0.5), webtool (3.18), etc.
• Numerous fixes and features enhancements

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This short howto will show how to disable a user account under linux. This might be useful in the situation where you don’t want to permanently remove the user, but you just want it disabled and no longer able to use the system. The user will still receive emails for example, but he will not be able to login and check them out.

Modern linux systems use /etc/shadow to store the encrypted user passwords. The quickest way to disable a user is to alter is password stored in /etc/shadow. Normally an active user account will have one line in /etc/shadow that will look like:
user:$1$eFd7EIOg$EeCk6XgKktWSUgi2pGUpk.:13852:0:99999:7:::
where the second field is the encrypted password. Read the rest of this entry »

Almost one month after RedHat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 (20071107), the CentOS team released yesterday their own 5.1 update for centos5. There are available new iso images for centos5.1 and we can also find a special netinstall iso that can be used to start a remote install. Systems running centos5 will notice the update in the yum/up2date repositories and can be upgraded immediately.

Besides the changes introduced by rhel5.1 you can find the centos particularities here. Personally I have found it quite strange that after the upgrade the /etc/redhat-release file was not showing 5.1 but still CentOS release 5 (Final), even if centos-release-5-1.0.el5.centos.1.i386.rpm was upgraded:
cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS release 5 (Final)
instead of something like “CentOS release 5.1 (Final)“. Apparently this is a known issue and the centos team will create wiki page explaining the situation about that in the next couple of days.

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