Chuck's Blog

Today I poured over some of my auth.log files as usual, and yet again to my disappointment there were several hosts that had spent around three to four hours hounding my server with login attempts every five seconds. Having a few hours of time to kill I decided to investigate one of the machines.

I managed to determine large quantities of information. Below is a snippet of the text file I logged my findings in:

Fedora Core (unknown version)
Default Apache 2 installation
- /var/www/html is directory for www files
- /cgi-bin/ does exist, but directory indexing is off

Port 21 (ftp), 22 (ssh), 80 (http), 443 (http) are open.

All this points to that the owner set up a machine, connected it to the Internet, and forgot about it. One would assume the owner would have at least have tried to secure this server with some simple things, but nope. FTP still had its default banner, the apache test CGI scripts were available, and the machine was not patched. (Apache and ssh were about 6 months behind the latest, most secure versions)

I assume the reason this machine was attacking servers was because of a rogue individual compromising its security. I of course did not check, but it is perfectly possible that the owner left a default user account with a common password, opening the avenue for a simple bruteforce attack. How ironic, considering this is what it is doing itself to other machines.

In conclusion, admins, PLEASE SECURE YOUR MACHINES! If you do not then you will likely have your box compromised, just like this one. And trust me, you do not want to be on as many blacklists as this unfortunate victim.

Well, it appears KDX is finally dead. Haxial software pulled the plug on themselves. From their homepage:

Unfortunately, the Haxial Software company is unable to continue operation, and has suspended itself.

The software is no longer being distributed or sold, and technical support is no longer provided.

Tis a sad day. For anyone who doesn’t know already, KDX was a bulletin board like chatting system. It may have never grown as popular as Hotline, but it did excel in many ways. It was actually very useful for moving files between Linux, Windows, and Mac OS 9/X without having to resort to FTP.

Ah well, farewell KDX, and good luck former Haxial employees.

Around the end of October, Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) announced the new release of Ubuntu, specifically version 9.10. A little after it was released I installed in on my laptop, and so far I’m pretty impressed. I haven’t tested it extensively, but I do use it enough on a day-to-day basis that I would have noticed any significant issues.

Heres a screen shot of my desktop. This is not an out of the box desktop, rather it is about 20 minutes of work customizing my install. This is better than previous versions, where customizing like this took a good solid hour.

Besides being easy to customize, the new version of Ubuntu offers several notable features. A quick list of the ones I have noticed so far:

• Much better Bluetooth device support
• Darker and more eyecandy-like login screen
• Faster boot time (About 60% faster on my laptop than 8.04)
• Better integration of instant messaging  and email into the desktop
• The default usage of the ext4 filesystem
• And finally a new, and very promising service known as “Ubuntu One”

I haven’t really noticed any issues so far with anything, but there were some reports from early adopters stating plenty of large issues. I believe the majority of them have been fixed now, though it’s still advisable to test from the live CD to make sure hardware support hasn’t disappeared.

One thing I look forward to seeing advance is the Ubuntu One service. So far it only syncs bookmarks on FireFox, contacts in Evolution, files, and allows for quick sharing of a desktop, but possibly later on it could support things like mail and instant messenger account settings.