Timothy Bowler

Over the last few weeks the server logs, especially /var/log/messages seems to be filled with consistent ssh dictionary attacks. Of course this cannot continue, so what do you do to prevent it?

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After googling the internet for hours I managed to get the perfect trac + svn setup. Because we use contractors at work, I needed a setup where the security is global but at the same time based on project by project basis. Therefore trac uses a global .htaccess and svn uses the authz file for authentication. At the moment this is working greate. To set up a new trac project is simply a case of creating the project, copying a base projects database and config file and then editing the new project’s config file.

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Ubuntu 8.04 does not have sendmail installed by default. This was annoying when some of the php web apps that I created rely on sendmail to send out email notifications. But before going ahead and installing sendmail, I thought that I would try exim4. Installing on Ubuntu is very straight forward:

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Installing an SSL certification in plesk, looked straight forward. But, there are a few gotchas.

When pasting in your certifacte, in the certificate field make sure you copy and paste the private key first. Followed by the certificate. If you puchased an AV certificate (so your domain is green in the IE bar), make sure you get the root and intermediate certificates.

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There are two ways of doing this

svn export . ../new_dir

or

find . -name .svn -prune -exec rm -rfv {} \;

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Today I finally installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my Sony vaio sz4. It runs like a dream, better than the SUSE setup which it replaced. My first thoughts are that the system runs very fast and all the components work out of box(web cam, finger print scanner have not being tested yet). I have noticed the wifi throughput has increased, using the eclipse IDE runs like a dream and best of all compiz fusion works on both the laptop and on a dual monitor setup. The synaptic package manager seems more complete overSUSE’s yast package management.

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I was refactoring a few developers code today, and one thing I see time and time again is two queries in favour of a left join, . The problem is symfony makes result set retrieval so easy (thanks to propel of course).

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Finally after having to wait an extra four days (Thanks UPS) I finally received my new Nokia 6131 NFC. The phone has quiet a few features and is small and compact. The reason for needing this phone is so I can start development on Near Field Communication (NFC). At the moment my PhD revolves around the world of NFC and this little phone is going to help me with my first prototype.

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This ultra portable pc is a winner. Its compacted, light, long battery life, multimedia ready and best of all comes pre-installed with xandros linux.

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A slight performance increase for Apache is to turn off the per-directory configuration files (.htaccess), and insert them into the virtual hosts configuration file. For each Symfony project that I set up the vhost file looks something like:

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