Thunderbolt and others

Take a trip over to Tested - http://www.tested.com/ - to check out all the stuff they pull apart! Also got a feature on new Intel Thunderbolt tech, which looks good.
MO

New MacBook Pros

Well, I'm now sold on Macs. Got myself an iMac and I actually get work done now, instead of booting up and fixing a Windows problem every time. Still use Win 7 though as its not too bad, but OSX seems to always do the job.
http://www.apple.com/uk/macbookpro/
There is also a nice crossover with Linux, so it satisfies the geek in me...

Other useful linux commands - act 3

iwconfig - check wireless setup

dmesg - query a USB device, plug it in a type this command

lspci - chipset interrogation

lsusb - as above

Configure Open SSH securely

Modify config in /etc/ssh or ssh_config to disable support for legacy protocols. Look for the 'Protocol 2,1' line and remove the ver 1 protocol.
Also set 'PermitRootLogin no' and 'MaxAuthTries 3'


After the changes have been made run:
service ssh restart

View attack activity by looking at /var/log/auth. If you see a particular IP that keeps attacking, put an entry in /etc/hosts.deny

You can automate this process by installing the DenyHosts package. Edit it's config in /etc/denyhosts.conf and change DENY_THRESHOLD_INVALID from 5 to 2

Enhanced GUI nmap

Try Zenmap, usually in your distros repository

Quick port scan of a machine

nmap

Not installed by default on Ubuntu or Mint, use:

sudo apt-get install nmap

Change hostname in linux

Using suitable privelages, navigate to /etc and edit the following files, replacing the default name with your desired machine name. Prefereably the FQDN.

/etc/hosts
/etc/hostname

Article to install latest SOLR build on Ubuntu 10.04

http://charlesleifer.com/blog/how-to-set-up-solr-on-ubuntu-1004-or-whatever/

Thanks Dave Hall for your brilliant article

http://davehall.com.au/blog/dave/2010/06/26/multi-core-apache-solr-ubuntu-1004-drupal-auto-provisioning

Tika and Solr

To index Word, Excel, PDF and other "unstructured" documents, Solr uses Tika, another Apache project.

Tika comes bundled in Solr and is ready to run in Solr. However, if you want to run Tika individually you have to copy a few .jar files around.

cd [Your path]/apache-solr-nightly/lib
cp commons-io-1.4.jar commons-codec-1.3.jar [Your path]/apache-solr-nightly/example/solr/lib
cp ~/.m2/repository/org/jempbox/jempbox/0.2.0/jempbox-0.2.0.jar [Your path]/apache-solr-nightly/example/solr/lib

java -jar tika-0.2.jar

Config

If you want to index Word, Excel, PDF, and other types of documents, there is a bit of additional configuration to do. To index those files types you have to get a nightly build of Solr from here, and copy some files and directories as described in the link at the end of this post. You have to add the following lines to example/solr/conf/solrconf.xml:

    
      last_modified
      true
    
    

Bitnami Stacks

Just discovered these and they are pretty awesome. If you just want to test a Wordpress idea and don't want to build a whole VM then download a stack:
http://bitnami.org/stack/wordpress