Archive for September, 2008

Mosso Hosting gets Rave Review from Sys Admin

Sep 25th

Posted by chuck in Admin

No comments

Mosso, the Cloud Hosting offering from market-leading hosting provider Rackspace, has received a rave review about their on-the-fly scalability under load.

Mosso is a hosting platform that allows you to be flexible with your configuration. Their Linux offering includes PHP 4 & 5, MySQL 4 & 5, Ruby on Rails, Perl, and Python technologies for building your application. Their cloud is, from their website, “an advanced, enterprise-level hosting platform that beats the pants off of running your own servers – and scales easier, too.”

The platform is easy on the budget, too. I’d rather not talk numbers here, so, contact Mosso for more information!

/cs

Secure Synergy

Sep 8th

Posted by chuck in Linux

No comments

I have a laptop that I use as my primary computer, and a desktop machine that I attach it to at work (both run linux).  I use synergy to connect the two so that I don’t have to remember which mouse is attached.

By default, synergy is quite insecure.  On the contrary, running synergy inside an encrypted ssh tunnel is quite secure.

I have two machines:

  1. My laptop: synclient
  2. My desktop: synserver

So, I use the keyboard/mouse from the desktop to control everything.  I assume that you are already aware of synergy and that you already have a working config.  Oh, ant that you are running Linux.  Oh, and that both of your Linux machine name the other one in their /etc/hosts files.  Oh, and that you have your synergy config in /etc/synergy.conf.  Now we don’t have to have everything all cluttered with flags.

There is no guaranty here that any of this will work on or improve the security of Windows.  You’ve been warned.

I log into both machines, and start up the synergy server on my desktop (I have a synergy.conf in /etc, so there is no need to pass it a config file argument with -c):

chuck@synserver:~$ synergys

I then log into my laptop, and do the following:

chuck@synclient:~$ ssh -f -N -L 24800:synserver:24800 synserver
chuck@synclient:~$ synergyc localhost

Now, it’s a pain to have to do that every time.  So, I put an alias in my ~/.bashrc:

alias synclient=’ssh -f -N -L 24800:synserver:24800 synserver && synergyc localhost’

Now, I can log into my laptop, once I’ve started synergys on the desktop, and run this:

chuck@synclient:~$ synclient

Now, the SSH tunnel has been configured, and the synergyclient started, all in one command.  No mess, no fuss. No password leaked on the net.

/cs