Is been a long time

Is been like ages since i blogged. Is been crazy for me since i got back to Ghana, land of my birth. but i am finally in control and want to start blogging seriously. expect more now.

How do I disable the ping response?

Usually a ping is used to check if a machine is up and to check the network status.

It is a small network packet sent to the machine. If the machine is up, an answer will be sent. The time needed to get the answer is called ping time or round-trip time.

The ping response from an IP indicates the machine is up.

Unfortunately this can be used to quickly scan an IP-range for reachable hosts.

This can be used to find potential hackable machines. If your machine doesn’t answer to pings, your chance to be seen is reduced. (That doesn’t mean your machine is more secure, the machine is just not that easy to be seen from the internet. Nothing more.)

Add the following line to your init script for the network (the name depends on the distribution you use):

echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all

This disables ping responses.

To reenable, use the following command:

echo 0 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all

To make this permanent set the following into /etc/sysctl.conf (if you have such a file)

net.ipv4.conf.icmp_echo_ignore_all = 1

Your request didn’t contain the proper sessionid cookie — access denied

This problem occured in the web browser when i was trying to access our open web mail. One thing is that openwebmail puts users uploaded attachments in cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/sessions. Users will normally get this error if there is no space left on the partition where cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/sessions lives or user has exceeded his disk quota.

Solution:

To solve this, please move cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/sessions to a larger partition. Then create a symbolic link to that new directly.

Steps as above

cd /new_place

That is change directory to the new big disk space.

mkdir sessions

Create a directory called “sessions” in this new big disk space

mkdir sessions

Create a directory directory called “sessions” this new big disk space.

chmod 770 sessions

Change the mode of the directory “sessions” which was just created.

chown 0 sessions

Change ownership of the “sessions” directory created.

chgrp mail sessions

Add sessions directory created to the mail group.

cd yourweb_cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc

Change directory or move into were your openwebmail/etc is.

cp -rf sessions

Make backup of sessions directory in the “etc” to somewhere safe.

rm -rf  sessions

Delete the sessions in the yourweb_cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc

ln -s /new_place/sessions  .

Still in the “yourweb_cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc” directory, create a symbolic link.

My first day at work

Before i say something, happy new year to you all.

Reported to work for the first time this year on 9th January. Actually there was not so much for me to do on the first day. But was shown the plan for the semister as i am working in the university. It was quite some job and i think is going to be very challenging. But hope to make it.

Laptop, Again and Again!!

I just moved into a new hostel on campus and so decided to get some of my hostel mates grazy about linux. So i just felt like setting a small server with my laptop. Just decided to get all the necessary packages so that my hostel mates will use my system as a web, mail servers at least so that they would feel the real power of linux. And also wanted to host quit a lot of tutorials for my hostel mates.

Just in the process of grabbing the packages, my dell latitude c610 screen decided to fade out. and now i cant see a single word on the screen when i switch it on. Now the laptop is just not doing anything again. This is the second time this is happening to me. my laptop again and again.

xampp and openwebmail configuration

Hmm, one might wonder why i am posting this at this time. After i have managed to get xampp and openwebmail to work, the networking administrator for University of Cape Coast encouraged me to write this small stuff so that my collegues would also have access it easily. This is actually my first tutorial and i hope it would help alot of people out there. Anyway i choose xampp bcos i wanted a simple functional and easy to setup system with apache, mysql, php and other stuff runing without doing so much. and also openwebmail as a mail client bcos that was what my schoo required.
Xampp:

1. download xampp from http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html and install with this command tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.5.4a.tar.gz -C /opt.

2. do cd /opt/lamp to see all the files with the lamp program.

3. all configuration files for the lamp are kept at /opt/lamp/etc including httpd.conf which is the apache webserver configuration. the web files or your website itself is under cd /opt/lamp/htdocs.

3. within the /opt/lamp/etc/httpd.conf with the help of an editor, change the servername and documentroot to meet your needs.

4. test your new apache server by opening a browser. i use mozilla. http://localhost or http://ipaddress or http://domainname

Openwebmail:

1. download openwebmail which is a mail client from http://www.openwebmail.org/openwebmail/download/ follow the link on the openwebmail site to configure it.

2 it must be kept in the /opt/lamp/cgi-bin.

3. create an alias within the /opt/lamp/etc/httpd.conf for the openwebmail

 

openwebmail starts to work again.

Emm. since ma first time….

The schools server on which i am working run into problems for the

past few days and i had to get things runing back. I needed to install mysql and things were not going right. And so i had to get xampp from http://www.xampp.org which comes with mysql, apache, php and etc. After getting mysql which comes with xampp to work cool, openwebmail also decides to sleep. So today i had to get it runing back. Is really been a very hectic day for me.

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