Tips and Tricks (old)

Various "how to" documentation, related utility programs, etc.

Installing and Configuring FreeBSD — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 18:47

How to build and maintain a FreeBSD workstation or server; supplements the documentation found on FreeBSD's web site.

Network Monitoring Using FreeBSD — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 18:48

Maintaining one's operational security involves more than just patching computers, setting up a firewall or IDS, and running anti-virus software. One must be able to monitor the activity of the systems and countermeasures one has deployed. Remote log data storage reduces the risk that an attacker or some other catastrophic failure will make it impossible to trace the attacker's activity or the error leading up to the compromise/failure. Consolidating countermeasure activity reports makes it easier for human analysts to assess and correlate the variety of indicators into useful and reasonable warnings. Even simple statistical indicators can provide a useful warning. For example, a sharp increase in both network and disk utilization may indicate someone is using a hacked server as an FTP warez site. This document describes a centralized logging and monitoring platform based on FreeBSD. While the described model is simple on purpose, the saavy administrator can add fault tolerance and increased capacity in a number of key components, such as MySQL, CARP, and the web-based user interfaces.

FreeBSD on a Sony PCG-C1VN Mini-HOWTO — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 18:49

How to install FreeBSD onto a Sony Vaio Picturebook (specifically the PCG-C1VN), and how to configure Xorg, the jog dial, etc.

Wireless Auto-configuration for FreeBSD, Version 0.2 — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 18:48

This hack will automatically configure a wireless network card at interface startup time provided a list of possible networks and their WEP keys in /etc/rc.conf. The attached scripts are covered by the same license as FreeBSD.

Using PPPoE with PF on FreeBSD Mini-HOWTO — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 18:50

The user-space PPP client includes its own firewall software that is incompatible with PF. Instead, one must use MPD (a multi-link PPP daemon for FreeBSD), configuring it to start PF with the PPPoE connection.

Approving Updates en Masse Using SUS — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-12-28 20:22

The web interface to Microsoft's Software Update Services (SUS) forces you to approve each update individually. This makes the initial deployment of a SUS server especially tedious. By directly modifying the SUS catalog files, an administrator may approve all of the updates at once.

Using the PF Firewall on FreeBSD — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 18:49

How to build a firewall based on FreeBSD, PF, and fwbuilder; how to proxy FTP connections; how to configure a transparent web proxy/cache using Squid; how to share iTunes; etc.

Using the FTP Server on FreeBSD Mini-HOWTO — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 18:50

 

Using SimpleBlog 1.2.1 with Archetypes 1.3.0 — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 19:18

How to work around the error "DisplayList keys must be strings or ints, got <type 'unicode>" received when trying to edit a blog entry.

Installing the TeamSpeak Server on FreeBSD (draft) — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 18:51

TeamSpeak is a free-as-in-beer voice-over-IP (VOIP) package for Linux. It can be made to run under FreeBSD using binary emulation.

.freebsd-firewall — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 17:35

 

.freebsd-netmon — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 17:35

 

Troubleshooting Kerberos Errors — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 18:52

A link to a Microsoft document that describes some basic troubleshooting steps for errors related to Active Directory and Kerberos.

Changing Object Ownership — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 19:20

Object ownerships cannot be easily transferred among Zope users.

Removing the Default File Type from the "Add New Item" Menu — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 19:19

I installed Ingeniweb's PloneExFile and AttachmentField products in order to be able to index certain uploaded file types. Now, I want to remove the default "File" (CMFFile) type from the "Add New Item" menu in order to reduce any confusion on the part of my end users over which "File" menu entry they should choose. To do so, I deleted the default "File" type from the Plone instance's portal_types list.

Making Published Content Only Available to Portal Members — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 19:20

The Plone workflow associated with a Plone content type manages Zope security settings for all objects of that type, overriding the Zope security settings defined on the objects themselves. If one wants to restrict access to Plone content, e.g. to only portal portal members, one must modify the corresponding workflow, by change the security settings in the workflow's states or by adding additional states with the desired security settings.

Folder Listing as a Plone Portlet Mini-HOWTO — by Matthew X. Economou — last modified 2005-09-15 19:20

How to create a box that displays the contents of a folder using Zope page templates and the Plone 'portlet' macro package.