Category / Cool programs

NX server auth suggestion… local/passwd auth without allowing passwd auth on public sshd July 21, 2008 at 10:41 pm

I thought this was pretty simple, but after chatting with a few, apparently not a lot have thought of it.  If you want to use NX to connect to a server from the internet, but also want more security on that same host by only allowing known rsa/dsa keys the ability to login, and you don’t like the nx passworddb option; you can use the following setup:

  • Leave the “public” sshd process listening on port 22, only allowing known keys (and don’t allow root logins IMO).
  • Setup a 2nd “local” sshd process listening on another port.  My setup is as follows:
    • Create /etc/ssh/sshd_config_local, in that file there will be 2 differences…
    • Port 222
    • UsePAM yes (or set PasswordAuthentication yes if you don’t use PAM).
    • For extra super security, also set: ListenAddress 127.0.0.1
  • Setup another init script (I just copied sshd to sshd_local) and add the following to the line that spawns the sshd process:
    • -f /etc/ssh/sshd_config_local

Setup your links, run chkconfig, whatever your distribution does, and then start the service (sudo su – root -c ‘/etc/init.d/sshd_local start’).   You should now have another daemon running that looks like:
 /usr/sbin/sshd -f /etc/ssh/sshd_config_local

The only configs needed for nx (I’m using the free nomachine server, not freenx, might be slight differences) are (in /usr/NX/etc/server.cfg):

  • SSHDAuthPort to 222
  • EnablePasswordDB = 0

..and that’s it.  Now connections to the server connect to port 22 as user nx using the key that came with the client (or you can setup a custom key… you figure that out) and then it does the ssh step (to auth/fwd the connection) via basically doing an ‘ssh -p 222 -l $USER localhost’ on the server, so it uses your “local” sshd copy and passwords work.

Posted in: Cool programs, My l337 skillz by Miguelito /
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I got a fever, and the only prescription… November 25, 2007 at 11:04 am

Rock Band is extremely cool.  Yes, it’s basically just a compilation of the Guitar Hero, Karaoke and a drum game.. but when put together, it’s more then just the sum of it’s parts.  The solo careers are pretty much run of the mill; much like the previous games already listed.  However, when you play in a group, it’s so much fun it’s insane.  We played for several hours over at my parent’s house on Thanksgiving, and man was it fun.  Of course my parents and grandparents didn’t care for a lot of the music included, but even they were singing along with some of the songs, like Bon Jovi’s Wanted Dead or Alive.


The new drum set (the one real new addition to the game over previous Harmonix games) are both extremely cool, and quite hard.  My niece was actually the most talented out of the box.   She was wailing on stuff on Medium with barely any practice at all.

Not having played the karaoke games, this is the first experience I’ve had with the singing.  While everyone seems embarrassed to try it in front of a group, it is a lot of fun to do in the privacy of your own home without anyone around to hear. 🙂

Anyway, to refer back to the title.  The BOC classic is included.  Even better, there are periods in songs where the vocalist can hit the mic in time with some marks on the screen as a tambourine.  However, in this track, you actually are doing the cowbell… I started laughing so hard when that first happened.  Here’s a little taste to show you (yes, it’s crappy quality.. I just pulled out my little cam to snag this real quick):




No, I’m not posting any of me singing on here.  😛

If you already knew about Rock Band and were on the fence, then you need to get your ass off there and find yourself a bundle.  I’ve read that they might really be having supply issues on the east coast, but on the west coast, there are (or were before Black Friday anyway) tons of them in stock (for the xbox 360 at least) all over the place.  The Best Buy in Mission Valley near me had tons of them on Tuesday when it was released.

Update (12/17/2007): Switched to much better flash player

Posted in: Cool programs, Poker / Gaming by Miguelito /
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Firefox’s Stylish plugin rocks January 7, 2007 at 7:58 pm

[ Watching:

“Titus – Seasons 1 & 2” (Kevin Sullivan, Howard Murray, Michael Lessac, Robert Berlinger) ]

I read a lot of blogs, and I find that a lot of them seem to think it’s cool to use really narrow columns to display their text… I guess they want to appear like a newspaper or something. While it’s not a big deal reading text like that in a newspaper, I find it extremely annoying annoying when reading websites. This wouldn’t be a big deal if the site admins would set widths with percentages so that the text resizes with the window size, but too many of them use hard-coded pixel sizes instead. Here’s an example of a recent site I visited that was just way too damn narrow.

Stylishbefore-1

No matter how wide you make your browser, the text stays as it is. Make the fonts bigger and it gets worse… less and less words on each line.

So I found and installed the Stylish add-on and gave it a shot. Does exactly what I want. Only thing that sucks is you need to check the source of the page and set overrides for the css tags the site uses, but it works.

Here’s the same site with the overrides I did:

Stylishafter

Much, much easier to read. The overrides I wrote look like:

@-moz-document domain(thesitesdomain.com) {
#outer-wrapper { width: 95% ! important; }
#main-wrapper { width: 80% ! important; }
}

Man I love Firefox and how extensible it is.

BTW, if you happen to recognize this as your site… take the advice, change your lame, narrow columns into something easier to read.

Posted in: Comments on other blog entries, Cool programs by Miguelito /
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