Podcasting

For all 2 of my readers, I would like your opinion concerning me starting a video podcast.  I have recently been ridiculed that my posts were not detailed and fairly unprofessional.  That is why I would like to do a video podcast.  That way, I could demonstrate my posts in specific detail and give you a real life example of what I'm talking about.  I would like your feedback/comments on this so I know whether or not you guy/s think that this is a good idea.

Linux is your friend

I realized that I had been writing about linux for a few posts now, but I never actually described what linux actually is!  Although that is rather vague and I could go on for days trying to describe, I'm just gonna give you the short bit.

Linux is an open sourced operating system that can be used as an alternative to Windows or Mac operating systems.  What is open sourced you ask?  Well, that is another novel itself.  Basically, open source software is any software that has been licensed to be free.  Not free as in beer, but free as in speech.  Many of the linux and open source software advocates say that open source software, like linux, encourages innovation and provides people with viable free alternatives to restrictive software made by people like Microsoft.

So what does this mean?  It means that you can utilize this large community to harness the hidden power of your PC, and without having to spend a dime!

The thing about linux is that it's not one operating system.  Because it is open sourced, there are literally hundreds of different distributions to choose from.  If you're interested, you should check out one of the most popular distributions over at http://www.ubuntu.com

What's SSH?

Dealing with multiple networks in different physical locations, such as I do, requires me to figure out ways to make my job and my life easier.  That's why I now use SSH to help me with the many different applications and networks that I work with.  SSH is short for secure shell and it can be summarized simply as an encrypted tunnel between two end points.  The reason that SSH is such a utility knife in the IT world is because of the many things that you can use in conjunction with SSH. 

One simple but effective feature is something called port forwarding.  There are different kinds that can be used for different purposes.  Local forwarding allows you to tell your local machine that if you make a request for a tcp/udp connection on a specific port that is specified in your SSH tunnel, it will in turn forward the connection to a port on the remote machine that you also specified in the SSH tunnel. 

What this means is that you can push applications through the tunnel and vice versa.  For example, say you want to use a remote desktop application to a computer at your home, but the only port you have opened from the outside of your firewall/NAT router is to your SSH server.  No problem!  All you do is setup a connection to your SSH server at home and specify that you want to forward say port 8000 locally to the ip address of the target machine and port 3389 on the remote side.  After the connection is setup, all you have you have to do is setup up your remote desktop to connect to the IP you specified on port 8000 and tada!  You now have a remote desktop connection to your computer at home! 

This is only an introduction to SSH.  There are a million and one things that you can do using SSH.  If you would like to play with SSH, you can install it on any operating system.  Check out open SSH to learn more at their website.  I will post some other interesting things in the future that you can do with SSH.  Until then, good luck and have fun!

Intro to capacitors

For anyone interested in hacking some hardware, but have no idea what the difference between a resistor and a capacitor is, here is a quick tutorial about capacitors.

Intro to capacitors

Facebook firefox addon for anyone that cares

I know this is not interesting for anyone that doesn't use facebook, but I figured I'd mention it.  Arthur Sabintsev from www.lazyrussian.com created a firefox addon called facepad.  It allows you to download an entire album from your friends' profile.  You can download it here the download is free, butthe developer just asks that you donate something (suggested donation is $3.00).  Enjoy!

Set up file sharing on your network in 10 minutes!

I recently needed to share some files at work with my group and I needed something that was quick and easy, in case I needed to move it somewhere else or if someone else would need to manage it. I had heard about a special BSD operating system called FreeNAS and I decided to try it out. I went to their website and downloaded the latest ISO and burned it to a CD.

You can simply boot your computer from the CD and install the OS, but I wanted it to be a little more portable, so I decided to install VMWare on a desktop I had in the office and run FreeNAS as a VM, or virtual machine. If you do not know what virtualization, it is basically a way to run multiple "guest" operating systems on a "host" operating system. You can head over here for more information on how virtualization works and how you can download one of their products. I suggest vmware server, since it's free and runs on Windows and Linux (you still have to sign up to get the licence key, but the signup and licence key are still free).

I started up the VM with the FreeNAS disc and it boots into a basic console that has a few options to choose from. I selected the option to set up an IP address. You can use DHCP to set the IP address, but you can't utilize some of FreeNAS's features if you use DHCP (like FTP), so I set my IP manually. After that, it tells you to go to that IP address on a web browser on another PC to finish the install (ex. http://192.168.1.100). I went to the website and set up users, folders, FTP, etc. It was really easy and I was adding files to it after about 5 minutes of setup. After I was done, I could tell people to go to that address on their web browser, which is authenticated so only people who had the username and password could get in. Once they authenticated they could see all of the files I had added as hyperlinks and simply click on any of the file links and download a copy of the file to their PC.

This solution was perfect for me, since I could now take an image of the VM and move it to any other PC running VMWare and share files on whatever network I'm on. You can even run the operating system on the CD if you only need to share the files temporarily, keeping in mind that as soon as the computer shuts off, you would lose your configuration.

So, if you need to share files quickly on a network, or just want a simple solution to share files, I would suggest you check out FreeNAS.

Use linux to test your QoS setup

Anyone setting up a QoS network should make an effort to "stress test" it. I picked up the idea for my solution from my QoS training. They were using bittwist in order to push pseudo data through the network in order to make sure our policies were effective. I found out that bittwist was in the Ubuntu repositories, so I set out to make my server a traffic generator for my labs. Bittwist works by using a traffic capture file that you have saved from using a traffic analyzer, like wireshark. I added 3 gigabit interfaces to my server so I could push a substantal amount of traffic and then used ethernet bonding in order to load balance the traffic on said interfaces. All in all, it works pretty well. To learn how bond ethernet interfaces, go here and to learn more about bittwist, go here

Enjoy!

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog! I'm hoping to provide tips for IT and electronic stuff. I have a bachelor's degree in electronics engineering and I'm finishing up a bachelor's degree in information security. My job consists of working exclusively with Cisco hardware, but I have many Linux servers at work and at home for educational purposes. I'm hoping to use this site in order to provide some helpful information for those who want/need it.