Welcome to The Linux Page

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This site is a collection of my own work with Linux. Certain things are easy, others take time to decipher and if I ever need to repeat the work (which usually happens!), then I need to remember everything by memory or... have a site with all the steps taken and to take again.

The following are my most recent posts:

Attacks by ZmEu or w00tw00t robots

Who is ZmEu?

An image showing Zmeu The name Zmeu (no capital E) is the name of a fantastic creature of Romania. There are so many stories that there isn't a clear understanding of what it is... but it is human like, can spit fire and wants to marry young women.

If you're wondering, it is generally a bad guy.

ZmEu Attack

Today, I noticed a lot of traffic on one of my servers. Looking into what was happening, I immediately found out that an attacker was looking for a loophole in that system. That attack was being performed from China.

I checked another server, and sure enough, that other server was ...

Trace PHP code with xdebug

xdebug

XDebug "logo" I'm very much working on Drupal and once in a while, I just have no clue what the code does... especially when there are callbacks that call callbacks in forever loops.

Multiple Adresses on the same Network Interface Card

Netplan Method

I think that the Netplan method is pretty explicit. The addresses option accepts an array of addresses with a mask (prefix length, really, which is mandatory; the "/24" in my example). So you do not have to duplicate the whole entry.

Here is an example:

network:
    version: 2
    renderer: networkd
    ethernets:
        eno1:
            addresses:
                - 192.168.1.2/24
                - 10.1.1.233/24
            dhcp4: false
            dhcp6: false
            optional: false
            gateway4: 192.168.1.1
            ...

Not too long ago, I accepted the update from Microsoft to go to MS-Windows 2000 SP4. Neat. Except that when I rebooted (I think the 2nd time, but not totally sure, my wife used the computer in between, it seems...) it could not load my profile anymore.

Problem

I worked on a project with many functions that access the database. These functions will generally have a Recordset variable. Yet, when I tried to run a script with the recordset declaration, it would fail with the error Undefined variable type.

  Dim rcd As Recordset

Since that definition was not required for the software to work, I ignored the error for a long time.

I worked on a site a week ago or so and checked it with IE 8 but not IE 7...

The customer then contacted me saying that some images were "completely" off. (about 30 pixels)

The image being off was actually centered. IE 7 and older does NOT properly reset the text-align CSS settings. So the parent setting leaks in the children instead of the chidren using the default as they should. So that one was easy, I just added a text-align: left; in the next <div> statement and got that to work right!

Closing a window from Flash

I had a little project which requirements was an Adobe Flash animation that calls a JavaScript function to close a browser window.

With the newest version of Internet Explorer, it will first ask you whether you want to let the script close your window... that's a problem when you'd like that process to be smooth (i.e. without user interaction.)

Description

I wrote a small shell script (bash) to make a backup of one of my hard drive to another. Really, a very very simple script. It has one rsync command per partition. So I have one variable to define all the options and one rsync call per partition:

I have been wondering, for a while, why is it that I get errors about DEFLATE no being known.

  [Sun Apr 11 22:41:23 2010] [error] an unknown filter was not added: DEFLATE
  [Sun Apr 11 22:48:54 2010] [error] an unknown filter was not added: DEFLATE
  [Sun Apr 11 22:50:23 2010] [error] an unknown filter was not added: DEFLATE

I should have thought of it, the deflate module was not installed. That was it, but oh well... 8-)

To tweak your Apache setup, use the following two lines:

  sudo a2enmod deflate
  sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

And you'll get rid of those ...

PHP Variables and E_NOTICE

Today I learned that not defining a variable in PHP would generate a notice error.

I had been wondering, why it is that so many people in Drupal define their variable or check them with isset()? That's why. In a way it is terrible that you can use a variable that does not exist and just get NULL, on the other hand, quite often that's because you intended to use another variable... (i.e. $create instead of $created, you declare $bool in one function and use it again in another, etc.)

This applies to objects, array indexes, and just plain variables. If you write:

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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Who is ZmEu?

ZmEu Attack

xdebug

Netplan Method

Problem

Description