Slings and Arrows

This is fun, and worked for me on Ubuntu 11.10.  Used my laptops inbuilt bluetooth, the bluetooth discovery tool (next to the clock) confirmed that the wiimote was talking to it, but connection with this gui failed to work.

1. Install software

sudo apt-get install wminput wmgui lswm

2. add the following line to /etc/modules

uinput

3. Reboot

4. Get the address of the wiimote, press the 1 and 2 buttons on the wiimote when asked.  I had to do this twice before getting a response.

lswm

5. Use the following command to discover the wiimote and start using it as a mouse.  NB: Press 1 +2 on the wiimote when it asks, and substitute your address from the command above.  Once the steps above have been completed once this will be the only command you will need.

sudo wminput xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

That’s it! You should now have mouse control with your wiimote. Use tilt for left and right and up and down for, well, up and down.
The + pad will also act as scroll in web browsers etc.
Not terribly useful, but kind of fun to try.  The tilt for L+R isn’t great, I guess that’s what the bar on top of the TV is for.

Just tried Photaf on my Droid, awesome stuff, this was taken with absolutely no knowledge, you can see where they have been joined, but this is pretty much exactly what this part of the world looks like.  I’m sure some practice and tweaking, attention to the light etc would improve these heaps.  This shot was taken just before the sun went down, I’d say that sun overhead would help quite a bit with colour balance.  Still (no pun intended) if you want a quick and dirty panorama, for free this thing is awesome!

They’ve changed it a little, still, press “a” at grub to get the append kernel parameters line, still add ” single” to the end of it.

BUT instead of using passwd (this really confused us) which just returns to the next line without asking for a password use:

passwd -d root

This blanks root’s password so when you reboot it doesn’t ask for a password!  Freaky stuff!

Finding that it would be far inferior, waste the money already spent on fibre to an expected 1.3 mil. homes, and fail to produce the desired outcome – equal speeds at equal costs for the every Australian.

NBN Coalition Policy Nov 11 2011

More clear pictures of the device

Probably my favourite new thing in tech this year has been Google’s Authenticator.

It provides a one time passcode for logging into stuff, you enter as well as your normal password. This is extremely secure because it means no one can copy it. Every 30 seconds of every day it’s replaced with a brand new one.  Interestingly if it only uses the same number once in the cycle, it will take about a year to use them all and start again.

If you’ve been given an RSA Token, OATH Token, Gold Card etc. at work it’s the same kind of thing, but instead of being geek bling to hang around your neck or on your keyring, Google make it easy to carry in the form of an app for your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone. Interestingly midway through this yead RSA also introduced an app to replace their tokens. Anyone that has had to carry a bunch of those things around knows what a pain it is, and will warmly welcome the phone version. No doubt the corporate solution will continue to cost $100-$200 per person per year however. Google’s is free.

With this app installed on your phone you enable two step authentication on your Google accounts (gmail, apps etc)  This video from Google explains it all pretty well.

That’s awesome in itself, almost eliminates the concern that your email account might get hacked, but for Linux admins it gets much much better. Oh yeah, this is REALLY cool.

Google have also released a PAM (Pluggable Authenticaton Module) for Linux, so you can use this technology on any of your PAM enabled services (Login, SSH, VPN, Email, you name it).  This effectively brings two factor authenticaton out of the expensive corporate security world into the Linux Free as in Beer, Free as in Speech world. Google you ROCK.

How To Install It on CentOS 5.

There’s plenty of doco out there that made this look easy, I did not find it so easy. I think that many of the writers assume the reader is using the latest bleeding edge Ubuntu or Fedora, the conservative among us using RedHat, Centos or Ubuntu LTS are left out in the dark a bit. It took me a weekend, but here are my findings.

Getting the Code.

This was the weirdest thing for me, it seems the repo uses a combination of Subversion and Mercurial, so you’ll need both.

Install Subversion and Mercurial.

yum install subversion python-devel docutils

You must install the latest version of Mercurial, the one on the Centos repo is too old to work properly.  Download latest mercurial from http://mercurial.selenic.com/downloads/

untar it (tar -xvf <filename>), change into the directory tar creates and “make install”

Mercurial is a bunch of python scripts, so make install is all that’s needed to put it into place.

Now you should be OK to download the actual source code for this CompSci epic. One command is all that’s needed here. Took days to work out why this didn’t work (solution above). Let me know if you have any more issues with it.

hg clone https://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/

As root change into the directory you get +/libpam and run

make install

For ssh logins edit /etc/pam.d/ssh and add the line

auth required pam_google_authenticator.so

as the first rule, just under the #%PAM-1.0 line and you’re ready to rock.

Restart sshd (not sure if this is needed, but might as well)

service sshd restart

Now login as your regular ssh user and run the command

google-authenticator

You’ll get asked a few questions and get a link to a QR code that the app on your phone can scan to set you up in seconds. Copy all the output to a text file on your laptop for safefy. When you log in again you’ll be asked for a code, then your password and you’re in.

I’ll be looking into how this works, and any security concerns going forward, and will post anything else interesting here. Have fun securing your systems!

Tags: Google-Authenticator, Linux, PAM, Security, Two Factor

If you use phpMyAdmin You know that annoying message that comes up all the time about mcrypt?  mcrypt, I beleive, is used my phpMyAdmin to encrypt it’s cookies so it’s a really good idea to have it switched on.

After searching high and low I finally realised I needed the EPEL repo to get it,  this is a repo by the Fedora team of all kinds of goodies RH in their wisdom don’t provide.

This is the RPM for Redhat / Centos 6:  http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm

And for Redhat Centos 5: http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

For anything else, and a better description check out their page. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL

Install your repo rpm (up there), run “yum install php-mcrypt” and “service httpd restart” – you should be good to go.

Thanks Fedora Project!

Tags: CENTOS, Linux, mysql, php

 Verisign now have a two factor tool for mobile phones.  Use the Market or App Store and search for Verisign.  The app is called VIP Access.

Two factor is often seen in corporate environments by means of a random number generating keyfob, token or card.

This will quite simply give two factor authentication to your PayPal and eBay accounts.  In my opinion if you’re not using this on your PayPal account you *really* need to reconsider your financial security online.

Tags: Security, Two Factor

Entering a web address in gmail or some other web form (and yes Firefox just flagged gmail too) Firefox (and most other browsers) tell me that the www in www.mikelindner.com is a spelling mistake.

I can understand that www isn’t really a word, but for a Web Browser to flag it as a non word is madness!

Humanity strikes again.

-edit-

blog also comes up as a spelling mistake.

-edit-

and firefox

Tags: www

Just set this up on my laptop today, it works a treat, although I didn’t get GDM working.  In the end I decided that I’d rather enter a password than sway back and forth trying to get into the camera’s “zone” – you need your chin pretty much over your keyboard for it to see you.
It’s an awesome thing to set up and see running though.  I totally recommend it, it also works with su, sudo and screensaver.  Anything PAM authenticates.
I’ll try a super-paranoid mode for a while that needs face, fingerprint and password, just for kicks.
It’s a Google Summer of Code thing, so you know you’ll love it
http://code.google.com/p/pam-face-authentication/

Tags: Linux, Security