Date: 11/04/07     Keywords: no keywords

All SSH servers on the internet are heavily targeted for brute-force cracking of passwords. Easy passwords can and are often cracked to gain full control over the machine. Here is a simple hack to thwart most of such hacking attempts. Change the default port of ssh to a non-standard port greater than 1024. Most hacking scripts [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/simple-hack-to-protect-ssh-against-brute-force-hacking-attempts/

Date: 11/04/07     Keywords: google

Why in the world I am getting overseas travel insurance ads on my highly technical blog? I am not talking about an individual page where I can understand that Google Media bot haven’t crawled yet. I am talking about the front page! The only time I talked about travel insurance was in July 7th. The other ad, [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/adsense-going-bonkers/

Date: 11/04/07     Keywords: linux

I typically use more on Linux following my earlier habit from Unix & Sun / Solaris days; and it works fine for most purposes. However today I found out that less (which bills itself as opposite of more) is actually much more functional and useful than more. For starters I use dual-monitors and I expect to [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/less-is-more-than-more-on-linux/

Date: 11/04/07     Keywords: spam

Comment Guard Pro is finally turning out to be the uber anti-comment spam protection plugin I dreamt of; everything you would ever want in a comment spam protection plugin and more, much more. The plugin itself is composed of several modules, each of which can be individually enabled / disabled, tweaked and configured all from [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/comment-guard-pro-in-final-stages-of-development/

Date: 11/04/07     Keywords: spam

I finally grew tired of email spams, having to delete several thousand spams a day while fishing out for valid emails is no fun. Occasionally I deleted valid emails too in the process. I realized I was wasting valuable productive hours dealing with junk from cretins and morons (aka spammers). I decided to fight back. I [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/tired-of-email-spam-fighting-back/

Date: 11/03/07     Keywords: spam

We are tweaking our postfix servers to offer maximum spam protection upfront with helo checks, header checks, blacklist checks, RBL’s and more. So far my daily spam count has dropped from about 3000-7000 spams / day to about 15-50 spams per day. It should drop even more as I added more RBL to my list. One [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/strong-anti-email-spam-protection-in-place/

Date: 11/02/07     Keywords: no keywords

Recently Andrea Tringo posted in Sun Alumni mailing list asking questions in every executive’s mind who wants to adopt agile development methodology (like XP) but do not know how to proceed safely. Andrea asked: I know a lot of tech companies are enthusiastically adopting Agile, as many of us embrace(d) Six Sigma, among other practices. Other than [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-adopt-agile-development-methodology-in-a-corporation/

Date: 11/02/07     Keywords: linux

I always wondered what made people get addicted to a game. Now I know. Battle for Wesnoth is an amazing, free, cross-platform (Windows, Mac & Linux), turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme that will surely get you hooked for days of even weeks, even if you are a non-gamer. Fight a desperate battle to [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/game-review-tips-battle-for-wesnoth/

Date: 10/23/07     Keywords: php, software, java, web

Simple Thoughts was chosen as the name of this blog in distant past to highlight my approach - simple solutions for complex problems. The name stuck over the years. However as many pointed out that Simple Thoughts is about Web software & technologies like WordPress, Java, PHP etc.; none of which is reflected in the [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/what-should-be-the-new-name-for-this-blog/

Date: 10/23/07     Keywords: no keywords

Sometimes you need to view the full email headers to understand whether an email sender information or other details is faked or to even debug your MTA (my situation). Unlike other email clients GMail doesn’t give you an intuitive way to get the full headers. Nevertheless when you know it, it is very simple. Here [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-view-full-email-headers-in-gmail/

Date: 10/23/07     Keywords: no keywords

Postfix is an excellent and powerful mail transfer agent (MTA) like sendmail. You can configure postfix to send outbound mails directly (default) or relay it to another MTA, which could be postfix or sendmail. However you don’t want anyone to be able to relay mails through the server. So normally MTA’s are configured to relay [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-setup-postfix-to-relay-outbound-mail-using-sasl/

Date: 10/23/07     Keywords: linux

Shorewall is an excellent free linux firewall which provides unparalleled level of fine grained control. It not only acts as a firewall and Gateway, it also supports DMZ, IP Masquerading (NAT & SNAT), Proxy ARP and more. In short Shorewall is your one stop solution for complex networking routing needs, flexible & controllable internet connectivity [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-configure-dual-adsl-cable-connections-firewall-gateway-nat-with-shorewall-firewall/

Date: 10/23/07     Keywords: software, linux

Sometimes windows installers come with msi extension instead of regular exe extension. Such software can be installed with the msiexec command which comes with wine. For example to install a file setup.msi you will run: msiexec setup.msi Did you know that even Adobe Photoshop runs in Linux using wine? Wine can eliminate your migration pain from Windows (to [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-install-windows-msi-installers-with-wine-on-linux/

Date: 10/22/07     Keywords: java

Communication between Java applets has been an interesting topic from the early days of Java. There are several esoteric ways to communicate like using Javascript as a bridge. However we will look into the simplest and most reliable method of intra-applet communication. Simple solution to applet communication problem Use a class with static getters and setters method(s) [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-communicate-between-java-applets/

Date: 10/22/07     Keywords: mysql, database, sql, java

Openfire is a cross-platform java based free Instant Messaging server which implements the XAMPP (Jabber) protocol with extensions. It is very well suited as corporate instant messaging solution. Here is how you can recover the admin password, in case you forget it. How to recover Openfire admin password 1. Login to MySQL and use openfire database. I [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-recover-openfire-admin-password/

Date: 10/22/07     Keywords: no keywords

While comparing broadband packages from Tata Indicom and BSNL Dataone, I came across the revised pricing of another provider with whom I have a love-hate relationship. My last experience with them was ok. I am talking about Alliance Broadband, a cable based broadband service provider in Kolkata. Their Zoom pack compares favorably with comparable offerings from [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/cheapest-broadband-in-kolkata-calcutta/

Date: 10/20/07     Keywords: no keywords

While configuring your routing (like load balancing with dual ADSL connections) you would often need to view the current route cache and also to occasionally delete the current cache. Here is how you can do it. How to display the route cache ip route show cache A sample entry from the list is: 217.212.227.18 from 172.16.0.69 via 192.168.0.1 dev [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-display-delete-ip-route-cache-on-linux/

Date: 10/20/07     Keywords: google

When Google Checkout came out I was very excited to have a viable alternative to PayPal from a reputed company despite its limitation to US only market. Since its launch I have heard several complaints from my readers, with zero positive experiences. Patrick said: within 10 days of the Checkout launch, my credit card info was stolen [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/google-checkout-another-google-flop-is-it-safe-for-buyers-sellers/

Date: 10/20/07     Keywords: no keywords

In many location, including but definitely not limited to India, single ADSL / Cable connections can be unreliable and also may not provide sufficient bandwidth for your purposes. One way to increase reliability and bandwidth of your internet connection is to distribute the load (load balancing) using multiple connections. It is also imperative to have [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-load-balancing-failover-with-dual-multi-wan-adsl-cable-connections-on-linux/

Date: 10/20/07     Keywords: software

Modern DSL modems by default allows you to establish a DSL link through them to provide internet connectivity. The actual connection is handled by software running on your computer. The downside is that the client side software consumes your precious CPU cycles. Also the internet connectivity of your internal network is now dependent on a [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/tips-on-configuring-adsl-modems-2/