I wrote a new article about how you can add protection to malware hosts on your home server. It uses lists published by the Malware Domain Blocklist site. A script will keep your system updated. Currently this list contains a little bit more then 20000 malware sites.
Tag: Home Server
All about Home Servers
Protection against spying TV’s with the homeserver project.
An interesting thread can be read at DoctorBeet’s Blog about LG smart TV’s sending private information to several Internet sites. In the article about the basic network setup I did create a hook in the setup of dnsmasq, the name server for your internal network. The setup has the following line:
conf-dir=/etc/dnsmasq.d
This means that any file dropped in that directory is read when dnsmasq starts. To block the sites mentioned at DoctorBeet’s Blog, create the file /etc/dnsmasq.d/80-lg-block with the following contents:
# # LG smart TV spy networks # address=/ad.lgappstv.com/127.0.0.1 address=/yumenetworks.com/127.0.0.1 address=/smartclip.net/127.0.0.1 address=/smartclip.com/127.0.0.1 address=/smartshare.lgtvsdp.com/127.0.0.1 address=/ibis.lgappstv.com/127.0.0.1
The restart dnsmasq using /etc/rc.d/rc.dnsmasq restart. If you use the IP address of your home server instead of 127.0.0.1 you can see all these requests in the log of your own internal web server. But if you use 127.0.0.1 you won’t see a thing, the TV will be talking to itself.
This option is also useful to block sites you don’t want to contact such as these irritating popup (poker/sex) sites.
Updated articles using certificates.
The article about certificate management that uses scripts is replaced by a version that uses XCA to manage the certificate creation. This makes this a lot easier, especially if you keep in mind that you won’t need to do this very often. Some related articles that use certificates are updated as well.
Updated the menus
It is a long time ago when I last updated this site, but here are some new updates. One of the projects hosted on this site is the MBSE BBS package. I was still running a Fidonet connected BBS but I finally decided to shut it down because I almost never used it and the MBSE BBS package is 99% finished. I have been a member in Fidonet for about 20 years, but today other media are more used by me. All pages for the MBSE BBS software and related pages will stay on this site.
Something different, we now have a tablet in the house. So when I used it to navigate on this site I found that it was very difficult to use the pull down menus when they were more than one level deep. I already had the extra links in the top articles for those who had a broken javascript, so this site was still usable on a tablet. I decided to make that more permanent by restricting the pull down menus to only one level deep (pull down, no extra levels) and to move the extra levels to the right sidebar. Here they are dynamic loaded when appropriate.
Progress migration to Slackware.
All articles original written for Arch Linux are now converted to Slackware, or are now more or less universal articles. Only the article about VoIP base installation needs more work. Most Slackware based packages are available now on the Slackware extra download site.
I am planning to add a whole new series of articles, Sound engineering and Sound on Linux. For a bit over 40 years I do things with sound, music and bands. That means I have seen everything from tubes to digital sound processing. Computers, and so Linux too, are becoming more important on sound production. In the studio this is already for a few years, but now it is more and more used for live sound as well.
New download site for my Extra Slackware packages.
All Extra Slackware packages are removed from this site, and hey are now available from it’s own site. This makes the sources for the packages available too and it looks more like a general Slackware packages tree. This move removes some load from this site, it became too slow because the file database was getting big.
In the meantime, most articles are rewritten for Slackware again, just eight to go and they are done.
Happy New Year and some updates
First of all, a happy new year to all our readers. The site has now a facebook page, so FB users can now more easy follow a number of changes on this site. Use the like buttons or the button in the header to go there.
Syslinux boot
The reworking of the existing articles from Arch Linux into Slackware Linux is making good progress. It’s a good opportunity to make some articles more or less distribution independent.
Today I wrote a new article to finish the basic system installation using syslinux as boot loader and so that the basic installation is now a more complete story.
Samba 4 is out.
On 11 December Samba 4.0.0 was released. This new Samba version can act as a Active Directory domain controller. I decided too look at it and see if it would be useful for the Home Server articles on this server.
Only One Server to go..
That’s right, just one server that I maintain is still running Arch Linux. This server is in another part of town, so I need to go there to migrate that one to Slackware. The virtual Linux on that server is already migrated because that can be done via the Internet. Such a thing is just a matter of preparing a new virtual root disk on a local system and install it on the remote server. A reconfigure of the disks and reboot and such virtual server is up and running again in a few minutes. This is just one of the advantages of using virtual servers.
At first I didn’t want to put the complete Slackware packages from my repository on line, but this week I decided to make these packages available for download. Lets see how it goes with the limited bandwidth here.
Half of the articles about the home server are adjusted to Slackware, slowly the rest will follow.
Progress dropping Arch
In the last weeks I prepared the move of the virtual routers from Arch Linux to Slackware 14.0. Now two routers and two web servers are running Slackware again. The largest work will be the host that runs the virtual machines. A lot of packages need to be prepared to minimize the downtime. Luckily I used to have two root partitions so that the system can run dual boot with two distro’s. This allows me to reboot Arch if it takes too long or if extra packages need to be build. This can happen as the host server has all the network drives with the packages and sources.