Apple, Phones, and Telecom - We're getting F'd Over

Alright, I was just reading this article, and it ramped up my hatred of Apple again. For you Apple fanboys, try to stick around, because I'm going to get into some other stuff after the Apple bashing.

Apple really needs to wake up. Or get sued like Microsoft did. Everything they do is designed not to play well with others. If I wanted to use an iPhone/iTouch on Linux, I'd HAVE to jailbreak it. Apple spends too much time making sure they people can only do things their way. You can be different, only if you're the different Apple wants you to be. Reminds me of liberals and their open-mindness. But I digress - this is not, nor is it ever going to be, a political blog.

Which brings me to phones, and telecom in general. The iPhone is pretty decent hardware, I'll admit it. But, as a phone, it was, until recently, lacking some things that even my el-cheapo LG has. Like recording video. And sending picture/video messages. I have no use for the picture messaging, but it's a pretty basic feature in phones these days - Apple should have gotten it right the first time.

Now, the biggest problem with the iPhone (and most phones) is not the hardware or software that is restricting features, but the carriers. Phone carriers are so interested in making money with their extra features and such, they're really screwing over the customer. Same thing goes for traditional telecoms. Like Time-Warner trying to charge based on usage. The lack of real competition in the market has destroyed any hope of moving forward. With the Ma-Bell's controlling nearly all of the long-haul connections in the country, it's impossible for anyone to compete. And now the Bells are starting to merge back together.

So, what's my dream? Not quite as epic as MLK's, but I have a dream, that one day, this nation will connect together. That data will move as freely around the country, with no priority for those with the most money or power. That everyone will be able to access the interwebs at blinding speed. Alright, enough of this.

I think that the way current teleco's manage the internet is going to hurt the country. We need Internet to be cheap and readily available. I was going to say like electricity, but Enron proved that industry isn't all fun and games either. How to get there, I'm not sure. I'm not usually one for government intervention, but I think if the government did it right, it could work brilliantly. Problem is, once the government gets their hands on it, they'll try to regulate it to death, and use it to bribe the States into doing something (Think Federal Highway funds...)

So, that's my rant. It's late, so I hope it makes sense.

Linux Disk Useage

So, my roommate was hunting for a large file/directory on his linux box today, and the way do to it is rather non-obvious.

You want to us the du or disk usage command. If you just use the command, you'll get a recursive list of directories and their sized, probably not what you want. If you want the size of the directory you are in, try du -sh - it'll simply print the size of all the files in the current directory.

More useful, however, is to list the subdirectories, and how big they are. For this, you want the --max-depth= option. The -s option is summarize, it's equivalent to --max-depth=0. Try max depth of 1 or 2, or even higher if you need.

Here is a sample from my computer:

user@computer:~/Videos$ du -sh
73G .

So the Videos folder in my home directory has 73GB worth of files in it. Alright, let's see more:

user@computer:~/Videos$ du -h --max-depth=1
21G ./Movies
53G ./TV Shows
73G .

Well, apparently I have 21GB in the Movies directory and 53GB in the TV Shows directory. Let's see a little more.

user@computer:~/Videos$ du -h --max-depth=2
6.6G ./Movies/Forgetting Sarah Marshall
4.4G ./Movies/Get Smart
4.4G ./Movies/How To Lose Friends And Alienate People
4.5G ./Movies/WALL-E
701M ./Movies/Zach and Miri
21G ./Movies
6.3G ./TV Shows/Big Bang Theory
15G ./TV Shows/Chuck
14G ./TV Shows/Get Smart
19G ./TV Shows/The Office
53G ./TV Shows
73G .

There you go, now you know what movies and tv show's I've got on my computer. Of course, it's all legal backups of stuff I own ;)

Redhat Academy - Making Life Easier

When I took the Red Hat Academy courses a while back, I knew enough about linux/unix to make life a lot easier on myself. Here is what I recommend for students doing RHA courses, all the commands are done in the terminal:

1) Add /sbin and /usr/sbin to the path variable. This will let you run commands like mount and fdisk without typing /sbin/fdisk
Open your bash profile in a text editor like nano
nano ~/.bash_profile

Find the line that says:
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin
And add to the end of it and make it look like this:
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin
and log out and back in to apply it.

2) Add your user account to sudoers so you can use sudo without a password.
open the /etc/sudoers file in a text editor (linux guru's - I know it's not the best way to do it, but I'm not teaching vi here)
nano /etc/sudoers
At the end of the file, add the following line:
yourusername ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
then save and exit.

You can now type sudo x and it will run x as root. You can also do sudo su - and it will make you root, without entering a password.

That's the two biggies for now - if I think of anything else, I'll post it. If you have any suggestions or ideas, post a comment and I'll see what I can do.

And no requests for me to do your work or anything like that. Not happening.

Addition: The biggest problems that we had when I took the course was dealing with the ipsec VPN. Basically, you had to use VMWare with a bridged network connection, and you had to forward/open ports in any NAT/firewall between you and the server. I recommended OpenVPN as an SSL-based alternative VPN. It has no problems with most firewall/NAT setups, and can be run as a layer 2 or 3 VPN. There are also lots of authentication options, as well as rolling your own. I discussed this VPN option with our instructor, and I think he liked the idea. He wanted me to setup a Fedora server (VM) to test/demo it with, and I didn't have time to mess with it then (and I really dislike Fedora, for reasons I won't get into here). I've basically forgotten about it since then. If any Red Hat administrators would like my help/ideas on this, feel free to contact me. I'd be glad to help.

Linux Security Series - Intro

Alright, I've decided to write a series of how-to articles on linux security. This will be targeted to the linux novice. I'll explain what you want to do, why you would want to do it, and then walk you through how to do it for common distributions.

This will be a work in progress, as I'm going to be doing walk-throughs for multiple distributions. I may have videos for some of the more complicated setups.

Below is a list of the tutorials so far. I'll keep this updated as new ones are added. Or check out the "Linux Security Series" tag.

Tutorials:
1) Su and Sudo
2) Locking Down Logins

If you have any suggestions or tutorials you'd like to see, then make a comment on this post.