One of the best instant messengers named Pidgin (previously Gaim) released it’s latest version 2.3.0. According to developers’ description Pidgin is a multiprotocol IM client and it’s goal is to hide protocols from the user as much as possible (users have to know about individual protocols when they create or modify accounts, but in day-to-day communication and usage, the intent is that users don’t have to think about protocols at all).
Pidgin supports the following protocols:
Read full developer’s changelog here and download Pidgin from pidgin.im/download. It’s available as source tarball, as binary packages for Fedora, CentOS/RHEL and other major Linux distributions, plus 2.3.0 version is ready also for Windows users.
hping3 is a network tool able to send custom TCP/IP packets and to display target replies like ping program does with ICMP replies. hping3 handles fragmentation, arbitrary packets body and size and can be used in order to transfer files encapsulated under supported protocols. Using hping3 you are able to perform at least the following stuff:
- Test firewall rules
- Advanced port scanning
- Test net performance using different protocols, packet size, TOS (type of service) and fragmentation.
- Path MTU discovery
- Transferring files between even really fascist firewall rules.
- Traceroute-like under different protocols.
- Firewalk-like usage.
- Remote OS fingerprinting.
- TCP/IP stack auditing.
- A lot of others.
I’ve tried several traffic generators for Ubuntu, Fedora (and other) like scapy, NTG, Bit-Twist, but only hping meets my requirements. Recommended.
Example: to generate 100 packets per second TCP traffic to 192.168.0.1 with packets containing arbitrary destinations, just execute:
sudo aptitude install hping3
sudo hping3 --rand-dest --rand-dest --faster 192.168.0.1
Information Improvisation: Traffic Engineering Server is new network appliance for Bandwidth Management that is especially suitable for Broadband ISPs and SMEs.
Here is a nice Linux tip: to get change information of some RPM package it’s enough to execute the following command rpm -q --changelog package for example rpm -q --changelog openssh will output something like:
* Fri Mar 03 2006 Tomas Mraz - 4.3p2-4
- allow access if audit is not compiled in kernel (#183243)
* Sat Feb 25 2006 Tomas Mraz – 4.3p2-3
- enable the subprocess in chroot to send messages to system log
- sshd should prevent login if audit call fails
* Wed Feb 22 2006 Tomas Mraz – 4.3p2-2
- print error from scp if not remote (patch by Bjorn Augustsson #178923)
…
* Sat Oct 30 1999 Damien Miller
- Back to old binary names
* Fri Oct 29 1999 Damien Miller
- Use autoconf
- New binary names
* Thu Oct 28 1999 Damien Miller
- Initial RPMification, based on Jan “Yenya” Kasprzak’s spec.
To look through whole output it would be useful to use more or less commands:
rpm -q --changelog /path/to/package.rpm | less
Similar command is available also in Debian: dpkg-parsechangelog. It reads and parses the changelog of an unpacked Debian source tree and outputs the information in it to standard output in a machine-readable form.
I’ve noticed that when I keep ssh sessions that I opened before untouched for some period of time (like 30 minutes) they become frozen and as a result I have to close ssh terminal and start a new connection. To prevent such situation I found several tips:
1) Start some utility updating the screen before leaving ssh session untouched. I usually use watch -n 1 ‘date’ that shows current date every second. Other simple way is to send icmp requests to some host, e.g. ping google.com.
2) Increase ssh session idle time by
echo “7200″ > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_keepalive_time
I’ve checked these tips with Fedora Core, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu but I’m completely sure that it applicable also for other Linux distributions. First tip (ping) can be used in Unix also.
You may also be interested in:
Secure shell (ssh) connection without password
Keep ssh session saved (Unix “screen” utility)
Moving Linux to remote server (over ssh via third server)
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