A few words about CCNP ROUTE 642-902 exam. This is the first one of three qualifying exams for CCNP, CCIP and CCDP. If you plan to become one of those certifications you must take 642-902 (the possibility to take the composite CCNP exam is also opened). Cisco ROUTE exam contains detailed information regarding implementing of EIGRP, BGP, OSPF dynamic routing protocols, redistribution between different protocols, filtering, summarization/aggregation and a lot of related stuff. You can read more at Cisco Learning Center.

Main Preparation Materials

• Implementing Cisco IP Routing (ROUTE) Foundation Learning Guide [ref]
• CCNP ROUTE 642-902 Official Certification Guide [ref]
• CCNP ROUTE 642-902 Quick Reference Guide
• CCNP ROUTE Portable Command Guide [ref]

Lab Simulations

I’ve been using the only available emulation software of this kind: dynamips. There are a lot of information available about it around the web. Meantime it is worth to say that Packet Tracer’s functionality is far not enough to complete labs coming with CCNP ROUTE so using of dynamips is mandatory. It is clear that every lab include more than three routers in it so you should be able to interconnect devices between each other using different kinds of connection e.g. Serial or FastEthernet. I used GNS3 for this purpose and it did its job perfectly.

Cisco CCNP ROUTE Cheet Sheets

Before actually to take an exam it makes sense to sum everything up in your mind so you should us cheat sheets for this purpose. I’ve been using Cisco cheat sheets which were prepared by Jeremy from www.packetlife.com, here are the direct links to them:

• Interior Routing Protocols
• BGP
• EIGRP
• IPv6
• OSPF
• RIP
• IPv4 ACLs
• NAT

Good luck!

Today it came to my mind that it is time to make sensitive information stored on my usb flash drive encrypted but still transportable and easy to use. But I don’t want to have whole my 32 GB usb drive fully encrypted using truecrypt or something similar. It is just toooo slow. I also don’t want to use GPG for uncompressing files and directories every time I would like to read them and then create new GPG compressed file every time I save changes. This eats too much of my time and system resources. At the same time it is necessary to be able to use that usb drive under windows, mac, linux whatever (read/write files) but still have my directory structure with sensitive files encrypted. Here is the solution: create encrypted filesystem within a file named, say, 16GB.candy.bin that could be stored on regular windows formatted usb flash drive and then mounted under Linux using the password.

When it becomes necessary I can mount that 16GB.candy.bin as the regular ext3 filesystem with all those stuff like permissions, ownership etc. that is available on ext3 but not in FAT or NTFS. On my windows formatted flash drive candy takes only 16 GB so I can use the rest of space to store not so sensitive information like mp3, movies or photos. Moreover I on windows or linux to read it.

Let’s create that 16GB.candy.bin file with encrypted ext3 filesystem (read below explanations below carefully before just to copy/paste commands into CLI):

[root@artemn root]# cd /path/to/candy/

[root@artemn root]# tune2fs -i 0 -c 0 /dev/loop0

Here are some points: using above commands we create encrypted file of 16 GB so if you need to have more or less just change “count=16000″ in dd line. “count=16000″ means 16GB so “count=20″ means 20MB. Path ‘/path/to/candy/’ is for example only so you should change it to real directory that is able to host encrypted file (16 GB in above example). Command losetup is present in most Linux distributions (btw I recommend Ubuntu especially newly released Lucid Lynx) but if it is not use your disro’s packet manager to install it or compile from sources (for super geeks only, Mr. Stallman if you read this article — Hello). Reader, you can replace “/dev/urandom” in dd line with “/dev/zero” that will make that command to finish faster but will lower security level of resulting file (read about AES for better understanding). You will need to enter the password when running losetup command so make sure it safe and long enough like ‘6U2sAsR37Hn8122dGsaPrew1twt’ but not ‘abc123′ or ‘iloveyou’.

Once commands are done you will get 16GB.candy.bin containing encrypted ext3 filesystem. You can store this file where ever you want, say, on a flash drive. If you loose it nobody won’t be able to open it until he (or she!) cracked AES encryption (use long passwords to prevent this). As the next step it is required to mount filesystem and store some files/directories in it:

[root@artemn root]# mkdir -p /mnt/candy

[root@artemn root]# umount /mnt/candy

When you unmount 16GB.candy.bin the changes are already saved there so it’s not required to compress and encrypt anything unlike with GPG.

P.S. This post is inspired by Loopback tricks article. Thanks to the author. Good luck!

artemn@artemn-laptop:~$ cat /etc/passwd | awk '{print length, $0}' | sort -n | awk '{$1=""; print $0 }'

bin:x:2:2:bin:/bin:/bin/sh
sys:x:3:3:sys:/dev:/bin/sh
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
proxy:x:13:13:proxy:/bin:/bin/sh
mail:x:8:8:mail:/var/mail:/bin/sh
lp:x:7:7:lp:/var/spool/lpd:/bin/sh
sync:x:4:65534:sync:/bin:/bin/sync
ntp:x:110:120::/home/ntp:/bin/false
daemon:x:1:1:daemon:/usr/sbin:/bin/sh
ftp:x:111:65534::/home/ftp:/bin/false
games:x:5:60:games:/usr/games:/bin/sh
klog:x:102:103::/home/klog:/bin/false
man:x:6:12:man:/var/cache/man:/bin/sh
irc:x:39:39:ircd:/var/run/ircd:/bin/sh
dhcp:x:100:101::/nonexistent:/bin/false
news:x:9:9:news:/var/spool/news:/bin/sh
saned:x:120:131::/home/saned:/bin/false
syslog:x:101:102::/home/syslog:/bin/false
uucp:x:10:10:uucp:/var/spool/uucp:/bin/sh
backup:x:34:34:backup:/var/backups:/bin/sh
www-data:x:33:33:www-data:/var/www:/bin/sh
libuuid:x:112:121::/var/lib/libuuid:/bin/sh
messagebus:x:103:109::/var/run/dbus:/bin/false
nobody:x:65534:65534:nobody:/nonexistent:/bin/sh
sshd:x:109:65534::/var/run/sshd:/usr/sbin/nologin
Debian-exim:x:117:128::/var/spool/exim4:/bin/false
artemn:x:1000:1000:artemn,,,:/home/artemn:/bin/bash
list:x:38:38:Mailing List Manager:/var/list:/bin/sh
mysql:x:119:130:MySQL Server,,,:/var/lib/mysql:/bin/false
gdm:x:108:118:Gnome Display Manager:/var/lib/gdm:/bin/false
hplip:x:104:7:HPLIP system user,,,:/var/run/hplip:/bin/false
pulse:x:113:123:PulseAudio daemon,,,:/var/run/pulse:/bin/false
polkituser:x:114:127:PolicyKit,,,:/var/run/PolicyKit:/bin/false
avahi:x:106:114:Avahi mDNS daemon,,,:/var/run/avahi-daemon:/bin/false
asterisk:x:118:129:Asterisk PBX daemon,,,:/var/lib/asterisk:/bin/false
gnats:x:41:41:Gnats Bug-Reporting System (admin):/var/lib/gnats:/bin/sh
haldaemon:x:107:116:Hardware abstraction layer,,,:/home/haldaemon:/bin/false
landscape:x:115:65534:Landscape Client Daemon,,,:/var/lib/landscape:/bin/false
avahi-autoipd:x:105:113:Avahi autoip daemon,,,:/var/lib/avahi-autoipd:/bin/false
chipcard:x:116:119:Chipcard-Tools Daemon Account,,,:/var/run/chipcard:/bin/false

For reverse sort, use the following command:

cat /etc/passwd | awk '{print length, $0}' | sort -rn | awk '{$1=""; print $0 }'

Source: www.opennet.ru

Information improvisation: Check out our latest 70-620 dumps & ccda certification written by our 646-046 certified teams to help you in pass real HP2-Z16 exam & NS0-153 dumps.

This article is presented to you by LaptopLogic.com. Go there to read the latest info on the top rated laptops and the best laptop accessories.

The High Definition (HD) content is everywhere these days, from HD and Blue Ray Discs to streaming HD media. Although HD content gives best picture quality, it also uses a lot of computational power to decode and play.

This was made easy for Windows by the introduction of new drivers from graphics card manufacturers, Nvidia and ATI, which allowed the whole media to be decoded on the dedicated graphics card, saving cost in computational power, and the need to have a stronger processor.

Nvidia recently released a new set of drivers for Linux supporting PureVideo technology for its line of graphics hardware, enabling full hardware HD-decoding, and giving smooth HD content playback, even on less powerful computers. The 180 series supports PureVideo decode acceleration. These drivers adds a new VDPAU API, which provides PureVideo like features on Linux, adds CUDA support, X Render optimizations, new workstation performance optimizations and some other improvements. The new versions offer optimizations and support for a wide range of Nvidia hardware, and is expected to improve with future releases.

Linux uses X-Video (Xv) as output extensions, where as X-Video MotionCompensation (XvMC) is an X-Video extension which offers some video decoding on GPU. With the new drivers, Nvidia implements VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for UNIX).

VDAPU is capable of hardware acceleration and the decoding of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, VC-1 and H.264 bit streams. It also provides an API for post-processing of decoded video in order to apply operations such as noise reduction and temporal and spatial de-interlacing, timestamp-based presentation of final video frames, and compositing of sub-picture elements.

AMD also supports hardware acceleration through X-Video Bit stream Acceleration or XvBA API. The recent drivers can take advantage of Unified Video Decoder (UVD2).

These new technologies are also supported by new video playback softwares, which can fully utilize the Graphics Hardware for video playback, providing smooth frames in HD and Blue-Ray movies. The VDPAU supported players include libavcodec, mplayer and ffmpeg.

CUDA support is also provided with 180 series drivers for Linux, and it can also be used to accelerate videos, and also to do any processing involved, like CoreAVC 1.9.0 is the first media player to offer this decoding.

The video acceleration on Linux came late, but certainly, with these new advancements by Graphics chips manufacturers, Linux users will be able to experience HD media playback, even on less powerful systems.

Imagine the following situation: you have to compile some Linux/Unix application or kernel module that requires kernel source present at your hard drive, say, in /usr/src/kernels/kernel-2.6.21-i386/ or elsewhere. But there is not enough disk space to copy these sources or install kernel-devel or linux-source packages (in Fedora/RedHat or Ubuntu/Debian distros respectively)… Sounds familiar? Believe me, sometimes it happens

As a solution you can mount the directory of some remote PC that contains needed kernel source. It can be done via several protocols like smb, ftp etc. In this article we will mount remote directory using ssh protocol that is one the most popular for remote and secure access to Linux boxes over the network.

Below are the steps which should be taken to get the ball rolling. We need two packages: sshfs and fuse-utils.

1. Install necessary packages:

a. Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo aptitude install fuse-utils sshfs

b. Fedora/Centos/RedHat:

yum install fuse-sshfs fuse fuse-libs

c. Other Linux: download and compile sshfs/fuse from sources

2. Check that kernel module fuse is loaded:

lsmod | grep fuse

There should be the line containing “fuse” in the output (of not try modprobe fuse).

3. Mount remote filesystem using something like this (two commands):

mkdir -p /mnt/sshfs/
sshfs remote-user@remote-machine:/some/directory /mnt/sshfs

where remote-user is the username allowed to login remote-machine via ssh protocol. It will ask you to type the password so just type it and press return

4. That’s it. Good luck!

What is .docx actually? It’s Microsoft’s file format representing word processor documents and named OpenXML (as an attempt to create open and free international standard). Today .docx is default format for Microsoft’s word processor Word.

There are myriads of online converters between OpenXML and OpenOffice formats including .docx, .xlsx, .odt and many etc but sometimes it’s much more better to just open received .docx file in Linux offline (if there is temporarily no Internet connection or for security/private reasons etc).

So, just download the following package to certain directory like /usr/src, here are the commands to do it:

1. cd /usr/src
2. sudo wget http://blog.mypapit.net/imej/odf_filter.tar.bz2

The next step is to unpack the contents of the archive (.tar.bz2 is definitely well compressed file) and copy 3 files to OpenOffice’s system directories:

3. sudo tar -xvjf odf_filter.tar.bz2
4. sudo cp OdfConverter /usr/lib/openoffice/program/
5. sudo cp MOOXTypeDetection.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Types/
6. sudo cp MOOXFilter_cpp.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Filter/

As you can see from picture below now it’s possible to natively open .docx files in openoffice under Linux. Of course such “native” support may imply some artefacts in opened files due to file formats incompatibility so it’s also a good option to ask your friends to convert .docs into .pdf before sending you

P.S. Thanks to guys from mypapit.

P.S. Here are several online converters .doc(x) <-> .odf <-> .pdf:

1. ZAMZAR (possibly the best converter), 2. http://docx-converter.com/.

As you might already know, replication allows you to create a copy of certain MySQL database from a master server on another server (slave). What is the most important, all updates made to that database on master server will be replicated to the database on the slave server immediately, so that both databases are synchronized almost in real time mode (if you need completely real-time synchronization/mirroring, the only solution is to deploy MySQL cluster).

One of the main issues is that replication features coming out-of-the-box with Open Source MySQL software don’t provide full back/forward compatibility. This means that you can easily replicate data from master and slave of the same MySQL versions only e.g. 5.0. But if you like to replicate database from 5.0 master to 4.0 slave (or from 3.23 master to 5.0 slave), it is not possible in most cases.

From the beginning we have two Linux boxes with MySQL installed (5.0.27 version in my example), server has database reptest we need to replicate to slave.

A. Configure Master:

Configure MySQL to accept incoming connections from another hosts in the network. In order to do it, comment the following lines in /etc/my.cnf (exact location depends on Linux distribution you use) as follows:

#skip-networking
#bind-address=127.0.0.1

and restart MySQL by “/etc/init.d/mysql restart” or “mysqladmin reload” command. Make sure that slave can access master’s MySQL via network (e.g. execute on slave “telnet <server_ip> 3306“).

The next step is to configure master to log all database changes into binary log that will be used by slave for replicating, add the following lines to /etc/my.cnf in [mysqld] section:

log_bin = mysql-bin
binlog-do-db=reptest
server-id=1

Then restart MySQL and log on to its shell with root rights:

/etc/init.d/mysql restart
mysql -u root -p
Enter password:

Type in MySQL shell the following commands:

GRANT REPLICATION SLAVE ON *.* TO 'slave_user'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'slave_password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Note: If you use 4.0 MySQL or older, you need to replace REPLICATION SLAVE in above line to FILE, so the lines will look like:

GRANT FILE ON *.* TO 'slave_user'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'slave_password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

The next commands are:

USE reptest;
FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK;
SHOW MASTER STATUS;

The last command should provide the following output we will use later on slave server:

mysql> SHOW MASTER STATUS;
+---------------+----------+-----------------+------------------+
| File          | Position | Binlog_do_db    | Binlog_ignore_db |
+---------------+----------+-----------------+------------------+
| mysql-bin.001 |   73     | reptest         |                  |
+---------------+----------+-----------------+------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Now quit from MySQL shell as we need to prepare current dump of reptest database: quit.

Now, run from shell “mysqldump -u root -p --opt reptest > reptest.sql” and transfer reptest.sql file to slave server.

2. Configure Slave:

Create reptest database:

mysqladmin create reptest

and apply previously created/transfered dump to it via command:

mysql -u root -p reptest < /path/to/reptest.sql

Now edit /etc/my.cnf on slave and add the following lines to [mysqld] section:

server-id=2
master-host=192.168.0.1
master-user=slave_user
master-password=slave_password
master-connect-retry=60
replicate-do-db=reptest

where 192.168.0.1 is IP address of the server and server-id is unique ID assigned to slave Linux box.

Now restart MySQL with /etc/init.d/mysql restart and log on MySQL shell:

mysql -u root -p reptest
Enter password:

The next step is to apply changes saved in binary log on server:

SLAVE STOP;
CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_HOST='192.168.0.1', MASTER_USER='slave_user', MASTER_PASSWORD='slave_password', MASTER_LOG_FILE='mysql-bin.001', MASTER_LOG_POS=73;
SLAVE START;

Now whenever reptest is updated on the master, all changes will be replicated to reptest on the slave.

Here are useful links you can use to get more information about MySQL replication and how to configure it:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/replication-howto.html
http://www.howtoforge.com/mysql_database_replication
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/16/MySQLian.html

If you’re planning to replicate on a remotely hosted machine, here are some of the best MySQL hosting plans.

The single most dramatic improvement in ext4 is in file and file system size. Thus, the users who are most likely to need ext4 are those who have more than a few terabytes of disk space. The list of features in Table 1, though, may present some other tempting improvements. For instance, you might want to try ext4 if you have directories with huge numbers of subdirectories or if you need timestamps accurate to less than a second. Read more >>

1. Easy to configure and powerful MTA (Postfix)
2. Virtual domains and user accounts (this information is stored in MySQL database)
3. Antispam and antivirus checking for all accounts (spamassassin and clamav via amavis-new)
4. Secure access to mailboxes through POP3, IMAP and HTTP (squirellmail)
5. Secure SMTP server
6. Extremal Stability and Security

Actually OpenBSD 4.2 was chosen because of it’s “security by default”. Thankfully Daniele Mazzocchio from friendly site www.kernel-panic.it wrote an excellent article about how to build such mail server on this operating system:

Offering a reliable and secure email service is probably one of the top priorities of most system administrators; therefore, in the next chapters, we will build a full-featured mail server, based on open-source software and focusing on security. Read more…

The only thing that is not covered by it is mail content filtering with maildrop and vacation messages that users often ask to set while they are out. Working on it!

I don’t want to write here a full documentation about Nagios, I prefer to give you a basic installation guide so you can set it up very easy and play with it yourself. The installation guide will show you how to install Nagios as well as some interesting extensions and how they integrate into each other. During this installation you will make many modifications to the installation that will help to understand how it works, how you can integrate systems and different services. I will also provide some articles about monitoring special services where I describe what they do and what configuration changes are needed. All together should give you a very good overview and documentation on how you can enhance the Nagios installation yourself.

The rest of the article is here. Respect to the author!