Most people know that port 22 is used for SSH communication and due to this common knowledge, you get people using scripts to test for weak passwords. If you look into your /var/log/auth.log and you see tons of fails/errors from users not on your system or from invalid passwords for root, it means you have people trying to break into your system. Truthfully, anyone that puts a system online with port 22 open will see this happen to them.

My web hosting company is doing some upgrades for all their clients and moving them to newer more powerful servers. Being an employee of them I get to see a lot of the back end work that is involved with the upgrades. Not too many people can say they have seen the server their website is hosted on. Along with seeing the work that goes on I was picked as the guinea pig to to test the new servers out.

Update: New code using Battle.net’s REST API can be found here. This posting is similar to “Pulling data from the Warcraft Armory with Ruby” but with Groovy. For the people who are not familiar with Groovy Home it’s “Object-oriented language alternative for Java platform; Java-like syntax, dynamically compiles to JVM bytecodes” in other words it’s another language that gets compiled to JVM bytecodes like Jython (Python based) and JRuby (Ruby based), but unlike being based off another language, this is new take on the Java language.

Ah, an end to a nice relaxing weekend! Had a good time out and I was also able to do some work around the house to making things look better. Also as always I enjoy spending time with my fiancée. Took this photo from my phone (Nexus One), it came out pretty good but still wish I had my real camera on me. It was taken from the Salem Willows in Salem, Ma and its looking in to Beverly, Ma.

Time to time you may find the need to encrypt a file before sending it to someone or store it where other people may have access to it. OpenSSL is a great tool for this and it is installed on most Linux/Unix and OS X (also, I believe there is an install for OpenSSL for Windows too). Here’s the command to encrypt a file, $ openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -a -salt -in mytestfile.

Sometimes it’s nice to be able to share files with other people. There are many sites online where you are able to do this but you are limited by size, type of file, or lacking in security. SFTP gives you the ablity to transfer from your server securely. Users that have SSH access can start using SFTP right away with applications like WinSCP. You don’t want to give people full access to your system, so this is where SFTP only users come in to play.

Update: New code using Battle.net’s REST API can be found here. For the people that play World of Warcraft, you know there is a great site made by Blizzard that keeps all your characters and guild information called the armory. If you take a good look at the site you will see its XML being formatted by XSLT. This is really great for people that want to script something to pull data from the armory because XML is really easy to parse.

“This was a triumph.” If you find your SSH connections dropping or locking up after not being used for some time you may want to try to edit your ssh_config (/etc/ssh/ssh_config) file and uncomment/add in the line ServerAliveInterval 30. The number is in seconds. What this will do is send a small ‘keep-alive’ packet to the server to ensure you don’t get dropped. Why is this happening? It could be settings on the server that drop users after set time of inactive use or due to a firewall/switch rule that drop inactive connections to improve the performance of the network.

SSH is one of my favorite tools on a Linux/Unix system. There is so much you can do from copying files, to tunneling data security. SSH is a great way to get access to your system at home, but also access to your network. Lets go over some things about SSH tunneling and why it’s good to use! Basic Idea: The idea of tunneling is to give you a secure way to pass data from one point to another.

Ok, lets start with something easy! :) What are SSH keys: SSH keys are a way to allow someone access to a user on another system without the need for a password. This is done with 2 key files one that is public and the other private. This is called “Public-key cryptography”. The public key will be sent to the server that you want to connect to and the private will stay on your local (or client) system.