What You Ought To Know About Securing SSH

February 16, 2007 | In Linux | No Comments

This tutorial written for Ubuntu, but applies to all:

Some basics in securing SSH:

1. Change SSH Port
2. Disallow Root User
3. Allow specific users

details here:
What You Ought To Know About Securing SSH

OS X Server 10.4.8 and Mailman

February 1, 2007 | In Other Tech | 1 Comment

We have used an OS X server for shared web and mailing list hosting among other tasks, and have nursed it through 10.3 Panther and Tiger 10.4 . This OS X server has provided a wonderful introduction to *Nix servers.

However, the version upgrades are now starting to show their effects, as are now experiencing some flakiness with OS X 10.4.8 in regard to both VNC (OSXVNC) and Apple’s Server Admin Mailing List interface, which is just a gui for Mailman.

VNC
So far, a quick reboot cleared up VNC issues.

You can create easy ssh tunnel to an OSXvnc server named www.servername.com with the command:

vncviewer -via www.servername.com www.servername.com:0

Very handy if you just want to use your ssh user account into a server that has its port 5900 firewalled.

Mailman
Fortunately, Mailman responded to command line scripts as documented here: http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/site.html

And on OS X server their location is /usr/share/mailman/bin as in:
server:/usr/share/mailman/bin $ sudo ./list_members

A complete list of Mailman commands found on our OS X server here:

add_members convert.py list_members remove_members
apple_config_list discard list_owners rmlist
arch dumpdb mailmanctl show_qfiles
b4b5-archfix find_member mmsitepass sync_members
change_pw fix_url.py msgfmt.py transcheck
check_db genaliases newlist unshunt
check_perms get_list_info paths.py update
cleanarch inject paths.pyc version
clone_member list_admins qrunner withlist
config_list list_lists rb-archfix

Will this box make it to 10.5 Leopard? Time will tell.