Recently a friend of mine mentioned that after logging into his Ubuntu box, it immediately displays a prompt to enter my login keyring.

So here is the solution…

Click System – Preferences – Password and Encryption Keys

…then in the password tab you will see some passwords. Under that you can right click the first selection and change password. Enter your current password and for the new password leave both blank. Click OK – it will tell you that your about to use unsafe storage. Ignore it.

Problem solved!

In an earlier post titled “The GRUB Customizer“, I mentioned about an excellent grub2 editing tool written by Daniel Richter.

The tool also helps in setting up a graphical login screen. Here is mine…

Graphical Grub2 login screen

A close-up view...

Finally a comprehensive GUI Configuration Tool!

Daniel Richter has developed a graphical Grub2 configuration application. It’s an excellent step in making Grub2 menu changes simpler for the average user. It provides users with a method of altering their Grub2 menus without using the command line and obscure commands.

To install the application, you need to add this untrusted PPA…

ppa:danielrichter2007/grub-customizer

…to your system’s Software Sources.

Following are the steps…

1. Go to System – Administrator and launch Synaptic Package Manager.

2. In Synaptic Package Manager, go to Settings – Repositories. This will launch the Software Sources box.

3. Select the Other Software tab and click on the Add button.

4. In the APT line field, paste the above PPA and click on the Add Source button.

5. Now click on the Close button.

6. You may get a notification stating….

Repositories changed
The repository information has changed. You have to click on the “Reload” button for your changes to take effect

7. Click Close.

8. Click on the Reload button on the main Synaptic Package Manager menu. This will reload the package information.

9. Now click on the Search button on the main Synaptic Package Manager menu and search for…

grub-customizer

10. Once listed select and install it.

11. Once installed, the package will appear under menu Applications – System Tools.

Happy Grub2 editing!!!

For more details click Launchpad PPA for Grub Customizer

To know how the Grub Customizer – a graphical grub2 settings manager works, click How does it work?

Network security appliances do a great job of keeping the cyber monsters from invading your business. But what do you do when the monster is actually inside the security perimeter?

Here are some important points on how your network can be attacked. Read on…

1. USB thumb drives: It is one of the common or the easiest ways to infect a network from inside a firewall. The ubiquity of thumb drives has driven hackers to develop targeted malware, such as the notorious Conficker worm, that can automatically execute upon connecting with a live USB port. Changes in the computer’s default autorun policies can be said as one of the solution to this treat.

2. Laptop and netbooks: A notebook may already have malicious code running in the background that is tasked to scour the network and find additional systems to infect. This notebook could belong to an internal employee or guest who’s visiting and working from an open cube or office. Laptops are also really handy Ethernet port for tapping directly into a network. Implement an encrypted file system for sensitive data can be a precaution.

3. Wireless access points: Wireless attacks by wardrivers are common and have caused significant damage in the past. It can provide immediate connectivity to any user within proximity of the network. Wireless APs are naturally insecure, regardless if encryption is used or not. Strong, mixed passwords should be used and changed on a fairly frequent basis to prevent this.

4. Miscellaneous USB devices: Devices like digital cameras, MP3 players, printers, scanners, fax machines and even digital picture frames are also included in the list besides the common USB devices. Since the primary functions of these devices are different we often forget their potential to cause threats. Therefore it is important to implement and enforce asset control and policies around what devices can enter the environment and when.

5. Inside connections: Internal company employees can also inadvertently or intentionally access areas of the network that they wouldn’t or shouldn’t otherwise have access to and compromise endpoints using any of the means outlined in this article. Passwords should be changed regularly. Authentication and access levels are a must for any employee – he should only have access to systems, file shares, etc. are some of the important steps to prevent this.

6. The Trojan human: It can take less than a minute for an unsupervised person in a server room to infect the network. Avoid assumptions and identify the source by asking questions can be said as one of the major steps.

7. Optical media: Recordable media that appear to be legitimate can and has been used to piggyback data in and out of networks. And, like the thumb drives mentioned above, they can be used as a source for network infection. As with the USB tip, it’s important to implement and enforce asset control and policies around what devices can enter the environment and when. And then follow that up with frequent policy reminders.

8. Hindsight is 20/20: The human mind is also very effective at storing information. Who is watching you when you log into your desktop? Where are your hard copies stored? What confidential documents are you reading on your laptop at the coffee shop, airplane, etc.? The best safeguard is being conscious and alert about this threat whenever working on sensitive material — even if it means stopping what you’re doing momentarily to observe your surroundings.

9. Smartphones and other digital devices: Phones do more than just allow you to call anyone in the world from anywhere; they’re full-functioning computers, complete with Wi-Fi connectivity, multithreaded operating systems, high storage capacity, high-resolution cameras and vast application support. And they, along with other portable tablet-like devices, are starting to be given the green light in business environments. Therefore it is important to implement and enforce asset control and policies around what devices can enter the environment and when.

Though I have being using Ubuntu for quite a long time now, I still have dual-boot (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Microsoft Windows 7). The other day I downloaded a Windows-based application (while being in Ubuntu) and then re-started my box and booted Windows to install and test the application, only to find that I had saved the download under my Ubuntu partition (/home/jitneo/Downloads).

As Windows cannot read linux partitions, the option was to again re-boot into Ubuntu and transfer the file to my Windows partition.

Before doing so I did Goggled a bit and found an utility called Ext2Read, which can access any linux partition from Windows. Ext2Read is an explorer like utility to explore ext2/ext3/ext4 files. It now supports LVM2 and EXT4 extents. It can be used to view and copy files and folders. It can recursively copy entire folders. Below is a screenshot of the utility.

view of folder properties

You can download the latest release from here.

Dear Readers,

This is to inform you that the “Ubuntu Linux” category has been renamed as “Linux (all distros)“.

Thank you.

Jitendra

To have full access to NTFS, we need to install ntfs-3g driver, which can be downloaded from http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

1. Check to see if you have the required pacakge, FUSE 2.6.0 or later. WI assume your system already has one. If not, read the”Installing FUSE” section below and then come back here.

# yum list installed | grep fuse

2. Download the source code, ntfs-3g-1.913.tgz.

3. Extract the source codes

# tar xvzf ntfs-3g-1.913.tgz

4. Install ntfs-3g driver by typing

# cd ntfs-3g-1.913
# ./configure
# make
# make install

5. Try to mount NTFS hard disk. In the command below, /dev/sdb1 and /mnt/windows can be changed appropriately, if needed

# mkdir /mnt/windows
# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/windows

If it had already been mounted somehow, unmount it first

# umount /meia/My\ Book/
# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/windows

Sometimes, you may need to enforce mounting like

# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/windows -o force

6. To unmount the volume, type

# umount /mnt/windows

7. To mount and unmount the volume with non-root account, type

$ ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/windows/
$ fusermount -u /mnt/windows/

To see the mounting information, type

# mount

or

# more /etc/fstab

Installing FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace)

1. Download the latest stable release from http://fuse.sourceforge.net and extract it.

# tar xvzf fuse-2.7.0.tar.gz

2. Install FUSE by typing

# cd fuse-2.7.0
# ./configure
# make
# make install

3. You may encounter several error messages while running ./configure. If you see the following message,

configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH

You may need to install whole packages related with Development to have a C compiler.

If you see another message like

checking kernel source directory… Not found
configure: error:
*** Please specify the location of the kernel source with
*** the ’–with-kernel=SRCDIR’ option
configure: error: ./configure failed for kernel

You must install kernel-devel with appropriate version

# yum install kernel-devel-2.6.18-8.1.8.el5

Then running ./configure should do work. You may see the following warning message, but you can ignore it.

***********************************************************
* WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING *
* The FUSE user space binaries were NOT installed with
* root directory executable prefix. This means that
* automounting NTFS volumes during boot could fail. This *
* can be fixed the below way by reinstalling FUSE using
* the right ’configure’ option during FUSE compilation:
*./configure –exec-prefix=/
*make && sudo make install
* WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING *
***********************************************************

4. Note that you need to reinstall FUSE if you upgrade the kernel.

The Ubuntu archive tool cannot open .RAR archives. To open .RAR files, you will need to install UNRAR. The command is…

sudo apt-get install unrar

You should be able to open the archive with the archiver included in Ubuntu afterwards.

I have a dual boot system – Windows 7 and Ubuntu. The other day I wanted to remove my Ubuntu installation for some reason, but this also called for restoring the Windox 7 Master Boot Record, after removing grub. So here are the steps if you also face such a situation.

1. Boot your computer to the Windows 7 DVD. At this screen choose to install now.

2. Select your language and click next.

3. Click the button for “Use recovery tools”.

4. Then select “Command Prompt”.

5. When open, the command prompt will look like this:

6. The command we will use, bootsect.exe, is in a folder (named boot) on the DVD. We need to know what drive letter has been assigned the DVD drive to access the folder.

Code:
—–
Type: diskpart and press Enter

Type: select disk 0 (zero) and press Enter

type: list volume and press Enter
—–

In this screen shot, the 7 DVD is letter: G

7. Use your DVD drive letter and

Code:
—– 
Type: exit and press Enter to close Diskpart

Type: G: (use the letter of your DVD drive) and press Enter

Type: cd boot and press Enter

Type: dir and press Enter 
—–

to verify that bootcect.exe is there (if you really need to)

8. To restore the “bootsector code”:

Code:
—–
TYPE: bootsect /nt60 SYS /mbr and press Enter 
—–

NOTE: If this method fails to restore the MBR, you can try the bootrec command as it is also a tool for repairing the MBR.

9. When completed successfully,

Code:
——
Type: exit and press Enter
—–

This will close the command prompt window.

10. Now select Shut Down or Restart

11. Then you can reboot your computer into Windows.

Installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) yesterday on my desktop and laptop.

First impression….Wow! Bootup and shutdown but are extremely fast. The default desktop theme/color is better.

The thing one has to get used to..and fast…is the windows buttons…they have shifted to the top left!

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS