Fedora Project Insider

User who follows Life: Infinity, Freedom and Voice.

Article by Peter Czanik, from Fedora Community Hungary.

Source page: https://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/2012/11/security-spin-preview-as-syslog-ng-3-3-7-is-part-of-the-upcoming-fedora-18/

The beta of Fedora 18 was supposed to be released earlier… sadly it was postponed again by two weeks, but as there are some great news regarding Fedora and syslog-ng, so I did not wait for the official release. I rather downloaded a nightly build to check it out. I did not research why the release was postponed, but personally I ran only some minor cosmetic problem during installation

As I tested in a virtual machine, the regular Fedora release was not really optimal for me, as it uses Gnome3 and needs 3D acceleration. As I don’t have 3D support, don’t like Gnome3 and I’m interested in security anyway, I downloaded the so called “security spin”. This raises two questions for those not familiar with Fedora, for which I quote the security spin website:

What is a spin? “Fedora Spins are alternate version of Fedora, tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application sets and other customizations.”

What is the security spin? “The Fedora Security Lab provides a safe test environment to work on security auditing, forensics, system rescue and teaching security testing methodologies in universities and other organizations.”

Luckily for me, the security spin is equipped with LXDE, which is a light weight Desktop Environment. It does not need 3D or much system resources and it runs very fast. All of the tools are collected under the “Security Lab” menu, which is further divided based on point of interest, ranging from code analysis to wireless network security. Some of these are graphical tools, many of them console based, but even these are easily available from the menus and a console window is started for them. Most of my favorite tools are available: nmap for port scanning, nwipe for securely wiping partitions, iptraf & co for looking at network traffic and many more.

The current look and feel of the security spin is now quite boring. Just a simple blue background with some stripes on it. But it will be changed in the next few weeks, as one of the guys from the Hungarian Fedora team (which invited me to FUDcon Paris) did a very nice new artwork. It will be worth to try the security spin just for this

Now back to the reason why I originally downloaded the Fedora installer: syslog-ng. The good news is that syslog-ng 3.3.7 is now part of the release. I installed it and gave it a quick try and everything worked as expected. A big thanks goes to JPO (José Pedro Oliveira) and Mrunge (Matthias Runge), who maintain the package inside Fedora!

This story might also become part of my FOSDEM presentation next February about upstream – downstream relations: syslog-ng 3.3 used a forked version of the ivykis library instead of upstream. The syslog-ng package could not be updated to 3.3.X in Fedora until this problem was resolved and upstream ivykis worked instead of the bundled forked version. This needed a lot of work both on the syslog-ng and the ivykis side, but version 3.3.6 solved this problem and 3.3.7 entered Fedora last week.

If you want to see why to upgrade to this latest version, see the announcement blog at http://bazsi.blogs.balabit.com/2011/10/syslog-ng-3-3-1-released/

Looking forward to the next Fedora release – in my opinion will be awesome.

Hi,

As you perhaps you know, we are almost low on media / discs. But instead of fighting for media, we think in the HU community this news can solve small event needs, and partially delays before event. We have made long discussions, what can help – and we think our designer kesigomu has a point. Without nice printed sleeves what holds our copy of the latest release, you can’t share our experience what the user can take away. How about to give an DIY printable sleeve, and instructions – as soon have them you can set up and Fedora desk, and give away discs on demand. No surpluses, and until the disc is burning – you can give more information to the visitor, talk about the community, people, friends, fudcon, and so on as necessary.

So we think, this foldable “origami” sleeves can give you a lot of opportunity. As you fold it together – at finish – you receive an pocket, where you can put more info, flyers, stickers, local available community and more. If you need them, just use it wisely, and all you need is an printer with borderless printing capability (with possibly 300-600 dpi resolution), and between 80-120 g A4 sheet shiny (copy) paper. Pretty nice, right? Wanna try?

We have added the sources, and the files to the official site – witch is at here. Our sheets are here. Folding instructions are here.

See you,

Zoltan

I think it’s time to renew and breath new life into our Freemedia Project, and this can be an good opportunity to help out our users, who are unavailable to obtain one of our media. Here at Hungary there are some people also, who has only a limited bandwith mobile access for the internet, so I have decided to help out FrancisoD – and made the hungarian version of the Freemedia Mailer template, and offered the testing if necessary….

Oh, you don’t know what is the Freemedia mailer template? Well, basically this is nothing more than an software and an printable envelope, that could protect an disc, and you are able to send with it (y)our media without any further packaging. The software [1] is targeted to fill out the template with your FAS data automagically (yes, similarly as our business card applet), and finishes with an ready to print template. FranciscoD has already made huge steps ahead with the software that creates this template [2], and the initial form looks awesome (that also proofs that we have awesome designers, thx design team!). Btw – I printed out samples, and it fits amazingly – even with sleeve. Take a look over here:

After I’m an translator – I would like to take the task to get more translation for this template, and merge it – it really everybody deserves to have one Fedora disc nearby – and the ambassadors will get one more tool to support our users out there. There are not much to translate, and takes only 10 minutes, but it makes already easier to make versatile tests, and support more of our users. So, if you want to support us – please look for me, and I will return to you the text parts that need to be translated.

[1] http://ankursinha.fedorapeople.org/fedora-freemedia-tool/

[2] http://ankursinha.fedorapeople.org/fedora-freemedia-tool/fedora-freemedia-tool-0.2-1.fc16.x86_64.rpm

Here is an little story that a friend of mine has told me lately….

One of the evening we have decided to meet and launch an party with friends. I promised my wife that point I’ll be home at midnight. But the party went too good, and too far. Cocktails, dancing, more drinks and time has run away. Finally, three in the morning arrived to home, needless to say ….. dead drunk… Just tried to shut the door silently behind me, when the bitch cuckoo clock has begin to work: “cuckoo … cuckoo … cuckoo”. Because I knew that my wife will wake up to that noise, I quickly continued the cuckoo’s nine more times. Gotten away with a thought of quarrelling, filled with pride with this brilliant idea – quietly went to bed next to my wife. The last thought before fallen asleep was – how smart and quick-witted I am … even in the critical moments I could invent myself.

The next morning when my wife asked me what time I came home, calmly replied “Exactly 12 at midnight, as promised, my darling”. She said nothing and even seemed to doubt either. Well, phew – gotten away with it …. that’s a MIRACLE !!!…. I thought… but when she turned back to me for a moment and said:

- By the way, I think you should replace that cuckoo clock!

- Yes, my love …but why? – I asked, trembling.

- Well, my baby…. I woke up at three o’clock night when the cuckoo chimed three times and the hell knows why or how, but then the bird has shouted somehow “F*ck !!!…” and did “cuckoo” then four more times as stumbled in the hallway, while did the other three and then the last “cuckoo” with laughing. Then one minute later one more loud  “cuckoo!” while he stepped on a cat and broke the phone in the living room together with the table. The last, longest “cuckoo!” in bed next to me was released out of himself, and this bird has simply fell asleep, accompanied by a farting… So, you will replace it, right?

After many problems, pain, blood and tears the hungarian community site for our small (but growing) community has settled – and it has built an baby website where we believe that our community will find their home. First steps are really hard, because we have to find more of our balance, and more people who could actively participate – contribute… I don’t know how the other communities has begun their first steps in Fedorian FOSS world, it would be nice to hear once of their success stories. Yeah, we would like to hear every story, and perhaps we could avoid the same or the similar mistakes – as others done.

I think this just an small gnome footstep, what we leave here on the net – but we want an better world, and an better community that adds new elements to our 4F principles. We have high hopes before of our community, and our site – as we talked about at our very first fedora round table meeting, and we feel that we’ll succeed. New events, contacts with many many people, teachers, schools, and more….. oh, and an small message to other small communities: we are ready to work together, if you need us – we will be there. Would be awesome to hold an event at Moscow, at Poland, or Bucharest – so if you are interested – contact me – and let’s plan and get ready to be done. Seriously. Tell us.

We know that not everything is perfect, even at our site – so – please, if you have advices, or wishes we gladly greet everyone at our IRC channel at Freenode #fedora-hu channel and there you could keep the contact.

I also would like to say again thank you to everyone who supporting us, specially to our board, to Jörg Simon, and to our admin who has created this drupal site namely Peter Borsa (FAS: Asrob), also to our ambassadors, who working hardly to keep the community together.

The current website adress is:

http://sysadmin.vinfo.hu/

Dear Fedorians!

The Insight team is looking for help, aid, we would like to grab more people for the development of the project called Fedora Insight[1].
But what is that Insight? Those who don’t know this project here is an short description:

Fedora Insight is a Drupal-based website that serves as a place to publish and share news, articles related to Fedora and Fedora marketing materials in various formats. Insight makes it easy for users, developers, and journalists — people who aren’t yet a part of the Fedora contributor community — to keep up with recent highlights without following a dozen different blogs and mailing lists.

We believe you can help us in Insight development. Currently we are looking for the following people:

1. Theme creator

Knows the combination of HTML, CSS and a little bit of PHP. To this you need only some Drupal theme docs [2][3] and you could successfully contribute, to be available an Drupal 7 theme for Insight. If you are interested, you’ll find our wiki [3] how can you make contact with us, and where you could find the Drupal theme (sample) files.

2. PHP (+Drupal) developer

If you know PHP, but would like to learn Drupal either, then you’re our perfect candidate.
Currently we have an actively maintained FAS auth module [4] for Drupal 6, what we would like to update to Drupal 7. Also we could provide an documentation [5] for this, what is available on drupal.org. We use the Feature module, what makes easy the development flow. More about this – check at [6] here.

3. Testers, Use case testers

It’s important, that we must test it out every piece of code, an we do it as we could. Sadly, sometimes some bugs are appearing when it’s unwanted, or it’s stays hidden, or we haven’t met. Therefore we appreciate anybody who could help to discover and report bugs. Tester can be anybody from the community, no need any special knowledge. We need also people who help to test out the mentioned FAS auth and Drupal 7 Mediawiki modules, the calendar module, and the site itself. All this can be done on our testing site [7]. But here pre-registration is required, because the FAS module has been temporarily disabled.

To be able help our work, please send an mail to our mailing list [8], with an short introduction that includes FAS, and the job that would like to help us. After this you’ll receive the necessary access rights, if the work needs that. (eg. like you would like to make an theme).

Also, you as a future important contributor of the project, we awaiting you – and everyone else online at Fudcon Blacksburg 2012, where we’ll put great emphasis to the calendar module [9], and we ask you to share any kind of idea, critics around it, or just contact with us through the IRC – at fedora-mktg channel. We gladly help your first steps.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Insight
[2] http://drupal.org/update/themes/6/7
[3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_work_on_the_Insight_theme
[4] http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=drupal6-authfas.git;a=summary
[5] http://drupal.org/update/modules/6/7
[6] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Insight_development_using_Features_module
[7] https://insight02.dev.fedoraproject.org
[8] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/logistics
[9] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Insight_use_cases_for_calendar

After I’m helping to search new applications for our Security spin, I couldn’t resist to learn always something new. Around, about security. Something like what is an rainbow table, password hashes, or how can you test your user database – make an security audit. How things are working, and so on. As I getting more and more deeper into the theme, I feel that I should learn new ways to keep secure my freedom, and independency and prevent loss of  my personal data. If we are put out more our (private) life / files /data to on-line who will ensure that won’t be used or reused from storages, from clouds by an 3rd party? Trust or not trust? Good question, right? But, at least our data /partition encryption or our passwords must be enough to keep our data in safer place. Or both together. Time just passed, and we are not anymore back in the ’80es, we all almost have one or more multi-core electronic device, that’s already chained into an network – and guess what: with it’s own operating system, that capable to do the same as our desktop machine. Not to mention, that if one machine is not enough, and the attacker is connected…. no password can stand in it’s way for long. That’s why it’s recommended to turn on encryption at many place… But how can we have a nice complex password that slows down the attacker?

In a hypothetically perfect world, we’d be able to remember infinite numbers of passwords, but the truth is for the most people: not possible. Instead of it this can be followed, I think:

• Do not use passwords that are easy to guess, e.g anything directly related to you, like your name or names of family/friends/pets/etc; or date of birth; or favourite colour,band,etc..
• Ideally, use a longish random string as your password, of at least 10 characters (but longer is better).
• The same applies for password-recovery questions, which often ask for information that is in the public domain (e.g. mother’s maiden name, date of birth). Do not provide real answers! Instead just make something up, or use another random string if possible.
• Do not re-use passwords across different websites, unless you truly do not care about what is on those sites, and what they can do in your name with that password.
• Do not be afraid to write them down if you can store them securely. E.g. if your home is reasonably secure, it’s fine to store most passwords on paper there. IF it’s just a limited amount you need to store.
• If you trust that a computer or device is sufficiently secure, it’s perfectly fine to store passwords on it, e.g. in a text-file. Also, many programmes support saving passwords and if you trust those programmes then it’s perfectly OK to use those features.
• Consider using disk-encryption products like PGPDisk, TrueCrypt, LUKS or the other built-in capabilities of many Linux/Unix distributions (some of which offer this at install time) to protect your data with a master key. This is particularly recommended for laptops.
• Any computer running MS Windows likely can not be considered secure and should not trusted with more sensitive information. Portable devices should not be considered secure, unless their contents are known to be encrypted, and they automatically lock themselves after a small period of unuse (i.e. don’t trust your phone too much for storing sensitive data).

Yes – Ideally, all your day-to-day passwords for your various, online accounts should be unguessable, random strings;  you’d never have to remember any of them; you would just, at certain times, have to enter a master pass-phrase (which should be unguessable, but still memorable and much longer than a password) without which the passwords would effectively not be accessible. But here also can be trouble – if you go to the trouble of memorizing a highly-secure, random password, you’re going to *want* to recycle it. And so many web sites now ask you to create a user account and a password, it’s practically impossible to create strong passwords for the multitude of needs, so you can either create simple, easy-to-remember passwords that are easy to crack, or recycle.

It also doesn’t help that various sites are in conflict with each other as to what they allow. e.g., some sites require a letter, number, special character, and capital letter, while other sites *can’t accept* special characters, and others require you to start with a letter only, while others let you start with a number, while others require a minimum of X characters, while there is some that actually have a *maximum* number of characters! This is the sort of thing that leads to passwords like “qwerty”,” 1212″ and “xyzzy” and such…..

Even when I think to Fedora – when I install the system, and drops the message at password page -”This password is exists in database. Use it anyway?” – makes me thinking. Who has composed this database, and what is the source of this? Moreover,  if char based security so weak (has so many flaws), do we have stronger, better solution? Is there any visual security feature or other methods for anaconda? We writing 2012 – what can be the optimum solution?

We would like to promote us at Hungary – to have an Fudcon at Budapest.

Our team true old wish to conquer new white spaces, and paint it again to blue. I know that the Hungarian team is still growing, but all three ambassadors are working hardly to grow this area, and around our country.

We have awesome circumstances, and an beautiful city that worthy to visit and hack at Fudcon. We are under preparation, and we awaiting here the hungarian drupal community, guys from Brno – and many-many others. Please vote for Budapest and ask for it!

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:EMEA_2012_Bid_Budapest

Hi Guys,

I have received today an mail, from an new open source beginning – but first time I haven’t believed that. But it’s working, and that shows again the power of open source. It’s an new online radio that tries to serve open source community, with open source music, and spread the freedom through it’s channels. Currently they are running the very first open tests (overdrive, effects, communication, mixing and so on), and mostly chaining up different channels, and their own mixes, and talks. Their music style is “ It’s a youthful, merry and energetic community radio built on Fedora foundations, representing Győr’s rythm of life.” as the their website describes at http://basefm.hu .

But there is some interesting feature they trying out in live – first they do this on Fedora, and additionally with an pimped Jack server. This is not big as it sounds, but when I have heard that the two DJ physically not sitting next to each other, made me really curious.

One of the DJ’s – Dj Smiley (Robert), controls and mixing the output, and his brother (Dj Igor – Zoltan) leads the talks, and other additional features to be an complete radio. Until Dj Smiley streams from my city Győr, his brother makes the rest from Hajdúhadház witch lies over 400 km opposite site of Hungary in air. With remotely connected servers, there is no fallen out stream, and not possible to there is no talk within the streamed music or between to the mixing if necessary. Sadly this part only possible with Skype as I have heard, but hopefully they will find the true FOSS alternative – as it’s the radio runs only free software.Of course there is not without problems, sometimes the stream has gaps, but that’s why the tests are running.

If you would like to connect yourself into the radiostream, it’s possible when you’re looking for inside in skype-contact: hungary.basefm.gyor  – or just want to say hello in mail: basefmteam at basefmradio dot hu.

I wish to them more listeners, and success for the upcoming year, and forward.

Zoltan