Reports estimate up to a quarter of all home computers could be part of a global bot-net.

A what?

A “bot-net”, a network of connected computers used with predominantly malicious intent by a central hacker.

Control is gained through installation of the “bot” via a worm or virus with the resulting PC resource invariably used for carefully orchestrated bulk spam attacks on the hackers internet site of choice (Known as distributed denial of service attacks – DDoS, for short). The effects of these attacks can quite literally cripple an online presence of any size.

The bot-program, once ensconced, can dig itself in with varying levels of granularity and service it’s remote master quite happily until the oblivious home user decides to rebuild his machine due to it “….not running quite right for a while”.

How’s your PC running lately? Virus checker up to date? Updates applied? Everything zipping along like it used to? 10-1 it isn’t, and those are good odds.

Many a home user will blame themselves for their machines degrading, they think they’ve balked the hard disk with all those family photos and music, or have installed some free game off the internet they perhaps shouldn’t, however it’s usually not so, the root problem is the flawed operating system they’ve been using for the past five years.

Integrated security for the Microsoft operating system was a security disaster. Without comprehensive security patching, an up to date virus checker and a decent home firewall (NAT router) it offered an open door to all and sundry when connected to the internet.

Todays (apparently savvy) computer user is actually aware of internet security, well, they think they are, they know they need to buy virus checking software, they’ve heard of a firewall and complain heavily about the amount of SPAM they get in their hotmail account, however what they don’t realise is the home I.T mess and confusion they endure daily doesn’t have to be so and that they actually have a choice, well, two choices, Mac or Linux.

Linux is merely an alternative operating system, it’s as simple as that, nothing wild or scary. It installs very easily and does all the things your present operating system does, but with two major differences – it’s safe (i.e it’s totally immune to the thousands of viruses floating abut the internet), and it’s free (yes, free, as in “no money”).

Freedom and safety, gotta be worth a look yes?

Ubuntu Linux is a great place to start looking and their latest release really is quite stunning, coupled with a recent re-brand I would be really surprised if even the most timid and most “Microsoft” home user didn’t delve deeper than the first page of their stylish new website to find out more.

Go on, take a look, escape from the net and into the web – http://www.ubuntu.com

TooMuchGreen has officially regressed to it’s former blog status, it likes being a blog and we enjoy blogging through it.

The “business” side of things is now fully re-branded as the wonderful MEBBI™ Solutions.

MEBBI™ Solutions provide all the services previously offered by TooMuchGreen plus a few new additions, why not visit our lovely new website and have a look around..

http://mebbi.net

Sector awareness for the benefits of open source adoption is rapidly growing amongst the forward thinking enterprise. An open source solution provides not only a comprehensive replacement but delivers added security and performance boosts to existing systems whilst offering huge reductions in immediate expenditure and long term cost of ownership.

Perhaps it’s time you spoke to MEBBI™.

We’ll shortly be holding some integration workshops at NTI in Leeds so keep an eye on the TooMuchGreen blog for details. Areas covered will include..

• Ubuntu Linux client builds
• Network & domain configuration
• User account creation and access
  
• Microsoft application optional installs
• Network share (SAMBA) connectivity & mappings
• Microsoft Exchange eMail & groupware integration with Evolution
• Microsoft Active Directory connectivity & authentication with Likewise
• Active directory enterprise user account management (GUID & OU configurations)

Let’s stop mulling it over, for the technically aware there can be no doubt the future of computing is cloud based (both locally and out across the www), it’s going to happen (it is happening). But what does this new virtual world present to us in terms of the good old desktop operating system?

Well, cloud access needs a browser, a browser needs a software platform to run on and a software platform requires a host device. Voice and gesture recognition technology is presently a touch under the horizon for general use so we’ll still need keyboard & mouse functionality, as such it’s a fair bet to expect a substantial increase in laptop style/tablet & personal device (iPhone) use in response to what will be corresponding growth in mobile infrastructure connectivity.
The personal computer will become less “personal” with the mindset for mainstream data ownership shifting away from the concept of local storage and becoming akin to the way vinyl (and soon CD/DVD media) is regarded today, i.e nice to own & “collectable” but at the same time unnecessary and cumbersome in comparison to what will in effect be instant delivery of most any content we can think of, anywhere. It’s true we humans do like to have our “stuff” but lifestyle technology (or should I say Apple) will most certainly re-dictate (re-train?) our behavioural traits.
Spotify is already a real world emerging example of this, why bother paying for GB’s of hard disk storage when you can stream pre-configured playlists to all and any of your your devices for free (albeit with an ad thrown in here and there) with no danger of media corruption? It’s only present infrastructure shortfall restricting increased adoption, but that will change, forces are at work (and have been for some time).

iTunes will expand to become an all encompassing on-line portal where Apple will happily manage all our personal media collections and deliver them back to us through “terminal” devices (be they laptops, dumb screens or variations of the imminent Apple Tablet). Google (of course) will also expand it’s virtual empire to take care of our business enterprise (check out Apps, it’s a killer), and Microsoft? Microsoft are obviously developing their own cloud cover strategy (Azure) but if I had to choose I’d predict a sway toward Google, why? I just think there’s more perceived trust for the big G, and although I do say “perceived” trust it’s also said with a certain degree of irony – “Many a true word” etc, for example – content filtering for word processing files? Your data should be YOUR data (and there begins the case for local cloud systems, more on that another time).

Anyway, browsers. Browsers indeed, and operating systems. A browser is a browser is a browser (more or less) and with Mozillas ubiquitous Firefox available for free across all platforms the question of cost arises. Why pay for an expensive operating system and the high end hardware it needs to function when all you’re running on it is Firefox? Answer – You don’t have to, and that’s where Linux slots in superbly.

Not only is the Linux platform free of charge it’s also incredibly stable and incredibly secure, two things you REALLY want when exposing your personal data to the world (wide web). We did mention Google before and here once again they come into view with their like vision of future cloud access – the “Chrome OS“.

Google vision is going to happen, Google (along with Apples iPhone) are going to take over the world and Chrome OS will be Google’s cloud entry portal, and guess what, Chrome OS is built on Linux. It’s no surprise really, Google know a good thing when they see it.

If you would like to find out more about cloud content storage & delivery through a Linux platform TooMuchGreen can help, we are specialists in this area and offer the full spectrum of Linux based advice and solutions tailored to your business and budget. Feel free to send us a message via the contact page, we would be more than happy to come and visit you to assess your needs.

Cost saving and stability from the cloud, that’s the name of the game for 2010, are you playing?

This weekend I encountered first hand exactly the situation highlighted by TalkTalk in their recent demonstration aimed at the UK Governments naive plan to disconnect persistent on-line file sharers. The problem is that of unsecured home Wi-Fi, and there’s a lot of it about.

I was visiting friends for the evening and as I do (everywhere) popped the iPod Touch out to check for open networks and catch up with Twitter, bingo, there it was – “Belkin54g” (unsecured home Wi-Fi is invariably Belkin or Netgear). What wasn’t so impressive was discovering Belkin54g was the house router and less impressive again was further investigation showing at least half a dozen users brazenly latched on to my friends connection at that current time, how long they’d been enjoying free surfing was anybodys guess and who knows how many more may have had the pleasure. Needless to say  all freeloaders were instantly disconnected, the SSID changed and a suitable WPA2 password applied.

As TalkTalk correctly explain, by simply being unaware of a need to secure your wireless home broadband you open up access for others next door or across the street to latch onto your connection and illegally download to their hearts content, and who would get the blame if there was an investigation? You would, it’s your IP number that’s being used and for home connections you are fully responsible.

The owners of the particular router mentioned in this post are both intelligent professional people who would most certainly never be purposely negligent, as so what this highlights (for me) is a lack of base public awareness for what could become quite a serious situation. Admittedly it’s not really akin to sticking an electric socket on the outside of your house and inviting the rest of the street to plug-in as (unless you’re on a managed connection) no matter how many users are streaming data down your pipe you wouldn’t get charged any extra, but, as shown by recent cases in the US the potential fines incurred by downloading illegally are substantially more than the cost of a few extra watts of electricity.

However, and here’s why prosecuting the public is also is incredibly short sighted, don’t fancy risking it at home? Not a problem, just go to McDonalds and use their free Wi-Fi instead*.

?

*Disclaimer – TooMuchGreen do not in anyway advocate downloading illegal material from McDonalds free Wi-Fi or any public connection, nor do we in fact advocate downloading illegal material at all, in any way, shape or form from anywhere, at anytime. The statement is merely presented to highlight the situation of anonymity with regard those who may abuse open wireless.

Compared to other NBR’s Moblin presents us with a completely different UI experience. NB OS’s like EasyPeasy and even Ubuntu’s own NBR just operate like a condensed over sized start menu to me, a feel further reinforced by certain upsized menu icons which having lost their integrity appear pixelated, a small detail perhaps but still something which spoils UI continuity. Moblin is also quick, very quick, I installed it on my Dell Mini 9 and in all honesty it’s the fastest operating system I’ve ever used – on any computer, some boast for a lowly 1.6ghz Atom based unit with 1GB RAM.

As you can see from the presentation video Moblin doesn’t function the way a desktop OS does, and why should it, that’s not the aim. I’m not what you’d call a regular Netbook user as rather than it supplementing a nice latte and an afternoon cake I have mine fired up indoors 24/7 for Ubuntu server development & LAN web caching, and although SSH is my preferred method of access I do realise there’s no need for an all singing all dancing desktop when you’re out and about, you just need to be able to check a few emails, view a website or two and keep on top of Twitter (OK, and maybe tweak a few docs). Size and weight are obviously a consideration and yes, although the majority of Netbook keyboards would still tax the nimble fingers of your average woodland sprite they’re still quicker to type on than the single character entry of an iPhone, which can be a chore even for Tweeting.

I like Moblin, I like it a lot. V2 is obviously still in BETA and requires a few boxes to be ticked behind the scenes (it didn’t pick up the Dell Wi-Fi card) but it’s damned close to a full blown release and is going to offer envisioned impact for early adopters when it hits. The main contributory factor for Netbooks not taking off as expected was a mindset for use as just a smaller desktop machine, which they aren’t. Running a cut down desktop OS merely offered a somewhat unidentifiable unit of reduced functionality rather than an enabling device for an emerging niche. Moblin feels different, it runs differently, it presents applications in an ingenious way through inspired methods of interface usability and yet underneath still sits on the inherent stability of Linux (as does OSX with UNIX).

I’m not completely convinced I’d use it myself (as I say I run my Netbook for more left field uses) however I did notice somewhat surprisingly on checking the Ubuntu-Karmic version that Tasksel offered a full range of server side modules for installation at the back end. Whether or not such broad flexibility will still be present in the final release remains to be seen as there are no such options in present and previous Ubuntu NBR’s, if so it would certainly open up potential for a most interesting dual purpose little computer. My Dell Mini may yet enjoy some fresh air.

In every aspect of life there’s an ideally suited tool for the job. Around the house we have a whole range of cooking, gardening and D.I.Y bits and bobs, in sport we use specific types of fitness equipment and attire for our chosen exercise, an artist uses a certain type of brush for a certain type of paint and a photographer has a selection of lenses for different types of shoot. It’s exactly the same in the world of computing.

Apple produce beautifully designed machines running an eloquently superior operating system inherently suited to media, arts and the home, their business platform is correspondingly swish in it’s intuitive ease of use however Microsoft hold a throttling 90%+ market share of the enterprise desktop, why so?

People just associate Microsoft with business software, it has a legacy of suitability and has more than evolved into it’s niche. Their Active Directory is unmatched as an enterprise network operating system and the offices of the world communicate to each other via a back end MS Exchange email solution, Apple obviously realise this. Rather than trying to create a matching solution Apple merely facilitate symbiotic MS Exchange connectivity from their own mail systems, in fact thanks to Exchange integration the iPhone is well on it’s way to completely taking over the hand-held world of pocket business communication, why even try to develop a rival when you can become equally as prominent by riding the success of some else’s existing product.

And Linux? Linux is the engine of the computer world.

The majority of web servers run Linux, as do the majority of in-house application delivery and development servers, there is nothing as stable, as reliable or as cost effective as a server running Linux, it is most definitely the right tool for the job,

Moving forward from the the back end away from Linux application servers, MS Exchange and the Active Directory we end up at the enterprise desktop. There’s no doubt Microsoft Vista was a lemon, they most definitely shot themselves in the foot there and it’s bloated unsuitability will probably go down in history as Microsoft’s worst ever operating system (aside from Windows ME of course). MacOSX is a superb platform but due to it’s requirement for pure Apple hardware just isn’t an option for a sizeable mainstream business looking for a cost effective I.T strategy (although any design, photography, music or general media company worth it’s salt obviously operate from a Mac base), and Linux? Who runs a Linux desktop? Well, not too many people yet, but they will do, Ubuntu is coming.

At $200 a pop (average) for a single licensed Microsoft unit running their corresponding Office suite the figures can most certainly start to add up. Ubuntu Linux is free. Ubuntu brings the inherent stability of Linux to the desktop and unlike it’s virus prone alternative an Ubuntu client isn’t going to go down with the latest computer equivalent of swine flu. Thanks to products such as Likewise Open Ubuntu will also seamlessly authenticate to the MS Active Directory and pull mail down from MS Exchange, contrary to popular belief it actually get’s on quite well with Microsoft’s back end business systems, and vice versa.

Any successful decision in the world of computing begins with having the insight to select the most suitable system for the intended end use, which is actually not as convoluted as many would imagine. The following breakdown covers all aspects of computing with a simple three option ideal suitability list..

• Apple – Home use & laptops. Media (home & business) – video, music, design, arts, photography, handhelds (iPods & iPhones).

• Microsoft – Back-end business services – Active Directory network management and MS Exchange email systems.

• Linux – Web & application servers, Ubuntu business enterprise desktop clients.

With our tailored Ubuntu client build Too Much Green are the tool for the job when it comes to providing Linux based enterprise desktop solutions, this isn’t sales pitch (well, not much) we just know our place. We’re not here to try and take over the world of computing, just to point it in the right direction and help it on it’s way.

There’s a continuing storm of ever increasing paranoia circulating our beaten up world these days, who’s watching who, who’s controlling who, who’s doing what to whoever, where, how and with what and who’s being doing all the above for years….and why, as such we’re all pretty “right on” with regard to safeguarding our personal identities from each other and our personal freedom from big brother, or so we’d like to believe.

Anyone up to speed with the Zeitgeist Movement (you should watch both movies) is more than aware of the apparent end game – personal micro-chipping, in itself quite a scary concept which along with satellite controlled location and movement logging aims to abolish the (already flawed) monetary system as we know it in favour of “chipped” credits, this whilst concurrently offering “them” the option to simply cut the credit connection of anyone who steps outside the norm, with the “norm” categorised as an increasingly restrictive set of rules and conformist procedural behavioural traits for what will be classed as socially acceptable. Such far reaching population control is (presently) still at the far end and obviously we’d never agree to anything so scarily pervasive, well, not directly anyway, but that’s the thing, we wouldn’t get asked directly, of course not, that’s not how it works, no, we wouldn’t get asked, quite the contrary, we may well embrace it ourselves, and all in the name of cool.

Let’s look at personal location recording, and here’s a concept, if Government (or the state) suddenly forced you to always carry a small device which enabled them to track your movements and exact location at anytime of day or night you’d (quite rightly) refuse, in fact there’d be riots in the streets…! However the embryonic rumblings of this are now offered as a “new feature” (Find My iPhone) for the latest versions of Apple’s MobileME service and corresponding “must have” devices the iPhone & iPod Touch, admittedly it’s not used by Apple themselves (or the Government) to track you (not that I’m aware of anyway) and in it’s present guise merely offers a facility for you to find your device should it get lost or alternatively to erase it’s contents remotely should it get stolen, however if you stop to think about how things could pan out from this already marketed technology it certainly gives pause for thought.

This is of course all just a bit of extrapolated fun from me poking at a potential dark side of controlled global future, (I watch a lot of Sci-fi), I’m a huge fan of all things Mac, always have been (hope I always will be) and firmly believe in the man Jobs, however if Apple do ever bring out a personal “iChip” I think I’d most certainly pause for more than thought.

As has been the case with me over the past two years I’m once again in a rented apartment at the mercy of someone else’s Wi-Fi with no resulting control or access to the router. It’s all somewhat limiting should I wish to dabble in any external DynDNS malarkey (which I do) but I get by SSH-ing around the LAN to the wondrous little Dell Mini 9″ and it’s certainly a notch up from running a virtual machine on the MacBook Air, in fact it’s actually a most useful set up and a really don’t know how I ever managed before.

The landlord here has been most accommodating and credit to him has tried to arrange my own connection, however due to a six week string of banal events revolving around the comms guys continually turning up at No.4 instead of No.11 (me) we’ve given up and canceled the request, fair enough, I’ll save €15 a month and the knock on effect of doing so has stuck another feather in the Mini’s cap for use as a DNS caching unit.

For those who aren’t sure what I’m on about basically a DNS server is a special “network” computer which translates IP addresses to recognisable names (and vice versa), i.e when you type www.google.com into Firefox a combination of DNS servers translate behind the scenes and deliver the search page to you from the actual IP address of Google (66.102.9.105), the server also remembers addresses it’s visited and keeps a record of them to speed up delivery for future requests.

The pipe to the outside world here tops out at just under 2MB (on a good day) however it’s connected through the pool.einsundeins.de domain which isn’t the most dynamic, couple that with a stretched Wi-Fi signal and things become a touch laborious at certain times of the day, so I thought I’d try a bit of local DNS caching to see if I could help things along.

Your computer at home (or at work) invariably makes it’s “DNS” calls to your ISP’s servers out on the internet, this process is relatively quick but obviously not as quick as if it were pinging a unit sat on your local network and with Ubuntu this is very easy to set up using something called BIND9 (Berkley Internet Naming Daemon Version 9). By default Bind is configured to act as a caching server however you need to tweak a few settings so it’s relative to itself and knows where to go to look up un-cached domain names it doesn’t know about (forwarders).

The first thing to do is fix the IP of the unit you’ll be using from DHCP to static, once done install BIND..

sudo apt-get install bind9

..next type..

sudo nano /etc/bind/named.conf.options

..uncomment the “forwarders” section and add the following (I use OpenDNS IP’s, OpenDNS is superb)..

forwarders {
208.67.220.220;
208.67.222.222;
};

..save the file.

Now we need to edit the /etc/resolv.conf file so it knows where to find the “namerservers” (including itself), at the command line type..

sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

..and add/make sure the file reads as follows..

nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 208.67.220.220
nameserver 206.67.222.222

..close the file and save then restart BIND..

sudo /etc/init.d/bind9 restart

That’s it, you’re done.

To test delivery times open a terminal and dig the URL of a website you haven’t visited before, for example..

dig www.ubuntu4business.com

Check the query time then execute the command again, see the difference? Admittedly it’s only milliseconds we’re dealing with here but you WILL notice a boost.

The beauty of this solution is that it provides a browser boost to any type or any amount of computers on your LAN, it’s a great quick, easy and cheap solution for both home and business, just point all primary DNS entries at your new caching unit’s IP address and away you go. My IMAP mail account performance has been painful for the past few months with continuing hangups ranging from folders not displaying to general time outs but now it’s happy and snappy again.

So, you’ve registered your domain and have your Linux VS ready to roll, what’s next? Well, rather than wrestle with the bottomless world of hardcore geekdom at the convoluted CLI you could do a lot worse than install the ECHP domain management tool.

EHCP is open source and thus free to download and use, it comes very well supported and the website supplies what could be THE all time best procedural “How To” for installation I have ever come across (if you excuse the ‘interesting’ english) with clickable “Yes/No” confirmation checks and resulting problem resolves after each stage (admittedly the ‘concept’ sections aren’t as yet fully complete). Install is as follows..

sudo apt-get install wget
wget www.ehcp.net/download
tar -zxvf ehcp_latest.tgz
cd ehcp
./install.sh
#

..it’s an incredibly long old install (seemingly at least three to four times longer than a base server install alone) and you’re asked various bits and bobs along the way so pay attention (MySQL passwords etc), however it’s all nothing too major and to be honest if you’re at a stage of wanting to manage your own domain hosting you’ll more than likely be at an easy level of suitable technical knowledge to cope with both the install and later domain import and configuration, if not you’ll work it out.

Once installed you access the admin interface through http://”your IP number“/ (if you haven’t fully configured base domain & DNS access it will tell you and either click through or use http://”your IP number“/vhost/ehcp/ then once in resolve things alongside the main domain config), username is “admin” and the password will be one you created during the setup.

An interesting point of note which could speed things along during later LAMP installs is that EHCP installs phpMyAdmin for you, which is useful, useful also are the included modules for eMail, FTP & MySQL services & config, however it’s the “Easy Add”, “Bulk Add” and “DNS Only” domain click throughs which are the bread and butter, or there again, you could always wrestle with the command line for days on end (personally I’d rather use the time more productively to drink beer and watch TV).

Due to the lack of an OSX version for the (apparently) swish and whizzy new browser from Google (Google ‘Chrome’) I thought I’d give the multi processing session concept a tryout for myself by installing the beta of Stainless on to the MacBook Air.

Stainless started out merely as a technology demo for Mesa Dynamics however due to it’s rapidly growing fan base and corresponding list of evolving features it’s continuing on toward a fully fledged release (V1.0). The present version (0.6) is still only at beta development stages however it’s already offering some nice touches above and beyond Chrome itself, to quote from the site -

“A prime example is parallel sessions, which allow you to log into a site using different credentials in separate tabs at the same time. This new technology is woven throughout Stainless, from the private cookie storage system, to session-aware bookmarks that remember the session in which they were saved”

Most useful, especially for those of us with a few Twitter accounts

Stainless is most obviously still in the development stages with no RSS menus or further extended browsing capability, however it does already have one very nice feature which virtually (for me anyway) negates the enhancements of missing technicality, namely the icon driven ‘Bookmark Shelf’ (see header image). I absolutely love it, just drag the web icon (favicon) over from the selected page into the leftside window strip, quick, easy and a nice simple alternative to those endless drop down lists of cascading bookmarks. I used to think the tab bar in Firefox was a cool idea but this takes it up (or sideways) to another level of lateral simplicity.

I’m a huge fan of graphics over lists and personally find it much easier to zip through visual recognition formats rather than by searching text, is that the same for everyone else I wonder? And if so what does it tell us about ourselves and the way *business* predominantly works with information? Take CD’s for example (yes, I hear some people do actually still own vast libraries of this antiquated physical media, however didn’t we all at some stage?), the question is how did (or do) you organise your collections? Alphabetically? Or further split down into genre? Such granularity always seemed too labour intense for me so I dropped into lining them up by colour, i.e starting with all white spines, moving into cream, to light yellow, to orange, to shades of red and flowing on into each other as the hue dictated ending with black (you get the idea?). I always knew the colour of the box and the corresponding album art (see previous post ‘Listen in Colour‘) so found it an incredibly quick method of finding the CD I wanted to listen to, not only that but there was a double bonus of the collection looking groovy and colourful racked up across the wall. Leading on from this is (I think) an interesting point regarding the inherent facility for colour tagging files and folders under the AppleMac operating systems of new and old, something which I believe says untold amounts about the Apple vs *PC* mindset.

Anyway, yes, my colour matched image freindly brain really rates the Bookmark Shelf concept and I can’t believe nobody’s thought of it before, or have they? Have I just been stuck in Firefox drop down/tab world and missed a whole new area of simple clickability? I know Safari 4 offers coverflow and the eye popping panorama view of the ‘Favourite Sites’ window but even that involves an extra click or two (clicks are a valuable commodity) and still lists the site description as text in a space hogging sidebar. The only drawback of course is that (as yet) there’s no specifically legitimate reason for every site to have it’s own bespoke web icon (although I think they should, and any site worth it’s salt actually already does) and as such you could just end up with a few generic globes. The site name does pop into view at mouse over, and you can easily drop a custom image in with a quick right click & ‘configure’ so I suppose it’s no real biggie to get things looking swish and organised if you only have a few dozen main faves (like me).

I believe it’s worth the extra effort just to fill in a few blanks for the resulting overall effect and I’m looking forward to seeing how slick the finished version is.

Download Stainless HERE