Putzing around last Sunday, I decided to give MPD a try. I store all my MP3 files on my desktop computer, which runs Ubuntu and I’ve wanted to be able to control music playback on that machine from my laptop, wherever I happen to be lazing about at home.

I had a bit of a hard time getting MPD set up, working and compiling a database. The main issue was file permissions, but once I got that hammered out, installed MPC so I could run commands, it worked nicely.

However, I much prefer a GUI to manage music, so I hunted around for a front-end for MPD. I first tried gmpc, which worked fine. But, I need support for last.fm and to handle this with with gmpc, you have to compile a plugin, which was a huge bitch.

While trying to get through the plugin compile, I stumbled on Sonata, which seemed popular and well regarded and contains built-in support for last.fm. Also, it’s in the Ubuntu repositories, which is a big plus for me. So, I dropped gmpc and gave it a try.

Sonata works well, it displays album art and all that fun stuff, but doesn’t have the smart playlists that I’ve grown used to with Amarok and exaile, which were two programs I’ve loved and relied on in the past. Truth told, it’s low on features, but so are most MPD front-ends. It works, though. It handles last.fm and doesn’t look too fugly. I’m going to stick with it for a while and see how it goes, since I really like being able to run a central music server. But, if there’s a better front-end out there, I’d like to know about it.

I am officially the coolest dude in Brooklyn (in my head at least). I have my very own Tor t-shirt! A few weeks ago one of the developers of the software emailed me to let me know that I had been running a fast Tor server for some time now and he asked me if I wanted a free t-shirt. Naturally I said yes. Soon after, I received a package with the shirt. It’s the coolest, ever. Click the thumbnails if you want a better look at the front and back.

Tor is a free program that provides onion routing anonymity for just about any program using the TCP protocol (browsing, blogging, instant messaging, IRC and SSH to name a few of the uses). In this day and age, with privacy rights getting raped, prison-style and draconian governments throwing people in prisons for thought crimes, it’s a good and necessary thing to have and to support. I run Tor on a Linux server (Ubuntu) I rent somewhere in Florida to give back to the network I occasionally use. I don’t really use the server for much, so I don’t limit the bandwidth I give to Tor, allowing it to be one of the faster middlemen in the web of servers that make up the Tor network. I think it’s pretty cool shit.

Tor is available for Linux, Windows and Mac. The project is non-profit and is supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and people like you (if you’re cool) and me (I’m so totally neat). You should download Tor, in case you should ever need it. If you have some free bandwidth, consider running a Tor server. You can also help the project by donation. If all of this isn’t your bag of nuts, you might want to think about becoming a member of the EFF and supporting the fight to protect digital rights and privacy. It’s all good shit.

Several times a day, computers somewhere in India or China (usually) launch brute force and dictionary attacks on my server to try and get SSH access. To anyone running their own server who regularly browses their SSH logs (/var/log/secure or /var/log/auth.log, depending on your distro) this is old news. Checking my logs, I’d see 80-100 failed login attempts from a single IP address trying a whole ass-load of non-existant user names and passwords.

I have SSH locked down fairly well, with remote root logins off and disabling password authentication in favor of RSA based keys. However, I opted to leave SSH on the default port 22, which undoubtedly accounts for all the attacks. Usually, I’d place the offending IP in my /etc/hosts.deny file, banning it for eternity with an “ALL:[bad IP address]“. Still, this meant that I banned them after the fact.

So, I installed DenyHosts. It’s a python script that can run as a daemon, monitoring my /var/log/auth.log for login attempts using non-valid users and/or passwords. After a few failed or invalid logins, the attacking IP is automatically added to /etc/hosts.deny, nipping a prolonged attack in the bud—just the way I like it.

DenyHosts is highly configurable, letting you you specify all types of rules such as how many failed logins are allowed before banning, specifics of what services to ban and for how long (hours, years, eternity). You can have DenyHosts email reports to you and also have it synchronize against a master list of bad IPs that’s bolstered by over 4,000 users. It’s pretty damn cool. In one day, I had three separate attacks, promptly caught and banned.

I have a remote server running Ubuntu that I rarely use. I pay something like thirty bucks a month to have it and really only use it as a squid proxy to get around my office’s firewall and in public wifi situations where I might need some privacy.

I’ve been using the anonymous proxy service, Tor for about three years. I don’t use it regularly, but I like having it around and knowing it’s there to use. Every once and a while, I see a reason to use it, but it’s the idea of Tor that has me installing it on all my computers.

So, I decided that I should install Tor on my underused server to give a little back to the service. By installing Tor, my server joins the many others out there, providing anonymous gateways to the web, without leaving traces. I’ve no idea what people may do using Tor through my server—be it shady or innocent, which is good because this lack of knowledge keeps me from being liable for any misuse.

While I was going through the grind of getting Tor running properly, I also decided to install Boinc, or the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (phew!). I’ve been contributing to the Seti@home project, assisting in the search for extraterrestrial intellignece for about four years with my desktop computers. Since the server is always on, I figured it was a great idea. Trying to run a boinc client via command line is pretty fucking annoying, but once I found a decent howto, I was up and running pretty fast.

I also attached the boinc client on my server to the Rosetta@home project, calculating the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins so that researches can hopefully find some cures for various diseases.

Fun.

In a fit of impulse geekitude, I’ve rented a dedicated server. It runs Ubuntu Linux, which is what I run at home and am currently writing this post with, so the ground is familiar, however I’ll have to get used to managing things entirely by command line. Something I should be doing regardless.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do about this website. Davebgimp.com is hosted on a shared server with BlueHost, who are seriously superb webhosts, IMHO. My account is paid in advance with them for another fifteen months, so probably I’ll just leave this website where it is.

For the near future, I’ll mainly be using this new-fangled server as a secure proxy host so I can get around redundant web filtering and also safely use open wifi spots without risking my passwords and data. I have a few other domains registered that I suppose I could move over to it, maybe even set up a mail server, I’m not sure. I’ve never really run a server before, so it’s all new shit to me.