Saiweb

I should of really written about this ages ago.

SSH Keys allow you to log into a server without the need for passwords by providing a public, private keypair for authentication, you can of course choose to specify a password for the authentication for an added level of security (Allowing you to have one unified login for you servers).

For the general user I would suggest the use of a password for securing the key further, you can forgo this in the case of secured automated processes however. (i.e. server to server backup via scp).

From the client machine:

Generate the key

Follow the prompts to enter your password (or just hit enter for no password).

Copy the key

You must now copy the key to the server you wish to log in to.

Now log into the target server.

Now exit the shell on the target server, and re-login.

If you are prompted to enter a password this should be the password you entered when generating the key, if you did not specify a password you should now be logged into the target server without being prompted for a password.

This process works for both linux and MAC OSX, when generating keys as the client.

NOTE: If you regenerate the key for whatever reason this will replace the olde key pair, and you will need to go through the procedure of copying to the target server again.

As per my previous post I was faced with a serious BSOD problem.

Now this is corrected and so you do not face the same problem here are my findings

• VMWare identifies the ISO file as Vista
• 
• The ‘optional’ admin password doesn’t seem to be optional! Enter this to avoid BSOD later.
• 
• On file sharing I chose NONE
• 
• Customize your settings!
• NOTE: Set the hard disk type to IDE and NOT SCSI
• 
  
• Enjoy
• 

For those not in the know Folding@Home is a piece of software that runs in the background of your desktop, server, heck even your PS3.

I originaly started out back in 99/2000 with the united devices cancer research client, their website of UD.com however seems to have long since slipped into web history, no doubt due to their nature of charging for CPU time on ‘thier’ grid, which was made of donor machines … Folding @ Home however is Open Source and not run by some shady business but by a variety of labs and Educational bodies (http://folding.stanford.edu/English/About).

Ok so what is this ‘folding’ all about?

When protein chains combine in your body to form more complex chains, and eventualy cells the process of combination is called folding, and problems during the ‘folding’ stage can lead to Cancer, Alzheimers, Parkinson’s disease etc …

The problem faced when looking at protein folding is the shear number of possible ‘folds’ for each different type of protein, of course this is where computer power comes in, but even that has it’s limits this is where distributed computing helps.

Rather than a large super computer which is limited in budget, size and power distributed computing takes place by assigning a small work load to a ‘volunteer machine’, what this has lead to is a virtual super computer larger than any other, driven by software, and at the time of writing claims some 260,000 Active CPU’s

So please install this small piece of software on your machine by visiting the downloads page here: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download

Once you have the client running please join the Saiweb team 156680

Cheers

Buzz

NOTE:

I will be dedicated several machines to this, they will appear in the team members list prefixed buzz_ , one core from our Dedi server has also been dedicated to running F@H.

Part 2 has finally arrived …. don’t all cheer at once now …

In part two I will cover how to run an IP range scan using bash script, and if the host can be pinged retrieve the MAC address of the connected host.

Now bare in mind this script was written to run from a MAC running OSX Leopard.

To make this work on your Linux distro replace -t in the ping command with -W and check the awk entry for the arp output, a display of (no) means that no ARP entries could be found for the host, and change the IP range to that of your network.

That’s it for this part, dump this is a file and chmod +x as useual and run with ./script.sh ipscan.

As I sit here tapping away on the iMAC currently in use whilst I wait on my Mac Book Pro, I am looking at various projects around the Google APS API … One notably of which is the Google Docs, file sharing and collab system.

“MacFUSE implements a mechanism that makes it possible to implement a fully functional file system in a user-space program on Mac OS X (10.4 and above). It aims to be API-compliant with the FUSE (File-system in USErspace) mechanism that originated on Linux.”

Not much to the end user, but basically will allow you (with some programming) to mount pretty much anything as a file system volume.

The techdemo video lists implementations such as docFS (Google Doc’s API) and rssFS (rss feeds as a file system).

Looking at the hello world example on the macFuse wiki it should be fairly simple to implement pretty much anything as a file system.

More to come once the MBP arrives.