Author Archives: Richard

No Internet access in VirtualBox

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I had a bit of a problem the other day.

I run VirtualBox on Linux Mint and have a copy of Windows 7 running on a virtual machine.  I use it to run those very few programmes that don’t have a Linux equivalent.

For various reasons I decided to install a new copy of 7 and delete the old one.

The installation ran without a hitch and everything worked perfectly except for one thing – I couldn’t access the Internet.

NoInternet

I was able to browse my local network all right and to connect to and browse the other devices.  However I could not access any web sites.  I was able to ping external sites but that’s all.

I tried searching the Net for a solution and found loads of suggestions about changing the network configuration of VirtualBox, mostly suggesting I attach to Bridged Adaptor instead of NAT.  I tried all the suggestions without success, so I had to rely on my own efforts.

The solution was simple and quite obvious.

The installation of the guest software [Windows 7] had configured the Network to default values.  The IP4 was set to “Obtain an IP address automatically” and the DNS to “Obtain DNS server address automatically”.  The solution is to simply manually enter the DNS server IP addresses (I used the addresses supplied by my ISP, though any DNS servers should do).  The main IP address should be left as is, to obtain automatically.

The only thing that baffles me now is how I got the original guest Windows to work!

WordPress Admin Security

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For some unknown reason, Head Rambles is frequently targeted by hackers trying to crack the admin password.

I should point out that most will have a very hard time, as the user “admin” doesn’t exist.

I have two plugins in place – Limit Login Attempts and No Soup.  While the first automatically locks hackers out after the first few attempts, the second is a more permanent fix, whereby any IP address I get from Limit Login Attempts can be entered and thereby permanently redirected to another site. 

I decided to introduce a little bit of extra security however.  What I wanted was to block access to the wp-admin directory and also to the wp-login.php file.

In fact this is extremely easy BUT there is one proviso – this will only work if you have a static IP supplied by your ISP.  If you have a dynamic IP then do not try these.

All I did was to create a little .htaccess file for my wp-admin directory –

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Access Control"
AuthType Basic
order deny,allow
deny from all
#IP address to Whitelist
allow from 123.123.123.123

Obviously 123.123.123.123 should be replaced with your own IP address.

In theory, this is all that is required, as even if the password is hacked then entry is forbidden into the Admin directory.  I decided to go one step further, just to stop all those warnings about attempted logins and to protect the wp-login.php file.  Again this was simple.  All I had to do was to add a few lines to my root .htaccess file –

<Files "wp-login.php">
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from 123.123.123.123
</Files>

With those two in place, hacking will be be considerably more difficult.

One advantage of this method is that you can update WordPress without destroying your protection.

One disadvantage is that the site can only be updated from the one location, so if you are accessing the site from some different location [for example, on holidays] then you will be locked out.  In that event either you forgo updates until you are back at base, or you FTP into the site and rejig the .htaccess file.

Time trials

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I thought I would try a little experiment.

I use a Packard Bell Easynote LJ71, with an AMD Athlon II X2 M300, 4Gb memory and a 320Gb Hard Disk.  I have it partitioned roughly 50:50 for Windows 7 and Linux Mint 13.

My experiment was to cold start into each partition with a target of getting a particular web page to display. 

First off I booted into Windows 7.

At first, it seemed to run fairly well, with the wallpaper soon displaying, and the various desktop icons appearing.  I clicked the Quick Start icon for Firefox.

However, Windows wasn’t ready.  It promptly announced that it was doing a few updates, each of which seemed to involve downloading the entire application from scratch.  I was faces with a stream of questions about whether to install Quick Start icons, or Desktop icons.  Did I accept the licence agreement?  Did I want the programme to run after installation?

By this stage, Firefox was running but Windows insisted on grabbing all the resources for the updates.  Finally I got into the web page I was looking for, despite the fact that the anti-virus software update was still loading.

Time taken from switch on to reading the web page?  7:23.8

I then cold started into Linux.

At one stage I thought I had a slight problem as the screen stayed black for a while, but next thing the desktop and all its icons appeared.  I launched Firefox, and went straight into the website.

Time taken from switch on to reading the web page?  1:41.7

So if any of you are wondering why I go on about Linux so much?……….

Using Remote Desktop in Mint 13 Maya

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For various reasons, I use Remote Desktop Control a lot.

Yesterday I upgraded a PC to Mint 13 and went to active remote access.  There was no sign of any Desktop Sharing Preferences.

I searched the Net and found more queries than answers as apparently this is a major problem that affects both 32 and 64 bit versions.  However by combining several solutions I eventually made one that worked.

I started by creating an entry in my main menu –

Running this will load the Desktop Sharing Preferences.  Allow sharing and chose the rest of your preferences.  This sets the default so there is no need to run this again unless you wish to change preferences at a future date.

The Vino server is now running but it still will refuse access.  To fix this, I created a new entry in Startup Applications (you’ll find the latter in Control Center)

Vino2

The Command is /usr/lib/vino/vino-server –sm-disable

Next time, and every time after the machine is booted up, Desktop Sharing will be enabled and running.

Running Tweetdeck on Linux Mint 13 MATE

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I am not one of Twitter’s greatest fans.  However I do have a couple of accounts and occasionally I like to keep an eye on them.

My Twitter interface of choice is Tweetdeck, and for the last while I have been having some problems.  My original problem was that Tweetdeck requires Adobe Air, but Adobe don’t support Air for Linux any more.  I eventually sorted that one out and life was quiet for a while.

Six months ago I started using MATE as my desktop of preference and once again I ran into problems with Tweetdeck.  It refused to work on MATE but was quite happy if I logged in using Gnome.  I posted a query on this on the Mint Forums and the reply was that Tweetdeck only runs on Gnome or KDE.

I like challenges and can be quite stubborn when it comes to sorting little problems.  I have upgraded to Mint 13 MATE version and my challenge was to get Tweetdeck running as a normal application.

I decided that one way to do it would be to run Tweetdeck in Windows 7, running in VirtualBox.  I already had the latter set up so I installed Tweetdeck and tried to log in.  No go.  Possibly there was some way or fixing that, but I didn’t fancy firing up VirtualBox just to see a few Tweets anyway.

My next idea was to install Wine and to install Tweetdeck using that.  Success at last.

Tweetdeck was now running very nicely, but I had a new problem – I had to drill down to “/home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Twitter/TweetDeck” to run the programme.  Painful!  I decided to add it as an Application in my Menu.  The command I used was “wine /home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Twitter/TweetDeck/TweetDeck.exe”.  That failed.  It reported that there were files it couldn’t find.  So obviously it had to be run from within the Wine drive.

The solution is simplicity itself.

I created a small shell script that would be run by my Menu entry….

cd “/home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Twitter/TweetDeck”
wine TweetDeck.exe

I saved it as “TweetDeck.sh” in my Home folder (and of course made it executable) and ran that as an Application from my Menu.

Problem solved.