Tag Archives: howto

How to return to the moon in just four years

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In a four-launch scenario, the lander would precede the crew to the moon. The first two launches would be a moon injection stage followed by a lunar lander. These two vehicles would rendezvous in Earth’s orbit before the moon injection stage would send the lander ahead to the moon. The next two Falcon launches would carry a second moon injection stage and then the crew in their capsule/service module. After a similar boost in a moon-injection stage, they would meet up with the lander in lunar orbit.

The rest of the mission would be like the Apollo mission — Americans on the moon, once again taking giant leaps for mankind.

via How to return to the moon in just four years | Fox News.

How to set up your own private instant messaging server

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The video below will walk through the process of setting up and installing Prosody, a lightweight Lua-based instant messaging server application. We’ll be using Ubuntu 12.04 for our server, though Prosody is a cross-platform application and will run on Windows, OS X, and a number of different Linuxes. Strap in, grab your server, and let’s roll!

via How to set up your own private instant messaging server | Ars Technica.

Setting up a man-in-the-middle device with Raspberry Pi, Part 1

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The regular install on a Raspberry Pi is NOOBS (new out-of-box software) and contains several pre-packaged operating systems. However for the purpose of our MITM device we’ll be using a different Linux distro for our Pi: PwnPi. PwnPi is a distribution of the Raspbian OS that contains many pre-installed packages for security and penetration testing which is naturally right up our alley. So, go ahead and download PwnPi. Once it’s downloaded we’ll need to load it onto our SD card. First, format your SD card using the SD card formatter from the SD association. If the “size” value shown in the formatter is less than the size of your card, be sure to choose “format size adjustment” in the card.

via Setting up a man-in-the-middle device with Raspberry Pi, Part 1 | jeffq, published.

Amazon AWS Route 53 GEO DNS Configurations

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You can send visitors to different servers based on country of their IP address using Amazon Route 53 cloud based dns server. For example, if you have a server in Amsterdam, a server in America, and a server in Singapore, then you can easily route traffic for visitors in Europe to the Amsterdam server, people in Asia go to the Singapore server and those in the rest of the world be served by the American server.

via Amazon AWS Route 53 GEO DNS Configurations.

In this post, I will explain how to configure and test GeoDNS using AWS Route 53 service.

Using iptables and PHP to create a captive portal

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There are various captive portal software packages available (both free and open source) that will allow you to setup an internet access facility that people have to logon to first. None of the packages I tried did what I wanted and they were not particularly customisable. Therefore I created my own, using a few iptables rules and PHP (along with a handful of other standard packages). This page details the steps that were taken. The key to this method as opposed to other iptables based solutions is that tracking information is removed after the user has signed up. Failure to do this will sometimes cause the user to still be redirected to your logon page even after they have signed up.

via Using iptables and PHP to create a captive portal – Andywiki.

Captive portals allow for a splash screen to be delivered to a user upon entering an open network such as free wifi hotspots at various establishments.  This portal typically shows terms of service and displays some branding.  The user hits OK and then they’re free to use the network.  I find this burdensome but in the world of branding and advertising I can understand why places may want this.  I found the above iptables only solution with some PHP interesting.  Here’s another site.

For Squid users it appears to be even easier by only requiring some configuration changes.  See  Portal Splash Pages for more information.

Syncing an Android Tablet to a PC

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Android tablets don’t have an automatic method or desktop management software to sync your files from the device to a personal computer. However, there is a way to do it manually, a process which requires mounting the device so the computer recognizes its file system, then moving pictures, videos and other data to the computer’s local hard drive.

via Syncing an Android Tablet to a PC | Chron.com.

This entire site seems like a good reference on many topics relaing to  using tablets based on android.

Build a Skype Server for Your Home Phone System

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Configure Linux to Work with Skype

I’ll assume that because you’re a Linux Journal reader, getting Fedora Core 3 up and running on your Skype server is a no-brainer. The only important thing to remember is that Skype is a Qt application (though it’s also available in a version with Qt statically linked), and the Skype API uses D-BUS. Also, disable the screensaver (after all, there won’t be any screen to “save”) and power standby features as these may interfere with Skype.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to setting up Linux to work with Skype (it assumes you have set up a Linux user account named skype for the purpose):

via Build a Skype Server for Your Home Phone System | Linux Journal.