Month: July 2011

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PPSPPA (Sisa Pepejal) goverment agency uses Ubuntu in its office branches

PPSPPA or Perbandanan Pengurusan Sisa Pepejal dan Pembersihan Awam is a government agency in Malaysia that uses Ubuntu in its offices. PPSPPA has branches in every state in the Peninsular, including the HQ and training center in Putrajaya, all of it runs Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating system.

PPSPPA Logo Sisa Pepejal

As such, PPSPPA only uses hardware which runs in Ubuntu, including printers, scanners and drawing tablets. Which is a good sign for vendors to start releasing their hardware drivers for open source operating systems.

Hopefully other government agency would follow suit and use free and open source operating system instead the one that requires millions RM of site license. It is not the license that concerns us, but it is the grip of monopoly of a single corporation has over governments and economy that is most concerning.

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I’m Getting The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation Book by Jono Bacon

Art of Community

I’m getting “The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation“, a book written by Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager (UCM).

In this book, Jono offers a collection of experiences and observations from his involvement in building and managing communities, including his current position as Ubuntu Community Manager, arguably the largest community in open source software.

The content of the book, will help you to:

  • Develop a strategy, with specific objectives and goals, for building your community
  • Build simple, non-bureaucratic processes to help your community perform tasks, work together, and share successes
  • Provide tools and infrastructure that let contributors work quickly
  • Create buzz around your community to get more people involved
  • Track the community’s work so it can be optimized and simplified
  • Explore a capable, representative governance strategy for your community
  • Identify and manage conflict, including dealing with divisive personalities

This book is useful to those who are in a position that manages and responsible towards online communities, including day-to-day management, governance, managing conflics and how to promotes the community effectively.

An online preview is this book is available from Amazon Bookstore
“, a book written by Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager (UCM). website.

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Where all the Blog XML RPC ping sites have gone…?

I found out something interesting when I’ve gone through my WordPress setting, it seems that the once famous XML-RPC ping sites are either out-of-service or have been taken down.

The one standing up until today is Ping-o-Matic and venerable Weblogs (the first blog XML-RPC ping service).

I once tried to run one of such services to in order to study spam blogs behavior, but it ends up eating too much server resources with too much noise coming from all the submission, I ended the experiment just over one-year.

Probably this is what happening around the world, ping sites gotten shut-down because of being overwhelmed. The remaining option of promoting blog posts is through social status updating site such as Facebook, Twitter and Buzz (also identi.ca!).

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3 Reasons Behind why I Hate CPanel Web Hosting

Adding Subdomain / Domain creates a subdirectory
Adding Subdomain, and add-on Domain is a pain-in-the-ass as it creates a subdirectory in the root web directory, meaning that any web-users can abuse this by adding trailing subdirectory ‘subdomain’ http://yourdomain.com/subdomain/ to access http://subdomain.yourdomain.com/

Outdated Pre-package Software
Cpanel came with outdated pre-packaged software, PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL and other libraries that is outdated compared to the one available on the host operating system. The problem is not about how outdated the software packages are, but the how often these package are being patched. CPanel vendor very notorious for not providing timely patches which would compromise the security of the web application.

Can’t change DNS setting easily from the panel
Unlike DirectAdmin, CPanel does not offer an easy way to change DNS record of domain easily as the option is not offered by default to the control panel. Although this can be mitigated by having your domain points to a 3rd party NS, it’s still one of the thing that gets me down with CPanel.

My Thoughts
CPanel is an excellent control panel for beginner as it offers a lot of options and functionality with a simple user-interface. However, personally, I prefer to use other control panel such as DirectAdmin or Plesk for my web hosting use.

p/s: Currently I’m on VPS without standard control panel.

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Limiting the number of connections to SSH Server using Iptables

This is the quickest way to limit the number of connection to your SSH server with iptables.

[bash]
sudo /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -p tcp –syn –dport 22 -m connlimit –connlimit-above 5 -j REJECT
[/bash]

This will only allow up to 5 concurrent connections to the SSH server, subsequent connections will be rejected by iptables, thus this can thwarts Brute-force attempts to your server.

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