Tag: linux

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Keeping Things Private – Stripping JPEG Metadata

There are more things than we know that can be revealed by your JPEG EXIF metadata such as the type of camera you use, aperture settings, the type of focus, lens type and even the location of the picture taken that might compromise the privacy of the persons or locations depicted in the photograph.

Mypapit EXIF data gnome

One of the things that we can do to is to strip away the information from JPEG files before uploading them to the internet, by using exiftool or jhead.

Exiftool
Install libimage-exiftool-perl
sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl

and by running the command
exiftool -all= *.jpg

jhead
Install jhead package:
sudo apt-get install jhead

and by running the command
jhead -purejpg /path/to/*.jpg

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Howto solve ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host error

I’ve keep getting the message “ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host error” after I managed to finalized my CRUX linux on my decTOP box today. After enough looking into documentations, I finally found out that I need to edit the “/etc/hosts.allow” file to allow SSH connection, for example:


#/etc/hosts.allow
sshd:ALL

or for more conservative setting


#/etc/hosts.allow
sshd:LOCAL
sshd:192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0

I can connect ssh to my box normally after that.

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Debian: Force users to use more secure login password with pam_cracklib

One of the factor that makes your system easily crackable is the weak password. PAM cracklib forces users to choose stronger password by analyzing the password strength, length and entropy.

To enable pam_cracklib in Debian / Ubuntu operating system, you need to install libpam_cracklib:

sudo apt-get install libpam_cracklib

Then edit the “/etc/pam.d/common-password” file using your favorite editor. Then, add and uncomment the following line at the end of the file.

password required pam_cracklib.so retry=3 minlen=6 difok=3

difok determines the number of same characters that allowed to be present in the old and new passwords.

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Ubuntu: How to erase CD-RW/DVD-RW from Command-line

Here’s an easy way to erase CD-RW and DVD-RW from command-line in Ubuntu:

you only need to install ‘wodim’ package:
sudo apt-get install wodim
Then run:
wodim -scanbus
To search for the cdrw device in case if you don’t already know.

To erase the entire disk, run:
wodim dev=/dev/cdrom blank=fast

That’s all!

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Microsoft Windows XP on vanilla AMD decTOP (Geode) – wished Linux GUI is this light

This is a continuation from my post of running Android on my AMD decTOP machine.

Of all Linux distribution that I tried, I found out that only Puppy Linux offered a usable GUI desktop environment on a plain vanilla AMD decTOP out of the box, but that is not without some effort on the installer side.

On the other hand, it is very easy to get Windows XP running on a plain vanilla AMD decTOP, without additional hardware upgrades. Here is my prove.

It seems Windows XP is more tolerant to low end desktops (or in this case, decTOP) than Linux operating system for fully GUI environment. Are we getting bloated?

AMD decTOP specs
RAM: 128MB RAM DDR2
HDD: 10GB IDE
Processor: AMD Geode GX 500, 366 MHz clock rate