Saturday, March 6, 2010

Install Linux in USB pen drive

Now a days every one have a USB flash drive with them.Now what if a cool small Linux OS is installed on it and booting from the flash drive with the expense of merely a 200 MB space. I think its quiet cool to have a pen drive installed with an operating system. Today I am going to discuss the same thing with you people.

There are a number of Linux distros available for installing in a flash drive. However I think 'Slax' is the coolest one and here I am selecting the same in this post. Slax is actually a customized version of the famous 'Slaxware Linux'. The Slax will give you a full fledged Live OS environment from your pen drive.

Let me give you an intro of the slax distro. As I mentioned earlier, slax is a stripped down version of the Slaxware Linux. It is available in two formats, .iso and .tar. However the contents of both are same. You can convert the iso image to tar and vice verse. Actually the iso is for writing to a compact disk and booting from it. The tar is meant for installing to a flash drive. It can be installed directly to a variety of storage devices like flash key, MP3 player, or even to a hard disk. the slax installer is all set to make the device in which you are installing it bootable and hence it will be like a fully functional operating system. It can be installed on the pen drive using a Windows box of Linux box.


Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Labeling a Linux partition - Volume Labels

Here we shall discuss about labeling a Linux partition and its advantages. 

You might have seen labeled partitions if you have opened and viewed the /etc/fstab file. There you can see that the 'root', 'home', 'boot, and other system partitions are labeled and are mounted using the label rather than referring the device name. The advantage is that, the root partition will be the same even if the device name got changed in an unlikely event during the system startup. The volume labels make the partition retain a consistent name regardless of where they are connected and what else are connected. And for your information such an unlikely event of changing the device name is quiet often if you are mounting mounting multiple iSCSI drives to your system. 

Hope you know about the iSCSI target and initiator stuffs, it is the low cost, high efficient alternative for costly storage solutions. Hope I could give you an elaborate post about iSCSI soon coz that too is one of my hot favorite topic.  However here we will discuss about labeling the Linux partition labeling.

setuid File Permission in UNIX/Linux

In this post I am going to describe you about the 'setuid' in UNIX and Linux.

setuid or 'set user ID upon execution' and setgid or 'set group ID upon execution' are UNIX access right flags which are used to allow users to run an executable file with the permission of the executable file's owner or group. If the setuid is enabled for an executable file, the user executing the file will get permissions of the user or group that owns the executable file. This is very useful for allowing users on a computer system to run programs with temporarily elevated privileges for performing a particular task. 

These programs are needed for performing some tasks like 'ping' from an unprivileged user. The ping executable in /usr/bin folder is set with setuid bit on and consider its owner is root. So that whenever the ping command is used it is executed with elevated privileges and hence all the unprivileged users can use the ping command unless they are explicitly blocked form using it via some other means. By this hope you got the concept of setuid. Please continue reading for knowing more about setting, listing and more about setuid. 

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

SSH login to remote servers without password.

Hello guys this time I give you a how-to for logging into a remote server/desktop without being prompted for password.

SSH or Secure Shell is a program that allows you to log into a remote machine over a network and execute commands. It also allows you to move files from one computer to another. All the communication including password transmission are highly encrypted. Hence it can be used to create a secure communication over insecure channels. It protects a network from attacks like DNS spoofing, IP spoofing and IP source routing. Thats the reason why the SSH has effectively replaced older remote log in protocols like rlogin, rsh, rcp, telnet etc.

While using SSH log in entire communication including password transmission is is encrypted. SSH uses 3DES, Blowfish, AES and arcfour as encryption algorithms. So it is virtually impossible for a hacker to eavesdrop your password. Here I will describe how to create a secure communication channel between two servers securely and enable password-less login between them. This would be quiet useful while using scripts for logging into remote machines and executing commands. You don't have to store the remote machine's password in the script and also it is quiet annoying to type in password every time you log in to the remote machine via SSH.