Mar 30

flickr-logoPerhaps you noticed in the top right of the page I’ve added my flickr photos. This is auto-updating, as soon as I upload new images to flickr they appear here on my site as well. And its super easy.
flickrstep1

First head over to http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne, We are going to use the HTML Badge for this. On the next step we have a few options about the type of content you’d like to display. You can choose to display all of your public photos and video or perhaps just your content with a specific tag associated with it. You can even limit it to only display content within a specific flickr set. You even have the option to display all public content from everyones uploads, and yes you can specify specific tags for this as well.

To get the layout I use, select not to display your portrait, leave the number of images to display at 3 (4 isn’t an option we will override this in the next step anyway). Choose to display your most recent images, (or you can opt to display random images) Select Square for the size and for orientation select None (Because you want to style it yourself).

flickrstep5Go ahead and skip the Colors step because we are going to style this ourselves with a bit of CSS. Don’t worry what it looks like at this step, in fact we only care about one thing on the next step, the bit of code I highlighted in the image. However we need to change this code just a bit to load 4 images instead of 3 and to make the code Valid. First lets replace all the & with & and then we need to adjust count=3 to count=4 your end code will look somewhat like this (This will pull MY 4 images not yours be sure to get the code from the flickr page to pull your images).

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.flickr.com/badge_code_v2.gne?count=4&amp;display=latest&amp;size=s&amp;
layout=v&amp;source=user&amp;user=14897087%40N04"></script>

appearance_widgetsNow that we have the little bit of code we need, lets get it ready to place in the WordPress sidebar. WordPress Widgets are also known as “sidebar accessories” which are WordPress Plugins or add-ons to your WordPress blog sidebar. Developed by Automattic for WordPress and WordPress.com blogs, WordPress Widgets allow the easy addition of design elements, gadgets, content, images, and more to your WordPress sidebar to personalize your blog without knowing HTML, PHP, or any code. Many WordPress Plugins now come with a Widget version to allow easy addition to the sidebar. One Widget type is Text which allows us to input our own HTML or Plane text, We are going to use this Widget type.

<div id="flickr">
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.flickr.com/badge_code_v2.gne?show_name=1&amp;count=4&amp;display=latest&amp;size=t&amp;layout=v&amp;source=user&amp;user=14897087%40N04"></script>
</div>

appearance_widgetseditor2Now that we have the Basic code put together, we need to style it, so we need to add some CSS to the WordPress CSS file, Don’t worry its not as hard as you think, WordPress has a built in editor for doing this. (The following Instruction’s assume your running the latest and greatest Version of WordPress, If your not UPGRADE! if you don’t know how, Use the Contact link at the top of the page or leave a comment to get ahold of me, I offer WordPress Upgrades as a service, contact me for more details)

Select Appearance from the Left Sidebar, then select Editor, okay we are going to edit the Style-Sheet at the bottom. Once the editor is up scroll all the way to the bottom and Paste the following code in.

#flickr {
width:165px;
height:150px;
margin-left:12px;
}

#flickr a img {
float:left;
margin:0 0px 8px 8px;
background:#3f4e4e;
padding:4px;
width:62px;
height:62px;
}

written by Brandon Leon \\ tags: , , , , , , ,

May 28

so you have your fresh new Ubuntu system and you log in via ssh to be greeted with

“Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
applicable law.

bla bal bla”

so you fire up vim and change the good ol /etc/motd to sometime a little more along the lines of threating anyone who misuses the system with the wrath of IT.

super your new MOTD works great untill you reboot the system. heres a little secret about Ubuntu notice the first line of the MOTD when you logd in the first time? The line about the kernel version and other system information? Well thats all there because Ubuntu generates the /etc/MOTD file during system startup so any changes you make to this file will be lost on the next reboot. Solution? Ubuntu generates the first line then appends the conents of /etc/MOTD.tail to the end and saves it as /etc/MOTD.

so to use your new MOTD you need to save your message to /etc/MOTD.tail

written by Brandon Leon \\ tags: , , ,

May 21

A while ago I wrote a bit about Shared Key Authentication for SSH, and discussed a bit about the benefits of enabling this on your own servers or even desktops. one of which is protecting your server against brute force attacks. However we never discussed that in order for your system to be truly protected from a brute force attack on your password you need to disable password authentication on your server. Please note before attempting this make sure that your keys work because if your configuring your server remotely and you disable password authentication you will lock yourself out. Once you are sure that you can log into the remote host using your private key, we can safely disable the user name/password authentication.

The procedure to set this up is extremely simple. I’ll be showing you this on a Ubuntu Server install with OpenSSH but the procedure is similar on other setups. On a Ubuntu server the file will be located in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. your going to want to add the following to the config file (or change the values if they already exist.

ChallengeResponseAuthentication no
PasswordAuthentication no
UsePAM no

Once you save the changes you’ll need to reload the SSH server with the following command.

User@Host:~$ /etc/init.d/ssh reload

Thats it, your server should no longer accept user name/password authentication.

written by Brandon Leon \\ tags: , , , ,