Even though we just had the nice and successful ownCloud Contributor Conference there have quite some ownCloud releases happened recently. I like to draw your attention to this for a moment, because some people seem to fail to see how active the ownCloud community actually is at the moment.

There has been the big enterprise release 9.1 on September 20th, but that of course came along with community releases which are in the focus here.

We had server release 8.0.15, server release 8.1.10, server release 8.2.8 and release 9.0.5. There are maintenance releases for the older major versions, needed to fix bugs on installations that still run on these older versions. We deliver them following this plan.

The latest and greatest server release is release 9.1.1 that has all the hardening that also went into the enterprise releases.

Aside a ton of bugfixes that you find listed in the changelog there have also been interesting changes which drive innovation. To pick just one example: The data fingerprint property. It enables the clients to detect if the server got a backup restored, and saves changes on the clients to conflict files if needed. This is a nice example of solutions which are based on feedback from enterprise customers community running ownCloud, who help with reporting problems and proposing solutions.

Talking about professional usage of ownCloud: Of course also all the server release are available as linux packages for various distributions, for example the ownCloud server 9.1.1 packages. We think that our users should not be forced to deploy from tarballs, which is error prone and not native to Linux, but have the choice to use linux packages through the distributions package management.

There also have been client releases recently: The Android client versions 2.1.1 and 2.1.2 were released with important changes for Android 7 and much more fixes, as well as iOS client versions 3.5.0 and 3.5.1. The desktop client 2.2.4 also got a regular bug fix update (Changelog).

I guess you agree that is a lot of activity shown in the ownCloud project, making sure to get the best ownCloud experience out there for the users, driven by passion for the project and professional usage in focus.

If you are interested and want to join in and make ownCloud better, jump in on ownCloud Central or Github. It’s fun!

Basics work, good. GSM does not work too well, which is kind of a problem. Camera broke between 4.7 and 4.8. That is not good, either.

If you want to talk about Linux and phones, I'll probably be on LinuxDays in Prague this weekend, and will have a talk about it at Ubucon Europe.

I see the official documentation has full tutorial for RHEL 6 or CentOS 6 and RHEL 7 or CentOS 7. The main documentation covers Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

openSUSE already has the Nextcloud client packaged in Tumbelweed and the Server is in the PHP extra repo! Personally, I prefer to install eveything from official repository, so when an update is available, I can have it without a glitch. This tutorial describes how to install Nextcloud using command line. I followed the official documentation of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installation.

Why choose openSUSE Leap? openSUSE Leap is a brand new way of building openSUSE and is new type of hybrid Linux distribution. Leap uses source from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), which gives Leap a level of stability unmatched by other Linux distributions, and combines that with community developments to give users, developers and sysadmins the best stable Linux experience available. Contributor and enterprise efforts for Leap bridge a gap between matured packages and newer packages found in openSUSE’s other distribution Tumbleweed. You can download openSUSE Leap from the site https://software.opensuse.org/.

Make sure that ssh (sshd) is enabled and also the firewall either is disabled or make an exception to the apache and ssh services. You can also set a static IP (check out how).

First of all, let's install the required and recommended modules for a typical Nextcloud installation, using Apache and MariaDB, by issuing the following commands in a terminal:


Create Database (optional since it'll create eveything automatically)
Next step, create a database. First of all start the service.


The root password is empty by default. That means that you can press enter and you can use your root user. That's not safe at all. So you can set a password using the command:


Where newpass is the password you want.

Now you set the root password, create the database.


Database user: ncuser
Database name: nextcloudb
Database user password: dbpass

You can change the above information accordingly.

PHP changes
Now you should edit the php.ini file.


change the values


and finally enable the extensions.


Apache Configuration
You should enable some modules. Some might be already enabled.


Now start the apache service.



Install Nextcloud
Before the installation, create the data folder and give the right permissions (preferably outside the server directory for security reasons). I created a directory in the /mnt directory. You can mount a USB disk, add it to fstab and save your data there. The commands are:


Now download Nextcloud (find the latest version at https://nextcloud.com/install/). Then unzip and move the folder to the server directory.


Make sure that everything is OK and then delete the folder nextcloud and nextcloud-12.0.0.zip from the root (user) directory.

Now open your browser to the server IP/nextcloud


Set your administrator username and password.
Your data directory is: /mnt/nextcloud_data
Regarding database, use the following.
Database user: ncuser
Database name: nextcloudb
Database user password: dbpass

Wait until it ends the installation. The page you'll see is the following.


For more configuration, you can follow the official documentation. That was the basic installation on openSUSE Leap.

For any changes, check the github page.

It’s been about 3 months now since I switched over to Medium from Wordpress. Now that I have had a chance to experience it a bit I think I can provide a comparison between Medium and Wordpress.

Pros

• Simple, easy to use interface, almost never have to drill down menus looking for options
• Super easy to use editor, its basically blank and you only see what you write until you want to insert something, save or publish your post
• “Reads” statistics, this lets you see how many people that visit a specific post actually bother to scroll down or read it. It’s a useful way to determine if you are doing a good job of capturing the readers interest

• Medium doesn’t do the stupid “” replacement with html character codes that Wordpress performs in code tags. This was one of the reasons I decided to leave Wordpress, the ability to disable the “feature” required paying
• Publications allow you to easily setup a system where members can submit posts that are displayed on a shared page
• Draft comments can be left by members of your publication and those you share the draft link with, allowing you to get feedback on stories before making them public
• Comments can leave tags on your article, allowing readers to easily reference sections that they are addressing

• Great embedding support, I found it very easy to embed and format things into posts. Pictures, Twitter, Videos, its all pretty nice and easy
• Lack of plugins, strangely a good thing. One of the biggest detractors of Wordpress is the terrible nature of plugin developers (and users) to never address security issues. It’s extremely common for Wordpress sites to get breached due to insecure/not updated plugins

Cons

• Lack of syntax highlighting is super annoying on Medium. I have not looked for alternatives to the default code boxes but they are not that useful. Wordpress provided some great features in its code tags.
• Cannot really mess around with the blog theme, while the default looks fine it leaves something to be desired. I actually really liked the theme from my Wordpress blog as it was simple to navigate and just showed you the content you wanted to see.
• Medium definitely does not give you as much control of the blog as Wordpress did, however this wasn't as big as a con as it may seem. Most of the time I never used any of the fancy admin features Wordpress provided (mainly because you need to pay to use them)
• Does not seem to have as much help available online as Wordpress does, makes it tricky at times when I want to do something fancy and cannot determine if Medium actually supports the feature
• Medium does not allow you to leave notes for readers which can be frustrating when you don’t want to sidetrack the main content of the blog post

Overall I think I am happy with using Medium over Wordpress. It feels more slick to me and the editor is really easy to use. While some of the issues above do leave me wanting for the functionality I had in Wordpress, I think that Medium provides an overall better experience for writing.

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My Experience With Medium was originally published in Information & Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Well if your like me and you have been sick of this Error: Failed to get gcc information. for awhile now when installing VMware Workstation on the major Linux distributions out there then you likely will want to automate the process of compiling it correctly and doing the rest of the tasks once your compile is complete.

Download my script here and run it after each time your kernel changes of course.

Let me know how your experience is with this or you would like to see some additions or adjustments.

Brian Krebs is a well-known and respected reporter who covers many different topics in the security industry, often involving data breaches and ATM skimmers. However, Krebs has always been unpopular among the financial and cyber criminals of the world given his uncanny ability to uncover the dirt on how they perform their criminal operations. He is also the author of the NYT Best Seller Spam Nation, a book detailing the operations of cyber criminals who use spam emails to make money as well as their wars with competing spammers. Check out this video below for a great talk by Krebs regarding his book.

Over the past week, Kreb’s website, KrebsOnSecurity was under a remarkably severe DDoS attack. Attacks at this scale have never really been seen before (read further below for details). As a result it’s important that the security industry develop some method to provide protection to journalists like Krebs against attacks that in the past would have been classified as a nation state capability.

What Is A DDoS Attack?

If you are not familiar with the term, DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service attack. The idea behind the attack is simple, but to understand it you need to have a basic understanding of computer networks. This is a simplified explanation but it should get the following point across.

When two computers want to communicate on the internet, they send each other messages called “packets”. These packets contain all the information needed to allow communication between the two systems. When a computer receives a packet, it must allocate some CPU and network processing time to determine the contents of the packet. Normally the computer performs these tasks so fast that they are not noticed by the user.

When a website is hosted on a server, it needs to be able to respond to multiple visitors quickly and efficiently. As such, servers are given a very high ceiling in bandwidth so they can scale to a very large amount of requests. Think of bandwidth as a pipeline, the bigger it is the more data can flow from one end to the other, but ultimately there is a finite limit (the size of the pipe).

A DDoS attack preys on this property and attempts to fill, or use up, the server’s available bandwidth. When this happens, the server is unable to respond to legitimate visitors and the website ends up appearing as offline. These attacks can be devastating for websites because they are difficult to stop and can be launched simultaneously from all over the world. Often times, the senders of these DDoS attacks are compromised computers or smart devices which are being controlled from some centralized Command & Control infrastructure operated by the actual attacker.

The Internet Of Shit

This is one of the reasons why IoT (Internet of Things) is such a stupid idea. These devices are basically never updated and even when they are shipped to users, they are buggy and have lots of security issues. IoT is basically a free distributed infrastructure being built for DDoS attackers.

Katie Moussouris on Twitter

This is #IoT in a nutshell https://t.co/F9oU4og3yc

Kevin Beaumont on Twitter

The Internet of Things

Back To Krebs

The attacks against Krebs started after he revealed the operations of vDOS a botnet for hire company run by two Israeli teenagers. It is alleged that they made over $600, 000 in two years by offering their DDoS service to take down websites.

Two weeks after the article was published, a DDoS attack at an unprecedented scale was launched against KrebsOnSecurity. It is reported by ArsTechnica that the site was sent over 620 Gigabits of data per second. It should be noted that this is one of, if not the, largest attacks to ever take place on the internet! Initially Akamai, a popular CDN (content delivery network), was able to shield Krebs from the attacks but after a few hours, around 4PM that day they notified Krebs that they would not be able to continue supporting his site and he had two hours before they stopped shielding his website. Krebs opted to shut down the site while attempting to work out a solution for this attack. For the sake of brevity I don’t want to go over the rest of the details of the attack as it is already covered in the ArsTechnica article. If you are interested in more details about the attack, I suggest you read it as well as these two posts by Krebs.

What Does This Attack Mean For Journalists?

The dystopian cyberpunk future is here.

In the Future, Hackers Will Build Zombie Armies from Internet-Connected Toasters

The scary thing about this attack is that a journalist had his website shut down by someone who didn’t like the content. What is even more concerning is it means there are single actors out there that can carry out attacks which a few years ago would have been considered the realm of powerful governments. This all means that journalists will need to take even more precautions when determining how they want to share their content. It’s clear that not even a powerful CDN like Akamai can protect them from determined attackers.

Now, more than ever, journalists need to be given protection from the growing threats of internet warfare. If we want to continue to be able to exercise our rights of free speech then we need to develop products and practices that can be used to mitigate these targeted attacks.

What are these specific products or practices? I am not sure of any silver bullet solution, as DDoS attacks are difficult to deal with. The only way (I know of) to determine if a packet was sent by an adversary is to perform some analysis on it, which means having to spend time checking its contents. If an attack is large enough, this becomes difficult to perform at scale and causes a huge increase in costs. Krebs solved this issue by registering for Google’s Project Shield, which is Google’s attempt to protect journalists from DDoS attacks. It remains to be seen if the site will stay up for the coming weeks but projects like this are definitely a good thing.

Ultimately, one thing is clear to me: while attacks at this scale are rare right now, they will likely become much more common in the coming years. As a result it is imperative that we find some definite way to protect websites and journalists from these attacks.

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Attack On Krebs was originally published in Information & Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Documentation for audio on Linux... is pretty much nonexistent.

Notice!

Update: this solution does no longer work on later versions of Fedora that switched to Wayland instead of X.org by default. If you don’t want to switch back to X.org and you’re using the GNOME desktop environment, you can enable scroll wheel emulation as outlined here.

I’ve been struggling with this for quite some time now, but I finally figured out how to enable scroll wheel emulation for the Logitech Trackman Marble on Fedora Linux 24.

Previously (when I was using Ubuntu Linux), I had a small shell script that defined the required xinput properties. However, this did not work on Fedora, as they use the new libinput framework.

With the change to the libinput subsystem, you can now enable this behavior by creating a file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-libinput.conf with the following content:

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "Marble Mouse"
 MatchProduct "Logitech USB Trackball"
 Driver "libinput"
 Option "ScrollMethod" "button"
 Option "ScrollButton" "8"
 EndSection

Magically, this function got enabled as soon as I saved the file, without even having to restart X! I’m impressed.

ownCloud is even more hiring. In my last post I wrote that we need PHP developers, a security engineer and a system administrator. For all positions we got interesting inquiries already. That’s great, but should not hinder you from sending your CV in case you are still interested. We have multiple positions!

But there is even more opportunity: Additionally we are looking for an ownCloud Desktop Client developer. That would be somebody fluid in C++ and Qt who likes to pick up responsibility for our desktop client together with the other guys on the team. Shifted responsibilities have created this space, and it is your chance to jump into the desktop sync topic which makes ownCloud really unique.

The role includes working with the team to plan and roll out releases, coordinate with the server- and mobile client colleagues, nail out future developments, engage with community hackers and help with difficult support cases. And last but not least there is hacking fun on remarkable nice Qt based C++ code of our desktop client, together with high profile C++ hackers to learn from.

It is an ideal opportunity for a carer type of personality, to whom it is not enough to sit in the basement and only hack, but also to talk to people, organize, and become visible. Having a Qt- and/or KDE background is a great benefit. You would work from where you feel comfortable with as ownCloud is a distributed company.

The ownCloud Client is a very successful part of the ownCloud platform, it has millions of installations out there, and is released under GPL.

If you want to do something that matters, here you are! Send your CV today and do not forget to mention your github account :-)