SSH Server And “Permission denied (publickey).”

This drove me up a wall, yet it’s so simple, and so easy to overlook.

If you ever setup a server with SSH public key authentication, and you get the following error:

Permission denied (publickey).

Make sure you do the following:

• Make sure the permissions of the .ssh folder are 0700
• Make sure the permissions of the authorized_keys file are 0600
• Make sure the user owns the .ssh folder and contents (normally that’s the case but just to make sure)

For example from the home folder of the user you are trying to setup, use these commands:

sudo chown -R username:username /home/username/.ssh
sudo chmod 0700 /home/username/.ssh
sudo chmod 0600 /home/username/.ssh/authorized_keys

Especially if you’re on Amazon EC2 which uses public key authentication by default, this is very important when setting up new users. And with modern Linux distros like Ubuntu this is very easy.

Happy secure terminalling!

2010 Winter Games Live Streaming Requires Silverlight

Just when I thought the internet was headed to good pasture, I check out what internet streaming is going on for the 2010 Olympic Winter games here in Vancouver. What shall I find? But low and behold.. And I mean low. They are streaming using Microsoft Silverlight.

Until now I have refused to install it, I’ll probably end up installing it just for this and uninstalling it right after. But hey, they are streaming in 720p HD which is not bad. And I believe it’s even using H.264 so not a Microsoft specific codec. But still, I just don’t like it! This is bad for the open web, and bad for the non-Microsoft web. I know very well what Microsoft’s plan was for the internet. Thanks for the likes of Mozilla, Google, and Apple their plans have been thwarted. I just hope it continues.

ESET Antivirus (NOD32) for Mac OS X Update

On December 6th I wrote a short little post about ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4 Beta for Mac OS X. On January 08 2010 they released an updated build which has the following changelog:

- Fixed GUI failure that had occurred in some cases during configuration imports
- System font warnings no longer display
- Added advanced “About” window and “Splash” screen
- Added information windows about detected and cleaned infiltrations
- Support for selection of multiple items from lists

So compared to my last post, have any of the issues I addressed changed? No they haven’t. So let me go through my experiences with this new build.

USB and Other Removable Drives

When attempting to eject (or unmount) a removable USB drive, you get a message saying “The disk “XXXX” wasn’t ejected because one or more programs may be using it.
To eject the disk immediately, click on the Force Eject button.”

The you can either Cancel or Force Eject.

This issue only occurs when running NOD32, otherwise drives work just fine. Also in certain situations the mounting of drives including network shares can be quite time consuming.

TrueCrypt

I am a heavy TrueCrypt user. When attempting to mount a TrueCrypt volume (I mostly use container or file based volumes) the following error message occurs:

“hdiutil: attach failed – Permission denied”

I also mentioned this error in my previous blog post, and also submitted a ticket to ESET about this. No response.

More…

Of course there are other things we could talk about as well. I still strongly desire that there be a way to remove the system menu icon. There’s already a Dock icon and there should be a way to disable either one of them. At least a way to disable the menu bar icon as it just takes unnecessary space.

Also disabling the real-time protection still does not require administrator authentication. Even if you are logged in as an administrator user you should still be prompted for your password to disable real-time protection.

And one more thing, the uninstaller is not user friendly. Which of course I was forced to do again as without TrueCrypt I’m toast. The uninstaller actually launched a command line script and you’re prompted for your password from a terminal window. This is not something I would expect a normal user to do, and it would be a 15min task to bundle that script into a package just like the installer. Even an applescript bundle is better than that.

So that’s it. I still say good on ESET for doing this, but c’mon, listen to the people who actually use and sell your product.

Update [2010-01-18]

Just got a response from ESET on these issues, and quoting it here:

Thank you for your feedback on our EAV4 beta version for Mac OS. The updates installation package was released to quickly address some most important issues. It is not meant as the next beta version release which will contain more fixes.
Several issues mentioned in your articles are already known to us (dock and menu icon, TrueCrypt error) and will be fixed in the future.
…..

Thanks for the response, and hopefully once the TrueCrypt problem is fixed I can continue testing the product.

R1Soft Versus Bacula

When implementing a backup system for a network of Windows servers I evaluated R1Soft and Bacula, and thought it might be nice to share some thoughts here on the amazing blog!

So, the main differences. As of now R1Soft is $348 (up from $180 two weeks ago). Bacula is free and completely open source with an option of commercial support.
R1Soft has a very nice web interface for managing all the systems, and setup configuration is extremely easy.

Also the Bacula server (storage and director) component is not supported on Windows. Only on Linux/UNIX systems. But it works as that’s what I’m running currently with Bacula 3.0.3a.

Bacula has many of the same features as R1Soft, but the fact that everything is configured through text configuration files can be a turn-off for some people as it is quite a learning curve. If you just want to get it done without a fuss, R1Soft is your choice. In my case I decided to save a few thousand dollars by learning Bacula and implementing it.

Also Bacula stores the backups in monster volume files while R1Soft uses a more file based structure which I do prefer. Although performance does seems to actually be better with Bacula during a backup.

Overall I decided to go to Bacula solely on price. If R1Soft was still at $180/agent I would have seriously considered going with them because of official Windows server support and awesome web gui interface. But free software won again, despite the initial challenge of learning a new configuration file specification.

I might have to teach a course now to make some ROI for learning the stuff.

How to Create Video Thumbnails Using VLC 1.0

Apparently creating video snapshots, thumbnails, whatever you want to call them with VLC 1.0.2 or later has really changed, and everything out there that I found simply didn’t work.

When I tried to use the documentation I found available the lovely error message came up saying:

The command line options couldn’t be loaded, check that they are valid.
Press the RETURN key to continue…

So I’m on a Windows XP virtual machine but this same thing applies to Linux and Mac OS X. So how can you easily from the command line script the creation of a thumbnail, snapshot, image, etc. from a video?

Here you go!

"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" --video-filter scene -V dummy
    --scene-height=128 --scene-width=128 --scene-format=jpeg --scene-replace
    --scene-ratio 24 --start-time=6 --stop-time=7 --scene-prefix=thumb
    --scene-path="C:\thumbs"  C:\videos\video_file.mp4 vlc://quit

Now you are probably asking, can you please explain what all those flags and arguments mean? OK.

• –video-filter : This adds post-processing filters to enhance the picture quality, for instance deinterlacing, or distortthe video. In this case we’re using the scene filter for snapshots.
• -V : Specifies a video output module. We don’t want the video to actually play so it’s set to dummy
• –scene-height : The height of the snapshot in pixels
• –scene-width : The width of the snapshot in pixels
• –scene-format : Format of the image. Can be jpeg or png.
• –scene-replace : Replaced the resulting image each time. Remove this flag to have the file named in sequential order.
• –scene-ratio : Ratio of images to record. 3 means that one image out of three is recorded.
• –start-time : Start at this position in seconds
• –stop-time : Stop at this position in seconds
• –scene-prefix : Name the image file with this name. If scene-replace is not specified the file will be named prefixXX.
• –scene-path : Path on file-system to store the snapshots
• C:\video\video_file.mp4 : path to video input file
• vlc://quit : Quit once the process is finished

So, all the best as you try to script the creation of your thumbnail images!

More info: This is working with VLC 1.0.3.

ESET NOD32 Antivirus for Mac OS X Review

(Note: An updated review post is now online)

So, this is one of the last things I thought I’d ever do on my mac. But I installed the beta of ESET antivirus on my laptop this last week after it was available.

It’s seems to be just as good as the Windows version, in fact if I could say so I think it’s even better than the Windows version GUI wise. But in fact it’s really much the same.

There’s only one improvement I could suggest, and that’s a way to disable the icon on the apple menu bar. The dock icon is plenty enough.

Wait! There’s more.

It seems that Truecrypt is not able to mount a volume with ESET running, even if the real-time auto protection is disabled. You see an error message that reads “hdiutil: attach failed – Permission denied”
The only solution that I’ve found is to uninstall ESET NOD32, which I’ve done. And I’m running OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

Finally one more thing that I believe could be improved upon, is the real-time protection disablement. In order to disable real-time protection you should be prompted for administrator authentication. Currently that is not the case.

eStarling TouchConnect

So, because I figured there’s many people on the internet just like myself, who want to get a video onto the eStarling TouchConnect device, (a connected touchscreen picture/photo frame kind of deal). Here’s some tips on video support as there is no documentation at all.

So they say they support MPEG-4 video, but don’t be fooled. That does not mean H.264. I tried many different encoding variations but to no avail. So when encoding video for the eStarling, make sure that you’re using plain old MPEG-4. And also make sure the file size is not more than 20MB as that is the maximum file size.

Mozilla Raindrop Continued….

As promised this evening I continued my adventure with Mozilla Raindrop. This time configuring it with a couple of accounts. A Gmail account and a Twitter account.

Thoughts:
- As before I found the process very easy. Even though the current prototype requires me to create a .raindrop config file and I’m concerned that the passwords on this config file are not hashed or anything, which I suppose is not possible for technical reasons. I’d rather have the passwords stored in some secured database.

- It synced the Gmail account just fine, and immediately auto-detected two of the mailing lists that existed in the account and synced the folders without a problem. But I am interested to see how immediate the IMAP synchronization is. I would like to see it use the IMAP idle command to make messages come in almost instantly as Mac Mail does. But remember this is a prototype so I don’t expect a finished product here, in fact I’m interested in possibly writing my own raindrop plugin for server alert systems.

- Also the Twitter account I added worked very well, the recent tweets all appeared and Raindrop imported all the accounts I was following as contacts along with their thumbnail images. Very nice.

There are two things which after about 10 minutes of playing with it I’m wondering about. There an ability to send a message. How do you define where that message is supposed to go to.
Can this replace a normal email client? I think it has the potential. But like we all know this is prototype, and there’s a bunch of great people working on it!

Mozilla Raindrop First Impressions

I’ve installed Mozilla Labs Raindrop 0.1 on my local machine running Mac OS X 10.6 (Leopard).

First impression, it’s very easy to install and get going with from a technical point of view. I already had macports installed and so I installed couchdb, mercurial, and most of the python dependencies using macports for easy management and the ability to easily upgrade them.

After that it was just a matter of running the raindrop configure script which downloaded the extras like twitter, skype, and paisley python modules and away we go!

So that’s it for now, at the side you’ll see a screenshot of the browser window I get right now. It’s not configured yet or anything like that, but more is coming!

This Isn’t Just Any Raindrop

From Mozilla Labs, introducing Mozilla Labs Raindrop!

You thought I was excited about Google Wave? Just wait until you see what happens with Mozilla Raindrop.

Here’s a short video:

Currently a 0.1 prototype, I don’t think we can compare this with Google Wave just yet. It seems to be more of an RSS reader than a whole new way of communication. An aggregator of sorts.
It takes your email, twitter, facebook, etc. messages and combines them all in once place.

But I have not checked it out in detail yet, but will be sure to post more if I do!

Latest Flip4Mac WMV Beta Installs Microsoft Silverlight by Default

So this is what the world has succumb to. I had been careful not to install the Silverlight virus on my computers since it’s inception, but today I almost got tricked into it. This is bad.

UPDATE!! Here’s a little script you simply double click on to remove Silverlight from your computer.

• Download Removal Application Script
  

64-bit Firefox Up and Running!

From Josh Aas, “We got 64-bit Firefox running on Mac OS X today.”

And yes, I have gone back to Firefox. Actually currently I’m using a combination of Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome.