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!

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.

I feel compelled to write this short post, hopefully to help spread the information for anyone who even thinks about believing the goldstone report. Those who wrote the report had made their decision before even beginning the inquiry.

It’s anti-Semitic, and intentionally sides with the terrorists.

Going back to the first sentence in the post, what other army in the world, let alone the small pocket of the world called the middle east, would call their target allowing them to escape, before launching the attack? Something Israel has done countless times in an mind boggling effort to save civilian lives.

“The Goldstone Report was born in bias and matured into a full-fledged miscarriage of justice.”

Who Else Thinks So?

• Goldstone Report is Deceitful
  IDF chief says army began investigating itself before “we heard of Goldstone.”
• The Case Against Goldstone Report: Study in Evidentiary Bias
  Read the full text of Alan Dershowitz’s highly detailed rebuttal of the Gaza war report.
• Deputy Chief of Staff: Goldstone Report a Trojan Horse
  The Goldstone report is a Trojan horse; it gives terrorist organizations
  legitimacy to fight us from urban populations.
• Livni: Probe will legitimize distorted war report
  The IDF is a moral army that avoids hurting civilians. The Goldstone Report is one-sided and supports the position of Hamas, who fired Qassams at Israel’s civilians.
• The Case Against the Goldstone Report
  The Goldstone Report is much more scurrilous than most of its detractors (and supporters) believe.

Those are just a few.

On a side note, please forgive the production quality. I was experimenting a bit too much with this episode. First both of us were recording live using the same microphone so editing turned out to be difficult, and then I was working with new software which I still am not used to. Anyway, enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Download iTunes File]

- 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.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Using an iPod/iPhone?)

2009 was good.      BUT we can do A LOT BETTER!
And so my hope is that’s what 2010 will be about. A focused direct energy on something that is extremely important. Much like a laser beam. And we’ll see what happens.

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.

(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.

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.

Session #1

Click here to view the embedded video.

Session #2

Click here to view the embedded video.

Session #3

Click here to view the embedded video.

Session #4

Click here to view the embedded video.

Session #5

Click here to view the embedded video.