Month: May 2014

Installing Tor Client on Ubuntu

The use of Tor software to hide your network activity occasionally comes up in the main stream news media as being only for illegal purposes such as drugs or pornography. There are however many instances where individuals or groups rely upon their activity being hidden from prying eyes. Examples are… Journalists, politicians and even common citizens that don’t want to have their personal information gathered and shared/sold.

Installing the client software is easy for most platforms. You can download and verify the signatures from the Tor website to be absolutely certain. If you trust the maintainers of the Ubuntu PPA’s or other compilations, you can also do so… (with appropriate precautions):

INSTALLATION:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/tor-browser
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tor-browser

REFERENCES:

sudo – what is it?

If you’ve been following my posts for a while, you will have also noticed the use of the sudo command in a lot of the Unix/Linux configuration and setup instructions. This is because of the security model used by these operating systems. Users generally have limited access, and only the ‘root’ or admin accounts has greater access. A common convention is to use the sudo command to allow for temporary (usually 5 minutes at a time) permission to make changes, using escalated rights for an existing non root user.

It’s often best to think of “sudo” as “mother may I”, as the server administrator can give users access to some (but not all) commands.

Permissions are stored in a file that can be edited in a variety of manners (do so carefully):
/etc/sudoers

To give an existing user permission to use sudo…

sudo adduser USERNAME sudo

REFERENCES:

LinSSID

If you have ever used the popular software InSSIDer on Windows or OS/X, you might wonder if there is an equivalent application for Ubuntu/Linux.

LinSSID allows you to visually survey the Wifi networks in your area, identifying networks using the same channel as your own, even if they are not broadcasting SSID’s.


sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wseverin/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linssid

— OR —

sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/wseverin/ppa/ubuntu YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE main

NOTE: it seems that the release version is only available for ‘precise’ and has not been updated for newer Ubuntu releases, I was able to simply go to the terminal and execute "software-properties-gtk" to change ‘trusty’ to ‘precise’ on the PPA and it worked great!

REFERENCES:

DTD for logback.xml in Eclipse

After fixing the validation error in my Ant build.xml files, I got to wondering about the other common XML files in my projects. I’ve used Logback on many of my recent projects and it’s configuration has similar warnings that can be resolved in the same manner.

The simplest method to silence the warning is to add a DOCTYPE to the logback.xml files, between the XML declaration and the configuration. Official documentation seems to indicate that a DTD is not possible or likely.


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE configuration>
<configuration>

NOTE: For what it’s worth, this approach should work for any XML file to remove the error in Eclipse.

REFERENCES:

DTD for Ant build.xml in Eclipse

I’ve seen this validation error in Eclipse for a few releases and finally got tired enough of seeing it that I did some research.

The simplest method to silence the warning is to add a DOCTYPE to the build.xml files, between the XML declaration and the project, there are a few more complicated methods, but this one works well for the cases I’ve experienced.


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE project>
<project name="Example"...>

REFERENCES: