There were many changes made to Fedora 15, one of the ones that I keep running into is how to change the default run-level of your box. I use Fedora as a server OS in many situations because it offers some advanced features which CentOS either has out of date or doesn’t even include. Since often these boxes run headless I just set them to boot to run-level 3. The command below tells you how to do it:
ln -s /lib/systemd/system/<target name>.target /etc/systemd/system/default.target
I have changed the website to better display songs. Now the old songs and anything done with the new editor will be displayed correctly, automatically.
When you are first starting out using Linux, file permissions while being an easy concept to understand seem like they are very hard to setup. Most of the time you will see a three digit number which “magically” will determine what the permissions are going to be. This is actually a very easy system and once you learn how it works it makes a lot of sense.
Permissions on a linux system can be set for three different situations, permissions for your username, permissions for others in the same group as you, and everyone else. Each of these permissions are shown as a nine character string of letters such as r-xrw-rw-. The first three characters are the user permissions, the second three characters are the group permissions and the last three characters are permissions for everyone else. An example is below:
drwxrwxr-x 2 nobody nobody 1048 Jun 20 12:37 somefile.txt
There are two different ways to change file permissions, the first way is to set all three groups at the same time:
chmod +x -w somefile.txt
That is adding execute to the file while removing write access for user,group and everyone. This is a very simple way to do file permissions but it doesn’t allow the full range you may want. The next method allows you to define which permissions are assigned to the user, the group and everyone else.
chmod 744 somefile.txt
In this example you are saying setting user to 7 group to 4 and everyone else to 4, or rwxr–r–. So now how did I come up with those numbers? You use the chart below and just add the permissions you want together. So if was want the user to have read (4), write(2), execute (1) you get 7. Then you would do the same for both the group and everyone else.
Permissions:
1 = x = execute
2 = w = write
4 = r = read
One of the first rules of security is to not have any ports open which you do not need to have open. That is also pretty common sense. One problem you run into though is you still need to access data from one machine on another. Samba is generally used for file sharing but since it follows the windows standard for file sharing it announces your shares to anyone who asks.
If it is just you accessing your files you can actually mount a folder from another system using sshfs. Sshfs is available in all of the major distro’s repositories so it should be easy to find.
The first step is to just create a folder which you want to use as a mount point. Once you do that you just use the following command:
sshfs <user>@<machine>:/path/on/remote/system /local/path
After you do that your local folder will now display the contents of your remote folder.
If you want to allow other users to access the folder as well you need to add all_other as shown below.
sshfs -o allow_other,default_permissions
I have begun to throttle connections to the website. This is because the internet bots which search engines use have been pounding the server to the point of making it unavailable. I believe this will make the site run faster for everyone.
