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setup

Best way to setup a VirtualBox to avoid system crashes on a reboot

Broken Hard Drive reminds of of Broken Eggs

We now use permanent VirtualBox OSes to run part of our infrastructure.

We ran in all sorts of issues with those, but one thing for sure is that you do not want your OS hard drive to fill up because a (re)boot may not be possible after that. This is because the drive is likely to go bust if completely full.

You should, of course, have tools to let you know how filled up your hard drive is to make sure to catch such issues early. In our case, we had a Jira instance that filled up the drive mainly because we made one backup of the database per day. One day, one of those backup ended that ...

Top 6 Benefits of Hotel Management Software

Technology is ever-changing, and it brings huge operational benefits to all industries, including hospitality. However, not every business has the time, energy, funds, and resources to constantly invest in the latest technological breakthroughs.

That being said, there are a few simple and cost-effective operational aids that are easy to setup and make running a hospitality business that much easier, like hotel management software.

Not sure if you need new software for your hotel? Keep reading to learn how digital hotel management solutions improve efficiency.

Six Tips on How Hotel Software Can Help You

1. Accurate Reports

Hotel ...

Docker, an advanced chroot utility

Chasm—just like a Docker creates a chasm between two sets of software

SECURITY WARNING

Before installing Docker and containers with services on your Linux system, make sure to read and understand the risks as mentioned on this Docker and iptables page. Especially, Docker will make all your containers visible to the entire world through your Internet connection. This is great if you want to indeed share that service with the rest of the world, it's very dangerous if you are working on that container service since it could have security issues that need patching and such. Docker documents a way to prevent that behavior by adding the following rule to your firewall:

iptables -I DOCKER-USER -i eth0 ! -s 192.168.1.0/24 -j DROP

This means that unless the IP address matches 192.168.1.0/24, the access is refused. The `eth0` interface name should be replaced with the interface name you use as the external ethernet connection. During development, you should always have such a rule.

That has not worked at all for me because my local network includes many other computers on my LAN and this rule blocks them all. So really not a useful idea.

Instead, I created my own entries based on some other characteristics. That includes the following lines in my firewall file:

*filter
:DOCKER-USER - [0:0]

-A DOCKER-USER -j early_forward
-A DOCKER-USER -i eno1 -p tcp -m conntrack --ctorigdstport 80 --ctdir ORIGINAL -j DROP
-A DOCKER-USER -i eno1 -p tcp -m conntrack --ctorigdstport 8080 --ctdir ORIGINAL -j DROP
-A DOCKER-USER -i eno1 -p tcp -m conntrack --ctorigdstport 8081 --ctdir ORIGINAL -j DROP

My early_forward allows my LAN to continue to work. These are my firewall rules that allow my LAN computers to have their traffic forwarded as expected.

Then I have three rules that block port 80, 8080, and 8081 from Docker.

Docker will add new rules that will appear after (albeit not within the DOCKER-USER list) and will open ports for whatever necessary service you install in your Dockers.

Note that the only ports you have to block are ports that Docker will share and that you have otherwise open on your main server. If Docker opens port 5000 and your firewall does not allow connections to port 5000 from the outside, then you're already safe. On my end I have Apache running so as a result I block quite usual HTTP ports from Docker.

Docker

As we are helping various customers, we encounter new technologies.

In the old days, we used chroot to create a separate environment where you could have your own installation and prevent the software from within that environment access to everything on your computer. This is particularly useful for publicly facing services liek Apache, Bind, etc.

Put the label of an HTML Input inside the Input element

Reflection of trees in a mountain lake.

Update:

With HTML5 running on pretty much all platforms, you want to use the placeholder attribute instead of any sort of tricks to place a label inside your input widgets.

This is done like this:

<input type="text" placeholder="Phone Number"/>

This example will show "Phone Number" inside the input box until the user types some text in that box.

You can test with the box right here. This is just that one <input .../> tag I placed in my page HTML. (It is not in a form, but the widget itself will work as expected.)

For additional details, I ...

PHP e-Fax requires valid SSL certificates (failed with code 1)

As e-Fax is updating their systems further to be compliant with various security systems, some new problems may arise on your servers.

The main one is an SSL error that is quite unclear.

Warning: stream_socket_client(): SSL operation failed with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages: error:14090086:SSL routines:ssl3_get_server_certificate:certificate verify failed in /path-to-php-efax/http_request.php on line 294

As we can see, the error mentions a server certificate function and says it could not verify a certificate.

If your server is not 100% up to date with newest SSL versions or your web ...

Make sure your Thunderbird does not use SSL to avoid POODLE attack

A few days ago the news that SSLv3 was no good came out. The protocol allows for patterns that can be used by a hacker to decipher an encrypted message without the need for the private key. In other words, encryption using SSLv3 is no good (anymore--it never was, but we know this only now.)

We fixed our Apache2 settings, for those interested, you just have to turn off SSLv3 with the following setting:

SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3

Although to really remove all the encryption methods that are not that secure (can easily be cracked) you also want to change the list of ciphers with:

 ...

Protected Node per Node Type Settings

Node Type extension

The Protected Node module adds a field set to the Node Type form that you edit under:

Administer » Content management » Content types

These additions are explained in detail below.

The main reason for adding this feature is to avoid seeing the field set on all the node edit forms. With this feature you can hide the form on all the node types that you will never protect with a password.

Protected mode for nodes of this type

This option let you choose how this node type handles the Protected Node capability.

Never protected

This means this node ...

MobileKey addition to ThemeKey

The main idea of MobileKey is to give you the capability to switch your website theme to a mobile specific theme when the user access your site from one's mobile phone. A mobile theme will make it easier to access your website on a mobile device.

For go to the ThemeKey settings page:

Administer » Site configuration » ThemeKey

The MobileKey adds one selection to the list of attributes to match. The new selection is called:

mobile:device

This works everywhere on your website (it is a global option, not specific to any kind of pages.) The system checks different parameters to

Protected Node Global Settings

The protected node module has global settings found under:

Administer » Site configuration » Protected node

Protected node Statistics

The page starts with statistics to let you know how pages are protected on your website. All the counts include published and unpublished content.

  • Total nodes — the total number of nodes on your website
  • Unprotected nodes — number of nodes that do not have a password
  • Protected nodes — number of nodes that are current protected by a password
    • Showing title — number of nodes showing their ...

Simplemenu Inactive Parents

Description

A simple menu is composed of parent menus and children menus. A child has no drop-down menu and a parent does.

By default all the menu items are active, meaning that they all are links one can click on to reach the corresponding destination.

This simplemenu extension allows for turning the link off by replacing the anchor reference in a named anchor. The HTML tag being the same, the simplemenu looks the same, but the item cannot be clicked.

At this time, there is no option to make some of the parent items clickable and others not.

Setup

There is no settings for this module.