Black screen FreeNX/NX

I have been running my FreeNX for several years with no problem then all of a sudden I tried to log in today and I received a black screen. After several searches I found out that it’s a problem with the window manager temporary files being corrupt. Just to test I changed the settings on my nx client to use another window manager “KDE” in the system and it worked. To resolve the issue I SSHed into the box and deleted all gconfd, orbit and mapping tmp folders/files for the affected user. Tried to reconnect again and it worked.

Reset password Linux

In case you ever forget the your password in Linux there are several ways you can go about resetting it if you have physical access to the machine.  On your boot up menu select the recovery mode option you should end up at a command prompt on a black screen type the following cmd

#passwd username

Remember to change out ‘username’ with your real username. You will be prompted to enter the password twice, when done just restart your machine and you should be able to log in with your new password, if the cmd completed successfully . This method works in some Linux distributions but not all of them.

Another option is to boot up from Live CD, open up a command prompt and mount your HD as root/super user or with sudo whichever applies. Chroot your mounted drive then use the passwd cmd to change password as below.

$su

#mount  /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

#chroot /mnt/hda1

#passwd username

You will be prompted to enter the password twice when done just restart your machine and you should be able to log in with your new password

NB: To reset root password with the above methods just run the passwd command without including a username.

Popular linux alternative apps

Looking for an alternative linux app compareable to your favorite MS apps . Well adler has just made your work a little bit easier. Just follow the link and there is a list of some 50 apps, that measure up to some commonly used windows apps.
I found Gmount-Iso to very interesting as I have been looking for an ISO app.

NB: This is a post I redid as I lost it when I messed up the box.

Grub Error 17

I was trying to dual boot my machine and used the hide command on a linux partition on reboot grub started loading then stopped giving me the Error 17. I was able to resolve it after checking this site out.

This error can aslo be caused if you cange out HD’s without abdating the changes in grub or you overwrite a linux partition with windows in which case you can run fdisk /mbr from any rescue disk.

Hope i will be up long enough this time

Just recovering from a hard drive crash and this time i had no backup since the last time site went down. After going through this again I understand how important backup is just coz your machine is running ok 2day doesn’t mean this will be the case tomorrow. Always make sure you backup your stuff even if its just to a cd or dvd you wont know how that will come in handy until something ever goes wrong then you will be kicking yourself for not taking a minute to do a backup. Am currently looking for an app to help me automate this process. Will put up what i get.

Am back again

It’s been a long year and it feels great to be back online again. I have missed having some place to write down my thoughts and ideas which i have had quite a few. I learnt to watch free movies online and listen to free music too. Before that i thought you had to download the stuff to get access to it.
I take this time to announce that i should be graduating in a few months and also getting married after that. Yeah a lot has transpired in the last year.
Well I will be posting in a couple of days.

Securing your VSFTP server

If you are running your own FTP server you know how irritating it is to keep going through your logs and see them filled up with brute force attack attempts. I have VSFTP running and i found a way to go around this i was having nearly 80k to 100k attempts a day, it was very frustrating to see all this crackers from china and whearever wasting my cpu time, so i did some checking on confguring vsftp on default it checks for all usernames provided and the password on all atempts but by adding userlist_deny=NO to the config file and creating a userlist, any attempt with an illegal usernmae is denied access without the option of entering a password. After that restart vsftp, I haven’t had a single succesful attempt since then my logs changed showing from 80k attempts to 0 now i can rest easy and move on with peace on my mind.

Fun of being a programmer

The good thing about being a programmer is tinkerig with stuff and putting changes you want on a product that didn’t have them it’s a very good feeling believe me, here are some guys having fun with the apple TV so if you have one you can go and take a look at some of the mods that you can do to yours to soup it up a bit. Happy cracking.