burngreave.net

The burngreave.net  umbrella covers a number of different projects.

1.  Community Area Network.  We are developing a wireless based community area network in coordination with other groups in Sheffield.  For more infomation see http://bcan.burngreave.net
2. Volunteer PC support for the community at the PC Fixit  Cafe.  See http://www.burngreave.net/mailman/listinfo/cafe for more information
3. IT consultancy services / workers co-operative BITWork  
4. Community ISP services, hosting web sites and email for a number of organisations and bodies.
5. Email lists

Burngreave IT Partnership
Aims and Objectives

Minutes of the Burngreave New Housing Group can be found at:

http://www.burngreave.net/~housing/

There are also documents and links to Burngreave/Sheffield/national housing issues.

Articles and comments welcome.
Please email to:

housing@burngreave.net

OLSR Network Topology 10-April-2007

We've started moving the Burngreave Community Area Network to the Freifunk Firmware on the Linksys WRT54G family using OLSR routing protocol .

Here is a picture of the network topology around Verdon and Rock Street Areas of Pitsmoor

found this .. looks useful

http://www.faqs.org/docs/securing/backup-rest.html

Just been reading the transcript of Richard Stallman GPLv3 5th International Conference .. its available here http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/tokyo-rms-transcript

It has such beautiful content as

"Treacherous Computing is an instance of a very dangerous phenomenon, namely a conspiracy of companies to restrict the public - to restrict the public's access to technology. Such conspiracies ought to be a crime. The executives of those companies should be tried, and if convicted, sent to prison for conspiring to restrict the public's access to technology. However, that sort of policy would have required leaders that believe in government of the people, by the people, for the people. What we have today is government of the people, by the flunkies, for the corporations.

Started work on the Arbourthorne free wireless project. ( need to think of a catchier name ! )

Purchased 4 Linksys WRT54GL and started installing the freifunk firmware

Seems quite cool software. The OLSR daemon works nicely and creates the routes happily. Need to remember that the wireless interfaces must all be in the same subnet, adhoc, and have same essid for automatic meshing to work.

I recently participated in a sheffield hacklab workshop on setting up Linux Terminal Server based services at the MATILDA social centre in Sheffield.

We installed SUSE 10.1 Linux on a relatively ancient but serviceable dual processor 1 Ghz PIII 1GB RAM 2x 18GB SCSI HDD server.

SUSE 10.1 installed without a hitch ( as is to be expected from a Linux distro these days.)

The latest version of LTSP, LTSP 4.2 is pretty magnificent. The documentation is well written and easy to follow, and we configure a few simple networking services ( DHCP, TFTP, NFS, XDMCP and etherboot, with the help of http://rom-o-matic.net/ ), and we have a working LTSP server built, and a skipped compaq deskpro 6350 SFF Pentium II PC with 32Mb RAM acting as thin client.

My servers are being attacked regulary with ssh brute force attacks. I had 40,000 attempted failed logons over 7 hours from one ip address recently, at the peak it was doing 4 attempts a second.

This script works fine on the Debian Servers
Its very simple and can be run from cron every 15 minutes ( or less ).

It looks for the 'Illegal user' entries in a LOGFILE. If more than BADCOUNT are seen from the same ip address it gets added to hosts.deny ( man 5 hosts_access ) and thus is unable to bother sshd again. root will get mail when it does stuff.

You can make sure it doesn't lock you out by adding your trusted ip addresses to hosts.allow