burngreave.net - Open Source

Burngreave.NET Projects

Wed, 5 Oct 2005 22:51:33 +0100

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

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
Volunteer PC support for the community at the PC Fixit Cafe. See http://www.burngreave.net/mailman/listinfo/cafe for more information
IT consultancy services / workers co-operative BITWork
Community ISP services, hosting web sites and email for a number of organisations and bodies.
Email lists

BITPart Aims and Objectives

Sat, 8 Feb 2003 02:41:00 +0000

Burngreave IT Partnership
Aims and Objectives

Housing

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:07:38 +0100

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

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 18:34:00 +0100

OLSR Network Topology 10-April-2007

OLSR and Freifunk use in Burngreave Community Area Network, Sheffield

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 18:19:15 +0100

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

backup script

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 05:50:52 +0000

found this .. looks useful

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

Richard Stallman at the 5th international GPLv3 conference; 21st November 2006

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 13:21:03 +0000

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.

Arbourthorne Free Wireless Project

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 18:22:05 +0000

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.

LTSP Workshop at MATILDA

Sun, 28 May 2006 12:49:50 +0100

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.

Script to block ssh brute force attacks

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 10:13:03 +0100

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

wikipedia is your friend

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:12:39 +0000

this seems to have appeared: BurngreaveMessenger.

Burngreave Computer Fixit Cafe

Sat, 5 Nov 2005 13:54:43 +0000

Burngreave Computer Fixit Cafe

Working inside a vserver

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 02:24:54 +0100

notes from first use of a vserver
I've logged on happily onto somme.

On the surface , yes it looks like a standard debian install, but as you say some differences.

1. I install sudo and vim, (apt-get install sudo vim), then su - ( to root ). After editing the sudoers file and adding myself I cannot use sudo

alan@somme:/etc$ sudo su -
sudo: unable to lookup somme via gethostbyname()

until editing the /etc/hosts file. and altering it to this

209.51.169.86 somme.prevolution.org somme

the hosts file was empty before that.

2. I tend to use tcpdump, traceroute, mtr and nmap, to diagnose errors and perform security auditing after making configuration changes etc. I find that these dont work and give a socket error. Are these fixable ? Would iptables modules be similary affected ?

Nocat Splash + RSS feed

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 03:00:48 +0100

I've altered the Burngreave/Spital Hill Wireless http://bcan.burngreave.net to run in Splash rather than captive mode and added an rss feed to the http://www.nocat.net splash screen.

The Rss comes from rawdog (http://offog.org/code/rawdog.html )

Heres a Screenshot

Burngreave Community Wireless uses free network for uplink

Tue, 2 Aug 2005 10:20:00 +0100

The Community Radio group got their RSL for this month, but were stuck trying to get the feed from the studio to the transmitter. At short notice we put together a solution, using the dynebolic Linux distribution, wireless routers and 2 icecast servers to bypass restrictive firewalls. Things we've learnt. 1. If it can break it will. The studio was burgled.