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Countdown To Valentines Day --
Countdown To Valentines Day --
Posted on: February 2nd, 2010 by Famous Phil
This post is going to be short, sweet, and to the point 
It seems that every time I build a new server, I’m constantly at a loss for memorizing the commands that generate public keys in SSH (Secure Shell). SSH for the computer illiterate is the Linux equivalent to Windows Telnet Services. This basically gives you a command prompt that is running on a remote computer.
SSH is the heart and soul of linux based computers because *everything* can be done through the command line simply. Unfortunately, Windows is just starting to catch up with Telnet using a new application called powershell. Powershell is very unlike the linux command line though since it is more a scripting language than a command based language. This is why I always scratch my head when working with Microsoft Exchange Server’s Powershell commands and end up reverting to the famous Microsoft graphical administration interface which gives me the option of “next next next finish”. I really do appreciate the Microsoft wizards that make software so easy to administer. Anyways, Linux never started with a graphical desktop (Unlike Windows and Macintosh), therefore, the command line in linux is far easier to use when administering a system.
To get back to my original topic, I am a fan of passwordless entry into my own systems. With linux and SSH, there are a few authentication methods, 1 being password entry, and 2 being public key authentication. With a password login, you basically enter a username and password and you are logged into a command prompt on linux.
With public key authentication, you generate 2 keys at your local computer, one being a private key and the other being a public key. Basically, you give the server you wish to connect to the public key, and only you hold onto the private key. When you connect to the server, it will first give you the public key so that you can verify that the server is actually the server that you want to connect to. This will be ignored on the first connect, but in the future, if this key changes, you will be notified that the server was possibly compromised. Upon allowing the connection, you will give the server your private key and it will run some calculations on the key you provided. If the result matches that of the server’s public key, you will be granted access. Since keys are generally 256 hexadecimal characters long, these are much more secure than normal passwords, and they are generally much easier to use (unless your laptop is stolen).
So now onto how to actually use these keys:
1. Generate the key on your local machine (not the remote machine).
A. ssh-keygen -t rsa
2. Verify that your remote server has an ~/.ssh directory. ~ in linux is the home directory.
3. Copy the local public key to the server
A. This can be done with: scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@remote_server:~/.ssh/authorized_keys2
B. Notice I specified authorized_keys2… this is actually for SSH Protocol 2 which is a more secure SSH protocol than the original.
C. scp is secure copy in linux and it copies files between computers using SSH tunnels.
4. Attempt to ssh into your remote machine. It should not need a password anymore.
A. ssh user@remote_server
Hopefully this helps make sense of SSH keys.
Afterthought on 2/4/10:
when using the scp command as a copy / paste above, this will overwrite your authorized_keys2 file on the remote computer. To prevent this from happening, append to the file using this command (thanks Cris for pointing this out to me):
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | user@remote_server “cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2“
Tags: key, keygen, Linux, ssh
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
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Posted on: January 20th, 2010 by Famous Phil
Hi, and welcome to the new FamousPhil website! It isn’t actually all that new, but it is a major revision of my website. This has been coming now for at least the past 5 months because I completely hated the colors that I chose for the overall site theme. I can’t believe that I thought mixing all sorts of colors would even remotely look good. Anyways, I fixed it and I feel that the site looks better.
So what exactly changed?
I changed the color scheme a little bit and this is what you will likely notice the quickest. I decided to go with a traditional blue theme using the same blue that I selected before, but this time with a color guide. For anyone in need of finding colors that go well together, I strongly recommend: http://colorschemedesigner.com/. That site helped me a lot!
In addition, FamousPhil now validates to XHTML Strict 1.0, it used to validate to XHTML Transitional 1.0. This is basically technical language saying that FamousPhil is guaranteed to look the same on all compliant browsers that can display this website. This was very difficult to achieve considering the old website base uses many elements of XHTML transitional that don’t exist in strict. Regardless of the difficulty, I managed to get everything updated and working well 
You may ask why I didn’t choose HTML 5 (I know one person who did), and my reasoning is, its standards aren’t fully established yet and aren’t mainstream enough for my personal preferences.
Finally, the major component that I really wanted to fix for a long time has happened. On my end, FamousPhil now has a real content management system. I wrote a theme for Wordpress (thanks to John) and I now use Wordpress as my content management system. Doing this has made my life much easier since changing the site has gone from manually editing source code to “drag and drop”. Hopefully I can continue to make my sites easier to manage so I can perhaps find more free time in the future
Thats all for now. I still need to do some blogging on some important issues, but that will come someday in the near future
Tags: color scheme, design, famousphil, validation, xhtml
Posted in My Site
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Posted on: January 1st, 2010 by Famous Phil
At the time of beginning this post… it is 12:01am Eastern Time, January 1, 2010. My first words are: Happy New Year! and Happy new decade! Hopefully this decade will bring a lot more fortune than the last one I just want to quickly look back on the last 10 years of my life and the funniest videos of the year that I’ve found.
Ten years ago from today, I did not know much about a computer. I can assure you that I did not know how to turn one on, and I only had a slight clue about what the internet was. At the time, I had high hopes of becoming an electrical engineer and I loved playing around with circuits. I was also much younger and had a lot to learn (obviously). I also wasn’t entirely sure about what all the Y2K stuff was all about, so it didn’t really affect me. Finally, a last tiny tidbit… I have spent *every* new year of my life in my own bedroom here at home. I might be a few feet off from the same position each year, but I’ve basically in the same spot. This is only the third year of my life that I’ve been up to witness the new year come in.
So, how does it feel? I doesn’t feel any different… its just another day. For some people, its an iconic day I suppose, being a new year and all, but for me, nothing has really changed. I will continue to live and will continue to do what I do every day. The only difference is, I will have to get over the annoyance of not remembering to write 2010 on any documents I create for at least the next few weeks (probably about a month or two in reality).
2009 brought me 8 hard drive failures in various machines that I’ve worked on, 2 being my own. It also brought some bad fortune with the passing of my grandmother. On the brighter side, it brought Windows 7, Microsoft Exchange, XM Radio, 2 new Laptop computers, a new server, and the magic of Verizon wireless high speed internet here at home. It also brought me a wonderful job at my college and lots of new knowledge about computers. Overall, 2009 for me was a decent year, especially considering the killing I made on Ebay selling Michael Jackson dolls (I sold quite a few within the first day after his death). Of all the stuff that 2009 brought, perhaps the biggest was a new and improved FamousPhil.com. Within the next few weeks, FamousPhil.com will change slightly again to become more smooth in color transitions
In 2009, I watched a lot of amazing video. I think its time to share some of the more memorable youtube links of the best videos I saw in 2010! I’m also going to leave this blog post here. I hope that your 2009 was as enjoyable as mine and that your 2010 brings good tidings Enjoy!
Ancient Modem that still works (seen on Yahoo for several weeks back in June, 2009)
World’s Fastest Speed Reader reading the original Health Care Bill – Cavuto (Fox News)
Glen Beck – Turtles on TV (You may have to get half way through this partially edited clip)
Next up is from a movie that was hilarious (Monsters vs. Aliens). I also liked High School Musical 3.
I discovered something about geiko!
And finally, the video that combines it all together perfectly!
To another great year! Thanks for stopping in!
Tags: 2009, 2010, Happy New Year, New Year, video
Posted in My Site, Personal, Student Life, Technology
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Posted on: December 25th, 2009 by Famous Phil
First, I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas! This has been a long year for me!
6 score and days ago (clever huh? 
) I was preparing for a new semester at the University at Buffalo. Little did I know what I would be getting myself into. I was enrolled in 17 credit hours (8 undergrad, 9 grad) with a really split schedule. This and an unexpected Teaching Assistant position pretty much took all of my energy away for most of the semester. Included I’d like to provide some tips after looking back that might help others facing similar schedules.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t make my schedule in such a way that I could have classes in a long solid chunk like I have had in past semesters. I wasn’t expecting this to be hard to handle, but I was expecting a bit of lost time throughout the semester. This is because most of my work is project based and I’m not very efficient with doing work when I have an hour here and there to do the work.
The reason why is because it takes me a good half hour to an hour to get into an efficient working rhythm. I prefer having a large chunk of contiguous time to handle any chunk of work that I need to get done because I enter a mood and I work very quickly and efficiently. Programming is one of the huge tasks that I do that requires large chunks of contiguous time.
During the semester I couldn’t find large chunks of time to get work done and this probably hurt me a little bit, but I did get through it. I managed to get by through losing the concept of a “life”. Most of my weekends were spent working on projects that were due, and I was limiting my sleep to 6 hours a night. During the last 2 weeks, I had so much work left to do and so little time that I finally gave up on the concept of getting it all done in time. I switched over to a “best effort” approach and started getting my 8 hours of sleep every night again. This probably saved me the most because I quit worrying as much and I started being more productive.
After adjusting, I did start a paper todo list. I found this to be very helpful compared to my computer based todo list because I could cross stuff off and it would still appear on the paper. My computerized todo list removes my items from the list so I can’t see what I’ve accomplished. This was a huge set back for me until I realized it was happening. I will hopefully have a solution to this problem in the next few weeks to prepare for next semester.
Here are my tips: If you are in a situation where you don’t have enough time to do all the work, I recommend taking the stress out of the picture and start sleeping again. I found that losing sleep wasn’t helping the problem at all. I just couldn’t focus. I also admit that I didn’t get everything done, but the tiny details were the things that I left out. In my best effort approach, I quit doing the stuff that wasn’t worth a lot of points for my time and that was a huge help. Another huge thing that helped was a todo list on paper. This managed to keep me organized until I could finish and proved to me that I was moving forward.
All in all, I did enjoy the last semester. I learned a lot from it in many aspects that I can hopefully take away into future tasks that I need to handle. I would like to thank everyone who had to put up with me last semester, I probably wasn’t in the best of moods most of the time
Tags: christmas, school, semester, stress, time, work
Posted in Student Life
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Posted on: December 24th, 2009 by Famous Phil
Wow, it has been a long time since I’ve posted here. It is actually pretty sad since my goal was to post at least once a week on an interesting topic back before the fall 2009 semester began. Anyways, now that the semester is done, its time to move on and start working in new plans for my site, I will probably disclose these tomorrow sometime since I don’t want my blogs to be too long anymore I will also probably discuss the last semester sometime within the next few days… it was a rough semester!
Today’s interesting topic relates to my personal HP Laptop (Tablet PC – tx1000 series). More specifically Microsoft Windows User Access Control (UAC) and the graphics card in it. If you own any computer or laptop with an NVidia GeForce 6150 graphics card in it, this will be incredibly useful to you. So, the problem is: does your computer dim the screen and take forever to come back up?
If so, I have a solution… but first some background into the problem. Normally with any new operating system, I normally wait at least a year before I consider running it in a production environment (I’m quite conservative). My tablet originally came with Windows Vista about a year ago, and I threw Vista out the first day I got it to put Windows XP on it. I would never consider running Vista on any of my computers because of its horrible performance! Windows XP served me well, but Microsoft recently stated that they wouldn’t be supporting XP anymore. This coupled with a few really good reviews of Windows 7 prompted me to try Windows 7 when I first got it.
Back in late August, I got my hands on a copy of the Windows 7 Release To Manufacturing (RTM) and I installed it. To my surprise, it seemed much better than Windows XP ever could be. There were a few bugs, but nothing that I wouldn’t mind suffering through. Of these bugs, the only major annoyance was the Nvidia 6150 dimming the screen for UAC (User Access Control) prompts. I will get to that in a bit, but first, I want to make something very clear. Windows 7 is the first operating system that I have ever ran in a production environment without it being fully released! Microsoft should be very proud of themselves for making me feel safe while running a possibly unstable Windows 7.
The Windows 7 update software is quite impressive because it also found all of the missing drivers on my tablet and installed them for me. Out of all of the drivers, it also got the latest Nvidia graphics driver for my card. Prior to the driver being installed, UAC prompts and key combinations such as ctrl-alt-delete popped up the appropriate screen immediately. After the driver installed, the screen would dim and then go blank for a good 10 seconds before it would come back up. Back in August, I found no good solution to solve this but it was the only annoyance I had, so I decided to stick with Windows 7 for the college semester instead of doing a 10 minute restore of XP.
Now that I’ve got some background and some time in to solve the problem, the solution to this problem was quite simple. For some reason, Windows 7 scales your computer screen and this takes longer to dim it due to the scaling problem. To solve this, all you need to do is right click the desktop and goto the Nvidia Control Panel. Click the advanced button and ok it. Goto the “change flat panel scaling” option and turn it off entirely. Once you ok this, your screen will now dim quickly (and properly).
Hopefully this will help someone else out because it was a big annoyance to me for a long 4 months!
Tags: 6150, dim, nvidia, tablet, uac
Posted in Mobile Technology
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