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PCjackingManu Cornet, french Ubuntu developer and free software supporter, startet new ways of marketing recently called PCjacking. He wants to point people to different ways of using computers and tell them that there is more on the market than just Microsoft Windows.

He walks into computer stores and throws in Linux Live CDs like Knoppix or Ubuntu booting them up and hoping that the store employees won’t recognize it. He then leaves the computers running on Linux and watches how people approach this new experience.

I think thats a pretty neat idea, which we could all try out and see how it spreads 😉

In a recent interview with Pressetext Austria he said that he hopes many people will start to PCjack (of course without harming any computer). Manu Cornet added that he wrote an explanation on every CD so that the staff knows that they only need to reboot their computers to reset everything to the state it was before.

For everybody interested, there is even a little HOWTO on Cornet’s page.
? Wanna PCjack yourself?

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WordpressGrowlWow! I really gotta have this.
The Binary Bonsay has set out a competition to code a Growl plugin that notifies you of events happening at your WordPress install. This is a great idea. I hope the guys working on it can sort out the NAT issues somehow and will deliver a working implementation.

If you wonder what Growl is:

As described on the Growl website, Growl is a global notification system for Mac OS X. Any application can send a notification to Growl, which will display an attractive message on your screen. Growl currently works with a growing number of applications.

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I set up scponly to permit some of my users, for whom I host websites, to use sftp/scp to transfer files to the server but refuse them to login with a fully functional shell. After configuring scponly to chroot to the users home directory and some initial tests it worked very well with Transmit on the Mac, Filezilla on Windows and Putty/Terminal. The only thing that didn’t work was using Dreamweaver in SFTP mode to connect to the server.

After a bit of digging around me & Herbert found out that Dreamweaver will only communicate with the SSH server if you change the config from the Debian-standard, refusing “tunneled clear text passwords”, to permiting it in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.

# Change to yes to enable tunnelled clear text passwords
PasswordAuthentication yes

After a quick /etc/init.d/ssh restart Dreamweaver was able to log in as well 🙂

To set up chroot for scponly on a Debian system do the following:

  1. unzip the chroot script in /usr/share/doc/scponly/setup_chroot
  2. chmod +x setup_chroot.sh
  3. ./setup_chroot.sh
  4. type in the user you want to have scponly access
  5. accept the default for home directory
  6. type in the directory to be user writeable (in my case “www”)
  7. choose a password
  8. optional: compile the groups.c file in /usr/share/doc/scponly gcc -o groups groups.c and move it to the chroot mv groups /home/user/bin/.

…simple as that 🙂