Steffen's Tech Blog

Ever considered to make your Ubuntu installation even more secure? There is an excellent chapter available in the official Ubuntu documentation called "Keeping Your Computer Safe" that is worth to read. I used its sub chapter "Set up a firewall" to install the firestarter package - an Open Source visual firewall program that combines ease of use with powerful firewall features. To understand its basic features and how to use them you can read the quick tutorial from the Firestarter Online Manual . After completing the start wizard, some services that you might have on your machine such as a web server or a SSH server will not be reachable any longer from the outside because the default configuration set up provides strong protection against incoming intrusions. E.g. the connection from my Macbook via SSH to my Ubuntu machine wasn't possible any longer and therefore my rsync script described in my previous post " Synchronize files between a Macbook and an...

Have you ever considered mirroring/synchronizing your important files from your Mac to your Linux machine to decrease the risk of data loss because of a hardware crash? One very effective way to do this is using two open source tools available on your Mac and your Linux machine called rsync and ssh. This document will lead through the necessary steps. The main reason for this document was to have a reference for myself as it wasn't trivial. Maybe it can be helpful for others. As a precondition, it is assumed, that you have two computers that are connected via a network. I am using a Macbook with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and an Ubuntu PC with Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy connected via a WLAN where I have verified all the steps. Some of the steps described are Mac / Ubuntu specific. Most information should be valid for other operating systems where ssh and rsync can be installed (e.g. other Linux distributions) but you might check out the distribution specifics if something should not work. ...