Ubuntu

Block all traffic from a Geo-located country with UFW firewall on Ubuntu

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I was noticing some really strange requests in my web server’s log files on a VPS that I manage. Requests that seem to be focused on finding vulnerabilities or exploits. Turns out most of the originating IP addresses are from China. Since the VPS is not behind a router or otherwise managed firewall device, I decided to investigate if I could just block all traffic from China to my VPS. Turns out the software “Uncomplicated Firewall” or better know as UFW, that I already had running can do this easily. If you’re new to UFW have a look at this very comprehensive page showing how to set it up.

Here are two examples showing how to setup your UFW firewall to block IP addresses or ports based on Geo location. This should work on any system running UFW but in this case I did it on a headless Ubuntu 18.04 system. Click on Read more to view the rest of this article.

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Install MariaDB 10.1 on Ubuntu16.04

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I have Ubuntu16.04 servers running and I want to run database engines like MariaDB on it. Normally I would just type sudo apt install mariadb-server and the database system would be up and running in under two minutes. Ubuntu16.04 will install version 10.0 by default, but I want to install a different version. At the very least 10.1. Why 10.1 you might ask? Well because 10.1 was the first release that had Galera included by default in the package. Galera is a gift from the gods for all system administrators, developers, backup operators and other people who work with databases a lot. With three nodes, the minimum, it will offer you fast and reliable database synchronization and redundancy. Galera is a solid foundation for an easy to build load balancing environment. But first of we will install the MariaDB 10.1 instance on a clean Ubuntu16.04 server. If you want to be absolutely certain that the instructions below will work flawlessly for you, I would advise to use a clean fresh installed server also. Please remember that upgrading (or downgrading) from a different release version is NOT a good idea. When I was learning this the hard way I did a lot of reading on the subject and I can safely say that you should not follow these instructions on a system that runs, or used to run a MariaDB or MySQL instance. Even if you have removed it first apt remove you are still at risk of running into problems. When I was having problems with this I tried many things that included killing the process: kill -9 $(pgrep mysql)  and then purging the removed packages apt purge and also apt autoremove and I even had to delete some left-over files manually. Don’t even try to install it on a system that ran a higher version > 10.1 because that will be guaranteed imminent failure. You’ve been warned! Let’s get started and install some required software and updates.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt-get install nano ssh openssh-server software-properties-common rsync

To see the rest of this article please click on the read more link.

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Unattended Ubuntu ISO Maker

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Just found an awesome script online that I tested today and it works great. It’s a script that allows you to create an ISO for a unattended installation for Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS. Just made myself one of those ISO’s and I’m going to try to see if I can implement it in my PXE environment. If not, I can always place it on a USB flash drive and boot from that. This makes the life of a person who tends to install Ubuntu very often (either on a virtual or a physical machine) a whole lot easier and it’s time-saving. All you need for this script to work is a running Ubuntu system (I used VMware Workstation to create a fresh net-install, and I assume that VMware Player also works) and the script itself of course. The scripts and the really easy to follow instructions are all the github page right here. Took me approx 15 minutes to install a fresh Ubuntu server, follow the instructions, and the actual creation of the ISO. Give the author a star for his efforts cause he deserves it.

Adding cloud storage as permanent mount to Ubuntu Server 16.04

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Many cloud storage services give you the option to mount your online storage as an extra drive on your operating system. This can be done really easy on any operating system that runs a desktop environment. But I wanted to add my storage as a mounted drive on Ubuntu Server, and it does not use a desktop environment so I use WinSCP and Putty to administrate my server.
I did some research on how to mount my cloud storage I use at Stackstorage. In my account info on their website they showed me that the address I have to use for WebDAV should be . This was all the information I needed to get started. Here’s a step by step guide how I did this that you can follow but keep in mind that some commands should be different depending on what cloud storage provider you are using. Click on READ MORE to read the full article.

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Disable IPv6 on Ubuntu 16.04 Permanently

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If you want IPv6 disabled permanently on a Ubuntu 16.04 system, here’s a good way to do it. Disabling it like this should keep it disabled permanently, even after performing updates that could potentially enable it again without you knowing it. I haven’t tested it so I’m not 100% certain but if you decide to upgrade Ubuntu to 16.10 or the most recent version, it should still have ipv6 disabled after upgrading. Now let’s get to it! Simply enter the following commands in your console:

sudo echo "net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1" | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/99-my-disable-ipv6.conf
sudo service procps reload
ifconfig

The ifconfig should not show any ipv6 address. A reboot is not required, but it won’t hurt either.

 

How to install MP4Box on Ubuntu 16.04 Headless

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“MP4Box is a multimedia packager, with a vast number of functionalities: conversion, splitting, hinting, dumping and others. It can be used for performing many manipulations on multimedia files like AVI, MPG, TS, but mostly on ISO media files (e.g. MP4, 3GP). It is a command-line tool so it can be utilized by scripts like the php script that I want to use. MP4Box is included in the GPAC package.”

I want to be able to use a certain media hosting package but during installation it tells me that it will require MP4Box to continue. I tried installing it regularly (apt-get install mp4box) but that didn’t work. After doing a bit of research I decided to build MP4Box from scratch so that means compiling the source and here’s how I did that.

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