Happy Cat Technologies welcomes you to it's business web site. We look forward to 2013, continuing to provide quality service to a select group of clients in the Fort Collins area. Always remember that help is a phone call away, and we'll try to get you purring again as soon as possible.

Alfred P. Reaud, Proprietor, Happy Cat Technologies.

COMMENTING (WITH MODERATOR APPROVAL),
VOTING IS NOW OPEN TO ANONYMOUS USERS,
and NEWS FEED SEARCHING!

WELCOME!

Geek Fortune Of The Day

Maslow's Maxim:
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything like a nail.

Sorry, too much stuff going on, LOL, to keep up the regular updates. Happy Cat Technologies is going to be moving soon. Check out http://coloradoan-anti-censorship.net as to why.

LATEST CONTENT

Special For The Month of April

Submitted by alreaud on Mon, 04/01/2013 - 19:13

We've got a special deal for you in the month of April. During April, we'll install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Linux and accompanying applications for the very low price of $45 per machine to allow as seamless a transition as possible from Windows to Linux. This installation includes (many more come with basic install):

This list is the minimum install for usability, and there are thousands

Two great DRUPAL modules to stop harassing IP addresses

Submitted by alreaud on Tue, 03/26/2013 - 21:17

If you operate a content management systems (CMS), you're probably familiar with the curse of botnet attacks on the user registration and persistent spammers on comments. These are IP address that are attached to your CMS from China, i.e. the 163.com domain, sending regular, daily spam message updates about Viagra, Cialis, and faux haute couture, sometimes for years on end. Or they continuously try to attack the user registration CAPTCHA, trying to create accounts to do the same or worse, sometimes using inane responses to the CAPTCHA like "TooBad1" through "TooBad257", not really doing any damage but consuming sometimes scarce resources and filling up the logs (to mask other activity sometimes, like database attacks).

This is not a problem specific to any one CMS, and will happen to Drupal, Wordpress, or Joomla. Drupal, however, logs the events as part of core functionality, allowing them to be noticed by the operator. Having dealt with it for well over a year, mostly manually, I found two great modules in the Dupal repository

From Gnome back to Gnome, four operating systems later

Submitted by alreaud on Thu, 03/21/2013 - 06:43

My in-house server was running Fedora 16, which is at end of life, so I decided to update to the latest Fedora release, which was 18. This came about because of an OpenVAS scan of the server detecting issues with httpd and other things. Also with a philosophy of being tired of GNOME 3's idiosyncrasies, I decided to upgrade to Fedora 18-KDE instead of the Gnome version. Four operating system installations later, I wound up installing Ubuntu 12.04 with GNOME 3, LOL! Approximately 24 hours real time was used, and I'm getting damn good at it!

Fedora 18-KDE:
(Fedora KDE Live Media, i686, 844.1MB, Direct Download) Promises to be a great OS, and installed in an excellent fashion, except for the problem related below with partitioning the disk drives how you want as opposed to how Fedora 18 wants. This version requires a DVD because it's 844MB, and my problems started here, as an omen. The first thing I had to do after burning the ISO is swap out the DVD drive in the target system. angry  Install proceeded well, and I succumbed to Fedora 18

Gatesed in the Office - Watch out for Windows disk checking in the office

Submitted by alreaud on Sat, 03/02/2013 - 11:38

“If you encounter one of the unfortunate side-effects of using Microsoft technology, you've been "Gatesed." In typical IT usage, "If it Gatesed (BSOD), you were SOL."” fortune_mod

With most modern operating systems, full disk checking requires that the device be unmounted. With Windows 7, Vista, and XP, that is true, and one has to reboot to get disk checking started. If "scan disk for bad sectors" option is selected, running disk checking can take an appreciable time, sometimes hours depending on the size of the disk. Once started, this may not be terminated, on advice of Microsoft Support. “… Please note that it is not recommended to stop or interrupt the chkdsk running on the computer until it completes by itself. …” Srinivas R, Microsoft Support.

This can cause the customer problems if the system is rebooted Monday

Getting back in the groove...

Submitted by alreaud on Fri, 03/01/2013 - 08:15

Happy Cat is going to be getting back in the groove and focusing more on increasing our business, as the business needs to start paying the bills. For that we need your help out there. For the month of March, we have special going on, $45 to service your PC. It's a sweet deal, as usually the process would be more than $90 at our regular rate.

Call up the office number (970) 672-8298 and set up a service call or appointment for service at the shop.

Thanks for your time, and Happy Computing!

Increased Attacks on Content Management System Logins from Bots / Mal-Nets

Submitted by alreaud on Sun, 10/28/2012 - 05:13

Content management system (CMS) login attacks have increased significantly in the past month. The signature of these attacks varies, but it is repeated attempts to log in with a randomly generated account name, with very fast cycle times but low attempt counts, followed by a delay. An IP address change may or may not occur during the attacks. Occasionally during an attack session, an attack from another attacker IP address / attack profile inserts itself in the attack stream.

These attacks are ineffective, at least with a correctly configured and updated Drupal CMS. The threat to Wordpress and/or other CMS' versions are unknown to this author as he doesn't currently maintain any Wordpress, Joomla or other CMS'. The signature of some attacks are as follows:

Out of Lurking for Curiosity

Submitted by alreaud on Tue, 08/07/2012 - 21:12

Months go by and nothing gets written because not much changes. The Gnome 3 interface doesn't lock up as much on restart, but normally does so on logout. The attacks on the shell are futile, and Fail2ban does a good job of making them futile. So there's not much to write about.

Curiosity, the Mars Science Lander(MSL), is another story. At ~900kg, it's a behemoth, the biggest lander placed on another planet successfully. The landing techniques were novel, requiring aerobreaking, supersonic parachuting, retrorockets and finally a sky-crane winch-down of the lander itself. Pretty phenomenal...

What will we find there, with a real lander that is more like a nuclear powered 6-wheel ATV? There is no telling, but we await expectantly! So congratulations to NASA at the MSL team, great job done getting us there. Now the task is finding out where the water went.

happycattech.com One Year Aniversary - Gnome 3 Fedora 16 Update

Submitted by alreaud on Thu, 05/24/2012 - 22:53

The website's first year rolls around, and looking back it was interesting. Most of the hacking disappeared over time, with just occassional attacks occurring on the testing server. Recently, there have been more shell attacks coming from the US itself, treated in the same manner as usual. Business is slow, and the only work recently has been mostly hooking up with Manuel Labor.

Gnome 3 / Fedora 16 still isn't satisfactory, but it has improved. I've learned not to log out, but to just close all applications and lock the screen. That seems to prevent the hard lockups that happen on logout. Well, at least I haven't tried recently. I've had no success with restarting the Gnome Shell via remote command shell when hard lockups occur. The problem isn't (usually) in the kernel, but in Gnome Shell.

There is also an interesting video quirk which appears to scramble the screen tiles. Both on the background and in the application windows. It not a memory

Fedora 14 Upgrade to Fedora 16 and GNOME 3: Not for the faint hearted...

Submitted by alreaud on Sun, 02/26/2012 - 20:21

After waiting until Fedora 14 end of life to occur, I upgraded all systems to Fedora 16 except for one that had insufficient memory. Though the documentation says 768M, you should have at least one GB of ram and three times that in swap. It is important to note, before you start, that the upgrade process works better from a root shell than from the X-Windows GUI. Editing inittab may be required to allow this.

The first thing you want to do with this upgrade is, obviously, back up any critical data onto a machine that you can still operate with, such as a laptop or onto non-volatile media such as good quality DVDs. However, if you don't have another computer, I would recommend that you do an extra dose of your medication of choice before you start. Next install grub2 via the command yum install grub2, if it isn't already installed. This will save your ass when the install doesn't start. Having grub2 will allow you to manually start the upgrade via the grub command line or fall back to the old kernel version if all else fails.

Next we need to install preupgrade via the command yum install preupgrade. Now before starting, insure that you back up everything that you hold dear. That includes pictures, records, videos, anything that you can't afford to loose. Some things may not work as expected or may not work at all after the upgrade.

The next command that

Restoring the whole site

Submitted by alreaud on Wed, 01/18/2012 - 21:21

Restoring the whole site to a working state from an online site to a testing server, or from a testing server to an online site is a bit trickier. One has to account for differences in the server configurations. This leads to the locking of certain files on both the testing server and online server so that accidental updating doesn't occur. These files are usually the CMS configuration file, and .htaccess in the document root.

Hence in the following script, areas are left out that would be too specific to certain installations to be generically useful.

full_site_restore.sh