Vsftpd virtual users config

vsftpd has a very annoying inplementation and configuration compared to pureftpd and alike.

Part of the annoyance is treating virtual users as guest users and guest users as anonymous users! To fix this you can the anonymous umask to be wide open but this has obvious security concerns if you also have local users as I have.

The fix I found is to set the following to YES in the vsftpd.conf:

virtual_use_local_privs
If enabled, virtual users will use the same privileges as local users. By default, virtual users will use the same privileges as anonymous users, which tends to be more restrictive (especially in terms of write access).

Default: NO

This way only ftp user can mess with the files and no one has access to the ftp account. I recommend leaving hte local umask as default instead of 022 so others can't read.

Karen Durant - Travel Agent to Avoid!

I'm unsure if this woman aims to take money she is not entitled to on purpose or it is severe incompetence. On first calling her as I had not had a reply to an enquiry I had about accommodation I was due to book, I had a very rude and abrupt response from herself, and the man who first answered the phone sounded like he was defending a rather disorganised and stressful person.

Very close to the booking dates Karen Durant contacted me to say that the accommodation requested had already been booked by another! This is something of a habit for her and there are other reports on here illustrating my point! Even thought I confirmed it was available and speedily sent off her booking form with my credit cards in insecurely by email as per her request!

I was offered alternative accommodation but the be honest most of the accommodation I have seen on offer from Karen Durant is less favourable than a week in a Mosside estate flat! Tripadvisor is full of negativity for all of her properties I have been shown, which seems odd as she keeps these properties on her site! I'm sure a horse owner would soon ditch a loosing horse, but this is part of business she fails on hard!

When a refund was requested the time for refund was double that of the time to take payment and seemed come in 3 days after I chased Karen Durant again for payment! Not only was there a delay meaning I had to move funds to ensure I could pay for my other accommodation losing me money, it was also over £8 short! I emailed Karen Durant about this and had no response so have informed my bank to take this charge back and submitting them details explaining why that visa will review.

The 4u at the end of her domains says it all really. Just google phones4u/singlepoint complaints and you will see she seems to be emulating a lot of their style ;)

http://www.holidayaccommodation4u.com/
http://www.holidaycottages4u.com/
http://www.holidays4u.org/

Karen Durant
298 Nelson Road, Twickenham, Middlesex TW2 7BW
p: 02088933172 f: 02088938090
http://www.karen-durant.co.uk

pidgin-sipe-1.10.1

Pidgin-sipe is a bit of a PITA to compile on RHEL/CentOS. I read the README and attemted to yum the dependancies starting with a "yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'" Ensure the devel versions of everything are also included especially pidgin and then I hacked the configure script:

At line 11822 I ammended the current to read as:

pkg_cv_GLIB_CFLAGS=`$PKG_CONFIG --libs --cflags "glib-2.0" 2>/dev/null`

Ensure you have the right line first as line numbers might change with releases.

Compile and install! Ensure the plugins get stuffed in /usr/lib64/purple-2/ if your using a 64 bit install else pidgin won't find them.

Outlook and it's random line break removal

mtruesdell@stackoverflow.com very helpfully documented the odd behavior Outlook shows when dealing with line breaks in a most useful manner:

"Every message starts with continuation off.
Lines less than 40 characters long do not trigger continuation, but if continuation is on, they will have their line breaks removed.
Lines 40 characters or longer turn continuation on. It remains on until an event occurs to turn it off.
Lines that end with a period, question mark, exclamation point or colon turn continuation off. (Outlook assumes it's the end of a sentence?)
Lines that turn continuation off will start with a line break, but will turn continuation back on if they are longer than 40 characters.
Lines that start or end with a tab turn continuation off.
Lines that start with 2 or more spaces turn continuation off.
Lines that end with 3 or more spaces turn continuation off.

Please note that he tried all of this with Outlook 2007.
So if possible, you can end messages with a sentence-terminating punctuation mark, or even a tab."

Big yourself up mtruesdell this has been doing my head in the last 2 hours!

HP is the virus!

I have been seeing what I thought was a botnet virus on my network trying to talk to it's command and control server via constant UDP to everyone on port 34447! I had two laptop clients doing it and their owners where none the wiser. I reported this to HP's internal security teams to see if it was known to them and for them to get solving. One just stopped with no info from it's owner and the other was eventually rebuilt. Now I look at the users machine I note it runs a print server! A HP wireless print server! I smell the potential FAIL as most these products are made in India and Eastern Europe like their drivers, so I disable it. Bingo no more UDP broadcasts!

This is what the client running the print server sends:

438.407640 x.x.x.x -> 255.255.255.255 UDP Source port: 49906 Destination port: 34447

The source port moves but is sometimes reused the rest is static.