Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[sgreger1]

Hey so I am using irssi right now and have figured out how to highlight things:

/hilight <nic>

, but do you know how to customize it so that you can choose which names appear as which colors? The irssi manual website seems to be down so I can't read their documentation.


Edit: And how do I make it so my name is not attached to my account? Like if I try to use the same username twice it says "Name Belongs to MY NAME HERE". I don't want my real name being used. Is this something I have to change on my computer or in the irssi client?

[lxskllr]

Wow thanks for the detailed tutorial Shiki! I am learning lots of new things every day. Hopefully I will have more computer time today so i can mess around with this.

I saw a program in there that claims it can crack passwords on open wifi connections, is it really that easy to where you can launch a program and have it sniff enough packets to discover the password to the wifi connection you are on? If so than that is amazing.

wep is easy to crack, other encryption a bit less so.

[sgreger1]

Wow thanks for the detailed tutorial Shiki! I am learning lots of new things every day. Hopefully I will have more computer time today so i can mess around with this.

I saw a program in there that claims it can crack passwords on open wifi connections, is it really that easy to where you can launch a program and have it sniff enough packets to discover the password to the wifi connection you are on? If so than that is amazing.

[shikitohno]

I know there are ssh clients on the iPhone that work okay, though it's a pain in the ass to type exactly on those small screens. Still, any remote access software is going to require that you be able to forward ports. By default, ssh would require port 22 to be forwarded for that computer, though you can change it. For your router, did you guys actually remember changing the password? If not, you can probably find out the default password by googling "router model default admin password." If you did change it and you forgot, there ought to be a button that says reset or restore above it somewhere on your router. It'll be the sort of button you'd have to use the tip of a pen or a paperclip to press in. Holding that button down for about 5 seconds will reset your routers settings back to factory default, including the admin password. You'll haveo redo any configurations you previously did on it, like creating you wi-fi network over and such, but it'll spare you paying $40 to have your password reset. Once that's done, you'd have to install open ssh, and edit the files /etc/ssh/ssh_config and /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Then when you have your ssh client and daemon configured properly, run

sudo chkconfig sshd on

so that sshd would start on boot as a daemon (a process running in the background, not connected to any display or terminal), and you would be able to connect to your computer remotely by typing

ssh username@You.external.IP.here

in order to SSH into your machine. I'd recommend configuring it to use signed keys for login, rather than passwords, as it's a lot more difficult to generate a PGP key that would be the exact same as yours, compared to just guessingyour password. Some people also recommend picking an arbitrary higher port and using that for SSH instead of port 22, in order to reduce the number of random attempts to guess your password by people who port scan blocks of IP addresses and just see you running ssh on port 22. If you use an alternate port, you'd need to type

ssh -p ### username@Your.external.IP.here

.

Keep in mind, ssh is terminal only, so you'll be reliant on what you can do in the terminal. Fortunately, you can do almost anything shy of watch videos or look at pictures in the terminal. Mutt is a really good email client, mpd+ncmpcpp will give you music, irssi does irc, links is a decent web browser, vifm works well as a file manager (providing you know the vi/vim keybindings). Aside from links, I use those programs pretty much exclusively, even when I'm just at home. They're all capable enough and powerful enough that I don't need to use any GUI programs for those functions.

[sgreger1]

Yah I played with it a little more last night and it makes sense now (I only had 30 min of computer time so couldn't do much). I guess I am just not at the point where I find myself using multiple terminals for anything yet so I didn't realize that this would be something that would occur often. Are there any good remote clients for linux that can allow my computer to be accessed through my iphone by chance?

[shikitohno]

I'd say you're missing the point to a certain extent. Think about it, which is easier to work with: having 12 terminal windows/tabs open, and trying to remember which program is running in which while switching between them, or having 12 programs running in one screen session, and being able to see a list of them all just by hittin C-a "? Since you can name every window open in screen, you can get a nice list of everything you've got open in just a couple of seconds, rapidly move between them, and it'll work nicely for dealing with things running remotely. In the long term, it's up to you, but personally, I prefer to just have one terminal open running screen, instead of multiple terminals all running one program each. Screen's also very useful on remotely accessed machines for the reason you found in that little quote. If you have a screen session running your programs on a remote machine, and you lose your connection to the machine, when you reconnect you'll find your screen session still trucking along.

[sgreger1]

Okay so I got all three installed. I am trying to figure out screen.

So what exactly is the main purpose of this, running multiple terminals at once? Can't you just open up a new terminal window. Am I missing the point entirely?

Edit; Okay I found this somewhere, seems to make sense.

The beauty of the screen is that users can "detach" from their screens, logout, and then at a later time, login again "reattach" to find their programs still running just as they left them.

Moving on to learn Irssi now. This is a great tutorial that teaches about both:

http://quadpoint.org/articles/irssi

[shikitohno]

You can also hit C-a ? to see a brief listing of keybindings fo screen while you're in it. Just remember that by C-a they mean hit ctrl-a, release them and press something else.

[sgreger1]

Oh wow that's really easy then. I figured I would have to do something more complicated for such a simple task, it being linux and all

Oh i can't wait to get home now. I need to play around with screen too to figure out more about how it works.

[shikitohno]

To launch terminal programs, just type their name for the most part. For example, to launch screen, and run rtorrent and irssi in it, type

screen

to launch screen. Next

rtorrent

to launch rtorrent. You can then hit Cntl-a followed by c to open a new window within screen, and type

irssi

to launch irssi. You could switch between those windows by hitting Cntl-a (from now on, just abbreviated as C-a) followed by either n or p. As lx says, qbittorrent will work, and transmission is already installed. I used to like qbittorrent a lot, but it had a bug for a while where it'd misbehave with btrfs drives, and just intermittently unmount them...

Also, you can't always just copy those Debian instructions verbatim. Some things are relatively simple to adjust for, like what Debian releases as libfoo-dev would be called libfoo-devel on Fedora. Sometimes what's provided by one package in Debian will be provided by something with a different name under Fedora, or just be completely unavailable from the repos. And as lx said earlier, source compilations should generally be a last resort, as things installed via the repos are usually easier to update. Of course, rtorrent's source does have an easy update method coded into it for source compilations, but for now it's pretty much easier to install from the repos, or else use what lx is mentioning.

[sgreger1]

You don't listen to me...

Edit:
http://www.qbittorrent.org/

Edit2:
There's also transmission which is likely already installed. I'm sure fedora comes with a torrent client of some kind.

Cool i'll have to check it out when i get home since my work blocks their page. I may have seen transmission in my list of applications but didn't know what it did (all that shit sounds completely foreign to me as I have never heard of any fo these open source programs until now).

[lxskllr]

You don't listen to me...

Edit:
http://www.qbittorrent.org/

Edit2:
There's also transmission which is likely already installed. I'm sure fedora comes with a torrent client of some kind.

[sgreger1]

Oh okay, i'll have to figure out how to find/run a program from within the terminal than. Utorrent has lots of "Features" I guess but all I do is magnetic link>download>seed. Don't need all the "Stream now" or VLC plugins etc that it has since I never use any of that. If I could have something lightweight that just downloads and seeds torrents that would be sweet.

[lxskllr]

Yea, Debian is apt-get, aptitude, or synaptic.

rtorrent is a cli program. You'd run it from the terminal, so it won't show up in your applications menu.

[sgreger1]

It didn't click that fedora uses a different system. A quick DuckDuckGo says that Synaptic can be installed, and used. Also it appears there's some graphical front ends for yum. I prefer using graphical managers, as you can get close to what you're looking for, and don't have to rely on exact package names.

Edit:
Looks like Add/Remove Software tool is the one for fedora, eh?

http://www.muktware.com/articles/2936

Yah ad/remove software is the one for Fedora. Seems easier to just use yum from the coomand line but I've also used the software add/remove feature. In a lot fo tutorials I see "apt-get", is this like the debian version of yum or something? Because when I follow a tutorial and replace apt-get" with "yum" it works so I am assuming they are the same thing.