The Innovation Lover

I will be conducting a basic Django Web development workshop on Saturday 6th Feb. Check out the schedule from the website. [link]

Last week I had been to Toc H Institute of Science & Technology, to address the Computer science and Engineering students. It was a nice experience to share some bits and bytes about Free and Open Source Software development to the students assembled there.

I was being invited to the college being a Google Summer of Coder 2009 to share about my experience on FOSS and how to get started. I spoke to the students about how I started using the Revolution OS ‘GNU/Linux’, how does the community work and all. The students were very new to the GNU/Linux and they hadn’t been exposed to any GNU/Linux technology stuff before. They were really enthusiastic and excited hearing about it. After my talk on how to get started working with open source projects and how it benefits them, they shot me with numerous questions. They were really enthusiastic about it. After the formal session, we had another one hour question and answers session around the auditorium.

I never had seen this much of questions from any of my audiences before. I felt very glad about it. Felt like a mass transformation would happen around TocH students to GNU/Linux. After the session I had been in conversation with the Jayakumar sir, The head of the Department, Computer Science and Engineering. He told that they were trying to build a FOSS cell around TocH and transforming atleast the computer science labs to GNU/Linux.

It was really nice experience to inspire students to Free Software.

In my hostel, we use asianet dataline internet connection. The connection is established through a webpage authentication and it needs to keep that webpage always open in the browser to get the stable connection. Once we login and releave that page, after five minutes it will require a re-login. Its a real hurdle to keep a page open in the browser for internet authentication.

I just analyzed the http requests from that page and automated using the curl utility.

Here is the script it feel, it would be useful for many.

#!/bin/bash

customer=CNXXXX
password=XXXXXX

if [ -n "`ifconfig | grep -A 1  wlan0 | grep "inet addr"`" ];
then

curl https://mwcp-ekm-04.adlkerala.com:8001 --data "auth_user=$customer&auth_pass=$password&accept=Login" &> /dev/null

echo "Connected :)"

while true
do
	sleep 300
	curl https://mwcp-ekm-04.adlkerala.com:8001 --data "alive=y&un=$customer" &> /dev/null ;

done

else

echo "Wifi not connected";

fi

Copy down the above script in a text file and rename to internet.sh

slynux@slynux-laptop:~$ chmod a+x  internet.sh
slynux@slynux-laptop:~$ ./internet.sh
Connected  

This script has an initial check for ethernet interface. Here it is given Wifi interface, wlan0. If you use a LAN for connection change wlan0 to eth0 and the message as well

Life has been very busy these days around college. Series exams, crap assignments and lots of useless stuffs. Getting very irritated of these unworthy junks. Classes for Semester V are winding up these week. University exams are scheduled from November 3rd to 19th. So go confused !

Currently I am the official Web admin at Model Engineering College. Its been a long time since I am elected to be the web admin, but I haven’t been doing any work regarding that being busy with Summer of Coding.

Our official college website http://www.mec.ac.in is a well designed site with a template system and plain html static files + php in the backend. But we don’t have any CMS used to maintain the website. But once you look at the website, it would seem like some CMS is running backend. It the successful design which gives such an impression. Kudos to the Alumnis of MEC who spent lots of sleepless night coding the MEC website and the template. Currently we give edit access to different departments and staff via a web based file manager. We were using phpfm, which is dead project and of consists of numerous bugs. Recent days, I have noticed a good amount of attacks towards the website. I was pretty sure that the phpfm would be the vulnerability made use by the attackers. They injected base64 encrypted shellcode into all the php scripts. Once they are executed, it made copies of html and php files with extension filename.infected.

I removed the phpfm and replaced it with File Thingie.

File Thingies seems to be a easy to use and fine web file manager. It supports multiple user accounts restricted to subdirectories other than giving access to the entire website.

MEC Webserver hosts not only http://www.mec.ac.in, but also several other college websites. So it handles large amount of data. Once some attack happens, it is really hard to recover the data since some proper backup techniques are used. So I have decided to go with decisio to install subversion in the webserver and make all the changes occuring to the website to be written through subversion version control only. It would help to maintain a changelog of all changes which are made in the website/webserver. Once we need some rollback or recovery, within seconds we can rollback to the prevous states. Also it enables to implement several users. It would keep track of users made changes to the website, and what are the changes. It can maintain a history of all changes happening to the website. Once new webadmins come, they can easily trace the history from the changelog and he would be able to learn a lot from the changelog also. Like how some problem is identified, how are they rectified, how is an update made etc.

Anyway I am going to implement the version control system. I haven’t decided whether to go with git or subversion.