Many of you know I do book reviews for Pakt Publishing. Well this month is their WordPress Month where they are offering some great special offers on some cool WordPress books. This is the software that runs bunches of your favorite websites, including this one 
So, head on over to http://www.packtpub.com/article/wordpress-month and get a great deal on some cool tech books today! They even offer e-books to help fill up your Kindle / Nook!
The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Another great Oz book and this time with a whole new cast of characters to get acquainted with. Ojo the unlucky, a Munchkin on a quest to save his uncle from a tragic curse is in the company of Scraps the Patchwork Girl, a wonderful counterpart to the Scarecrow. They are joined by the glass cat, who temperment is a haughty as the color of her brains, another creation of the Crooked Magician whose magic is the direct cause of Ojo’s Uncle’s perdicament.
The quest this time is to find the ingredients to remove the paralysis curse on Uncle Nunkie resulting from the comical sorcery that produced the patch work girl.
Along the way they meet up with some favourites of Oz including the Shaggy Man who plays a very prominent role in this book. Their quest takes them to as of yet undocumented areas of the fairy country to meet both wicked and kindly denizens.
Avery very much enoyed this book as did I. I like how the stories are not exploring the Land of Oz and its inhabitants more and more as opposed to the opening and closing being about Dorthy coming to Oz and then finding her way home again.
Good stuff!
View all my reviews
Backtrack4
That being said, I believe the information in this book to be directly applicable to Backtrack 5 and a good reference for it!
The book is a great tutorial and walk-through on how to use Backtrack for security and penetration testing, but, more than that, it offers good information about the field in general. You will go through software installations, software overviews, methodologies, tests / testing, and my favorite part, reporting and deliverables, a MUST for professional computer people.
I think this is an excellent book to add to your knowledge arsenal and you may be surprised at just how much you didn’t know. I know I was. This really is an important subject for computer professionals and I cant think of a better way to brush up than by grabbing a copy today. Thumbs up!
I have seen a lot of commenting on the decision to use a black screen as the boot splash on Linux Mint 11. One person summed it up well when they said that that black screen is indicative in many other operating systems as something going wrong and it tends to scare people. Well, that being the case, if you are scared or if you just like to see what’s going on behind the scenes like I do sometimes this is how you can fix that fairly easily.
Open up a terminal and do a:
vi /etc/defaults/grub
scroll down to the line that says:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”
and change it to:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”"
and save the file.
After that do a:
update-grub
When that is finished, reboot your machine and enjoy watching the text based boot process as it occurs. Pay close attention, though, ’cause it sure doesn’t last long! 
There are some great reasons to use OSSEC. One of them is you get emails like these I received this morning:
Jun 10 09:24:51 pukwudgie sshd[28651]: Failed password for invalid user pureftp from 202.121.49.62 port 45542 ssh2
Jun 10 09:24:48 pukwudgie sshd[28651]: Invalid user pureftp from 202.121.49.62
Jun 10 09:24:29 pukwudgie sshd[28630]: Failed password for invalid user tom from 202.121.49.62 port 37388 ssh2
Jun 10 09:24:28 pukwudgie sshd[28630]: Invalid user tom from 202.121.49.62
Jun 10 09:24:11 pukwudgie sshd[28628]: Failed password for invalid user peter from 202.121.49.62 port 57468 ssh2
Jun 10 09:24:09 pukwudgie sshd[28628]: Invalid user peter from 202.121.49.62
Jun 10 09:23:52 pukwudgie sshd[28610]: Failed password for invalid user thom from 202.121.49.62 port 49315 ssh2
Jun 10 09:26:39 pukwudgie sshd[28730]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=202.121.49.62 user=root
Jun 10 09:25:43 pukwudgie sshd[28690]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=202.121.49.62
Jun 10 09:25:24 pukwudgie sshd[28672]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=202.121.49.62
Jun 10 09:25:05 pukwudgie sshd[28653]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=202.121.49.62
Jun 10 09:24:48 pukwudgie sshd[28651]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=202.121.49.62
Jun 10 09:24:28 pukwudgie sshd[28630]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=202.121.49.62
Jun 10 09:24:09 pukwudgie sshd[28628]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=202.121.49.62Jun 10 09:44:08 pukwudgie sshd[29440]: pam_succeed_if(sshd:auth): error retrieving information about user recruit
Jun 10 09:44:46 pukwudgie sshd[29478]: pam_succeed_if(sshd:auth): error retrieving information about user office
Jun 10 09:45:25 pukwudgie sshd[29497]: pam_succeed_if(sshd:auth): error retrieving information about user tomcat
Jun 10 09:45:05 pukwudgie sshd[29480]: pam_succeed_if(sshd:auth): error retrieving information about user samba
Jun 10 09:45:42 pukwudgie sshd[29514]: pam_succeed_if(sshd:auth): error retrieving information about user webadmin
Jun 10 09:47:02 pukwudgie sshd[29555]: Failed password for invalid user spam from 202.121.49.62 port 45351 ssh2
Jun 10 09:46:59 pukwudgie sshd[29555]: Invalid user spam from 202.121.49.62
Jun 10 09:46:43 pukwudgie sshd[29538]: Failed password for invalid user ssh2 from 202.121.49.62 port 37198 ssh2
Jun 10 09:46:40 pukwudgie sshd[29538]: Invalid user ssh2 from 202.121.49.62
Jun 10 09:46:03 pukwudgie sshd[29518]: Failed password for invalid user jambo from 202.121.49.62 port 49116 ssh2
Jun 10 09:46:01 pukwudgie sshd[29518]: Invalid user jambo from 202.121.49.62
Jun 10 09:45:45 pukwudgie sshd[29514]: Failed password for invalid user webadmin from 202.121.49.62 port 40961 ssh2
Etcetera, etcetera…
Something odd with the LinuxPlanet.Org blog site right now. Many multiple posts. I hope i have a handle on it and this is the test! Please disregard
Linux Mint
You should all know by now that Ubuntu 11.04 and Mint 11 are now out in the wild, and both are very nice IMHO. I have been a “Minty” guy now for quite sometime but I thought it would behoove me to at least try the new Ubuntu 11.04 and it’s Unity interface, so I stuck it on a netbook to test it out and I can say this: It doesn’t suck at all! In fact, I was pleasantly surprised. Compared to Gnome 3 (more on that later), Unity is quite usable.
That brings me to Mint 11. A beautiful distribution as I have come to expect. Not too much to say about it for those familiar with Mint except it’s a worthy successor in a long line of great releases. If you haven’t yet tried Mint, you are really doing yourself a disservice.
There are of course problems with everything. Mine was with my vpn connection. I use vpnc to connect to my works’ cisco vpn, and I have been doing so successfully now for many years. In fact, vpnc is my preferred method of connecting over any other client including the cisco client itself. It just works. It’s very easy to configure and use and it stays out of my way. That is until recently.
After I installed Mint 11 on my daily carry, I eventually needed to vpn into work and fix something. Well, I immediately noticed that ssh through vpnc would not connect. I could ping, http, rdesktop, whathaveyou, but no ssh. I looked at the routes, I looked at the tunnel, I looked at the verbose messages from vpnc. Nothing worked. If, however, I walked over to my other laptop that is running Mint 10 with the very same vpnc config, I got right through. This was quite perplexing. I eventually tried connecting with the Ubuntu 11.04 install, and I got the exact same results. I was grasping at straws. Maybe all new distributions were broken in this manner? The horror actually forced me to install Fedora 15 (sorry Fedora folks) and test that. To my surprise, F15′s vpnc+ssh worked just fine. This also gave me an opportunity to find out how dysfunctional and horrible an interface Gnome 3 is (KDE and Unity are gonna become big real soon I guarantee it).
As a last ditch effort to narrow things down, I decided to try a different ssh client. I tried both putty and dropbear. THEY WORKED! YAY! This meant I could go back to running the new Mint on my netbook. I fully intend to just try my own compile of ssh sometime in the future, or perhaps the package maintainers will catch wind of this and fix it (I did send some emails to Clem). Until then, I am happy that I can still use my beloved Mint and I can live temporarily with dropbear and / or putty for ssh through my vpn when I need it. I just hope this post gets around a bit so the other guy that uses vpnc+ssh to connect to his cisco vpn doesn’t think he’s going crazy like I did