Determine if a disk is SSD or HDD

Read full details here: Determine if a disk is SSD or HDD



This is one of those random things I do and decided to put it in the website. I know that my personal computer is running on HDD, but when I am logged into a remote Linux system and suddenly I started wondering about how to determine if the underlying disk is SSD or HDD, I wasn’t too sure what to look for. A quick Google search returned the best possible solution and I thought, hey maybe I should…

Read the rest of it here: Determine if a disk is SSD or HDD

darodar.com referrer spam and What to do?

Read full details here: darodar.com referrer spam and What to do?



I had some interesting traffic showing up in my Google Analytics today. So far I’ve seen 21 referral traffic from forum.topic55798995.darodar.com to my home page http://www.blackmoreops.com/.

What is more scary?

You know what? I am not worried about this darodar.com referral spam / referrer spam. The worst that can happen is you see some funny links in your Google Analytics. Just don’t browse to those sites.
But the part that’s more disturbing is that anyone with some programming skill can actually create a tool to randomize Google Analytics code and send Fake visiting info back to Google. Followings are the implications:

1. You can target a legit website and spam others using them as referrer. The result? Google demotes a perfetly good website because someone else spammed forged their GA code to spam others.
2. You can target a website and spam using their GA code. The result? That website appears in millions of GA users and if even 5% of them visit that website, it might just overload their server and create a DDoS situation for them. I tested a tool named GoldenEye which was able to create 100’s of legit connections from same IP and GA thought they were real users. There’s obviously some more fine tuning required on Google’s behalf.
3. Someone exploits your GA code and Google can just BAN your GA account, no explanations will be given. Your AdSense account can be exploited and banned in similar ways.

Open question to everyone

Anyone assessed this referrer spam on Bing/Alexa/Yandex?
This spam is too broad scale to be useful for BlackHAT SEO but if someone manages to do it carefully on Bing/Alexa/Yandex/DuckDuckGo or other search engines, then those sites will be ranked high on those services. Google unknowingly will pick up those search results and automatically give that website a higher ranking.

Note: Piwik doesn’t report this SPAM which confirms that this is again just GA code abuse.

What do you do in the meantime?

Few options, some are just to make you sleep well!

1. You can block their IP – pointless, IP’s are dime a dozen.
2. You can block them as a referrer – maybe good for your GA. See links above for the guides.
3. You can filter them in your GA Account – Possibly a good idea.

Just wait a few days and Google will take care of it in Google Analytics. It will not hurt your Analytics account or your website standings in anyway. Lastly, if it makes you happier and you’re a WordPress user who enabled JetPack, just check JetPack statistics. JetPack didn’t see this referrer.
You know what? Someone is having a lot of fun and laughing at us all!!!

Update 20141219:1340: I just saw make-money-online.7makemoneyonline.com popping up in my referrers list. Use Google Analytics Filter to remove them from your reports. You can also apply the filter above to ban them if you feel like.



Read the rest of it here: darodar.com referrer spam and What to do?

Random quotes and creatures using fortune and cowsay in Linux terminal

Read full details here: Random quotes and creatures using fortune and cowsay in Linux terminal

Fortune and Cowsay - random quotes and animals

Normally all the guides using fortune and cowsay uses the default creatures (a.k.a Cow!) to show different quotes. There's plenty of guides on that. However, I wanted to show a random creature saying different fortune quotes on my terminal.I could find random figment of instructions in different forums and decided to write a small guide on how to do it properly. Few lines of codes, and my Linux terminal becomes more alive!

If you're not familiar with fortune and cowsay then keep reading for details otherwise you can just jump into the code section.



Read the rest of it here: Random quotes and creatures using fortune and cowsay in Linux terminal

Fixing error: Package packagename is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source E: Package 'packagename' has no installation candidate

Read full details here: Fixing error: Package packagename is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source E: Package 'packagename' has no installation candidate

A very common error in Linux; well, most Debian based Linux distributions such as Debian itself, Ubuntu, Kali, Linux Mint has this error when trying to install a package/application

"Package packagename is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source. E: Package 'packagename' has no installation candidate"

Package somePackage is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package somePackage has no installation candidate

Extremely annoying and useless error that doesn't tell you much on how to fix it.



Read the rest of it here: Fixing error: Package packagename is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source E: Package 'packagename' has no installation candidate

Fixing ProxyChains ERROR: ld.so: object 'libproxychains.so.3' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.

Read full details here: Fixing ProxyChains ERROR: ld.so: object 'libproxychains.so.3' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.

 

Nullsec posted on – November 29, 2014 at 7:53 pm regarding ProxyChains giving an error: ERROR: ld.so: object ‘libproxychains.so.3′ from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.

 

Essentially, this might expose you. Following fix was also posted by NullSec, ‘Thank you‘. 

 

(I’ve only formatted his comment to make it more user-readable!)

Read the rest of it here: Fixing ProxyChains ERROR: ld.so: object 'libproxychains.so.3' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.

Reset root password in Ubuntu, Debian, Kali, CentOS or pretty much any Linux distributions

Read full details here: Reset root password in Ubuntu, Debian, Kali, CentOS or pretty much any Linux distributions




Forgetting root password is an hassle. We try to be vigilant with our security and set a complex root password. We also try not to login using directly into root account (in most production boxes) and use sudo instead. So it's not very unlikely to loose your root password and depending on how you've setup your access, your just might not be able to reset it using sudo passwd root/someusername. Following post shows you two different ways to reset root password in Ubuntu, Debian, Kali, CentOS or pretty much any Linux distributions.

Read the rest of it here: Reset root password in Ubuntu, Debian, Kali, CentOS or pretty much any Linux distributions

Fixing There are unfinished transactions remaining. You might consider running yum-complete-transaction first to finish them in CentOS

Read full details here: Fixing There are unfinished transactions remaining. You might consider running yum-complete-transaction first to finish them in CentOS


http://www.blackmoreops.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Fixing-There-are-unfinished-transactions-remaining.-You-might-consider-running-yum-complete-transaction-first-to-finish-them-in-CentOS-blackMORE-Ops-3.jpg
Tried to install atop in one of the CentOS servers. Due to the fact this server is locked down, the install process failed. Next thing I know yum is giving me grief with the following error
There are unfinished transactions remaining. You might consider running yum-complete-transaction first to...


Read the rest of it here: Fixing There are unfinished transactions remaining. You might consider running yum-complete-transaction first to finish them in CentOS

14 top data recovery softwares - Data rescue tools

Read full details here: 14 top data recovery softwares - Data rescue tools


http://www.blackmoreops.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Linux-recovery-software-–-Data-rescue-tools-blackMORE-Ops.png
Data recovery is the process of salvaging and handling the data through the data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. Often the data are being salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives,...


Read the rest of it here: 14 top data recovery softwares - Data rescue tools