JAFDIP

Just another frakkin day in paradise

Archives for February 2010

The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD

cover::The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD

By Dru Lavigne
ISBN13: 978-1-4302-2641-3
ISBN10: 1-4302-2641-2
Publisher: Apress

I was afforded the opportunity to review this book before the actual print date. For those who don’t already know PC-BSD is a well polished system and I commend the gang over at iXsystems for sponsoring it’s development. Dru Lavigne has out done herself with equally well polished volume. At first glance one would think why do I need a book about PC-BSD.

If the operating system is so good then who needs a book really? The book proves that the operating system is perfectly suitable for use by average PC users. Sure you can get by without such a text, digging through man pages and what not but if you are new to PC-BSD this book will help you go from newbie to power user in record time. One could easily re-purpose an older PC extending is usable life by installing PC-BSD.

Even if you are a veteran FreeBSD ranger, there are a lot of nuances to PC-BSD and the book does a lot to explain the why of PC-BSD. Dru does her best to explain common and advance UNIX tasks in a non-patronizing manner. Even as a long time user of FreeBSD I couldn’t help but discover some new ways of doing things.

My only gripe is that the book does not come with a PC-BSD live demo/install DVD. While you can download and burn the media easily enough, I have always found that people are more likely to drop a test drive disc in their system if one is included with the book. I personally feel that the topics covered are easier learned when one can follow along.

In any event the book has a lot of valuable information. For example in chapter 5 you will find a table listing the equivalents to common Windows applications. Since it is trivial to install these applications via PC-BSD’s PBI system even the novice user can look like a pro.

This book is the perfect compliment to a very good operating system. Yes you can muddle your way through on your own or, or you can jump start your progress with this handy guide by your side.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Permission denied (publickey,keyboard-interactive) – Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server

Recently while deploying a new MacPro with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server I encountered the following error in relation to the SFTP services.

Permission denied (publickey,keyboard-interactive)
After considerable searching through numerous dead ends all leading to the accounts in question have expired I stumbled upon the correct answer. The user accounts in question were not part of the Administrators group, therefore; were not allowed access to the system through SFTP. The obvious method to correct this would be to add all of those users to the administrators group and walk away. WRONG!!!!

No the correct thing to do is to open the Server Administration page and add this group of selected users to the allowed SFTP list. However when you open the Server Admin you won’t find an SFTP access section. SFTP access is actually part of the SSH protocol and provided by Apple’s port of OpenSSH to the system. In the following screen observe that I simply added the imagestaff group to the allowed list and saved the changes.

There are a few things worth noting about SSH and SFTP. Apple has bundled an anti brute force mechanism into the operating system called the Event Monitor Daemon or emond. Emond watches for unsuccessful login attempts via ssh and subsequently enters a temporary denial rule into the firewall. This rule denies ALL traffic from a specific IP address. That means if you have a remote office that connects to the server for other services like email, web and DNS these users will be cut off for the duration of the temporary rule. In my experience this temporary blacklisting lasts between 15 and 40 minutes.

This article is a work in progress and I will likely add more to it in the future. In addition I will likely relocate this to the Tehcnobabel pages.