Logwatch and fail2ban

Things are running along pretty smoothly on the Ubuntu server over on Amazon AWS. Doing some research on server admin and security, saw a post on installing Logwatch to more easily scan the logs daily.   Of course, no surprise to see lots of attempts at compromising the server.

Decided to do something about it and found this article (geared more to Debian Wheezy, but still applies to Ubuntu): Install and Config Fail2Ban

I particularly liked the information about apache-badbots and apache-myadmin, both of which would help block a lot of the traffic seen in the logs.

Also saw lots of entries in the logs with w00tw00t.at.blackhats.romanian.anti-sec:)
So looked up a post on this blog that discusses using fail2ban specifically to block it.

Fun stuff!

LibreOffice on Ubuntu 12.04 - More about hsqldb.jdbcDriver

I have another old laptop that has Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (dual boot with Windows 7) and wanted to see if I could recreate the issue with LibreOffice Base.

This time I did not uninstall the default LibreOffice 3 that came with the distribution.   Rather I followed the instructions mentioned in the previous post and added the PPA followed by an update.  I didn't realize that Base was not included in the default install I had, so did have to install it.

Was not surprised to find that Base could not open up the sample database just as before.  So, that ruled out that doing the uninstall first on the other laptop caused the problem. 

As before, running this command fixed the issue:

sudo apt-get install libhsqldb-java

Upgrading to LibreOffice 4.1 on Ubuntu - Missing hsqldb.jdbcDriver

I've been really enjoying Ubuntu on this old Dell laptop for awhile now.  One thing I ran across was not being able to open MS Publisher documents with the default LibreOffice 3 that was installed.  Doing a little research, that functionality was added to LibreOffice 4, so I decided to upgrade.

Best I could tell, the proper way to proceed was to use the Software Center to uninstall version 3.  Then I found this article on installing LibreOffice 4.1 from the PPA.  After installing with sudo apt-get install libreoffice, I tried out LibreOffice Base.

I created a new database and tried to open it.  Uh-oh, I got this error:
The connection to the data source "SampleDatabase" could not be established.
and
The driver class 'org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver' could not be loaded.

Now what to do?  I went back into the Software Center and looked at LibreOffice Base and there were several optional add-ons for a variety of database drivers.  Select every one available and updated.   Nope, still not working.

Somehow installing from the PPA is not linking correctly so the hsqldb.jdbcDriver can be found.  Doing some more research I found another reference to exactly just that topic on the LibreOffice forum:  Upgraded to LO 4.1.0.4 now get 'connection to data source' error

Reading through that showed me how to install that specific driver with this:
sudo apt-get install libhsqldb-java

(Side note: I did not need to remove the old symbolic link and create a new one as mentioned in the post by dtmonterrey).

Bingo!  LibreOffice Base now opens my new database and I can connect to create and edit tables.

Happy New Year - 2014!

That's about it for today.