One Laptop Per Child ( OLPC) Project

The One Laptop Per Child Association,(OLPC) is a U.S. non-profit organization set up to oversee the creation of an affordable educational device for use in the developing world. Its mission is "To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning." Informally the chairmen says that the mission is to eliminate poverty. Its current focus is on the development, construction and deployment of the XO-1 laptop.

The goal of the foundation is to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves. To that end, OLPC is designing a laptop, educational software, manufacturing base, and distribution system to provide children outside of the first-world with otherwise unavailable technological learning opportunities.

GET INVOLVED :
Posters: Print these stuffs in your neighbourhood


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FOSS meet 2010 at NIT calicut

FOSSMeet is an annual event on Free and Open Source Software at National Institute of Technology Calicut. This event brings together FOSS enthusiasts from all over India. The 2010 edition of the event is scheduled to be held during February 5 to 7, 2010.

It started as FLOSS Meet @ NIT Calicut in 2005 which was a single day event. It is being conducted at NIT Calicut annually since then. During this period, it has evolved into one of the biggest Free Software conferences in India.

FOSSMeet 2010 is the 6th edition of this attempt at popularizing Free and Open Source Software in India.

visit: http://fossmeet.in/
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FOSS.IN 2009 at Bengaluru

FOSS.IN is one of the world’s largest Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) events, held annually in India. The event is highly focussed on FOSS development and contribution.FOSS.IN 2009 is now going on at NIMHANS center Bengaluru(from Dec 1 - 5).Im so happy to be a part of this big event..Really i can't express the feeling when i see guyz like Kishore bhargava nd Atul chitni ..standing near me..
The talks are also great.

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Follow FOSS in twitter: Foss.in 2009

Nagios Remote Plugin Executor ( NRPE ) installation in Ubuntu

( See also NRPE for monitoring Windows  )
The NRPE  (Nagios Remote Plugin Executor) addon is designed to allow you to execute Nagios plugins on remote Linux/Unix machines. The main reason for doing this is to allow Nagios to monitor "local" resources (like CPU load, memory usage, etc.) on remote machines. Since these public resources are not usually exposed to external machines, an agent like NRPE must be installed on the remote Linux/Unix machines.


DESIGN OVERVIEW



The NRPE addon consists of two pieces:
* The check_nrpe plugin, which resides on the local monitoring machine.
* The NRPE daemon, which runs on the remote Linux/Unix machine

When Nagios needs to monitor a resource of service from a remote Linux/Unix machine:
* Nagios will execute the check_nrpe plugin and tell it what service needs to be checked

*The check_nrpe plugin contacts the NRPE daemon on the remote host over an (optionally) SSL
protected connection.

*The NRPE daemon runs the appropriate Nagios plugin to check the service or resource.

*The results from the service check are passed from the NRPE daemon back to the check_nrpe
plugin, which then returns the check results to the Nagios process.

INSTALLATION

REMOTE HOST SETUP

1) Install nagios plugins

These instructions should be completed on the remote Linux/Unix host where the NRPE daemon to be installed .


i.Create a user account for nagios

/usr/sbin/useradd nagios
passwd nagios

ii. Install the Nagios Plugins .Download the source code tarball of the Nagios plugins (visit:
http://www.nagios.org/download

ii.Extract the Nagios plugins source code tarball.
tar xzf nagios-plugins-1.4.6.tar.gz
cd nagios-plugins-1.4.6 .

iv. Compile and install the plugins.
./configure
make
make install

v.The permissions on the plugin directory and the plugins will need to be fixed at this point,
chown nagios.nagios /usr/local/nagios
chown -R nagios.nagios /usr/local/nagios/libexec

vi. Install xinetd
sudo apt-get install xinetd

2) Install the NRPE daemon

i.Download the source code tarball of the NRPE addon.
(visit:http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/nagios/nrpe-2.12.tar.gz) .

ii.Extract the NRPE source code tarball.
tar xzf nrpe-2.8.tar.gz
cd nrpe-2.8

iii. Compile the NRPE addon.
./configure
make all

iv. Install the NRPE plugin , daemon, and sample daemon config file.
make install-plugin
make install-daemon
make install-daemon-config

v. Install the NRPE daemon as a service under xinetd.
make install-xinetd

vi. Edit the /etc/xinetd.d/nrpe file and add the IP address of the monitoring server to the
only_from directive.
only_from = 127.0.0.1

vii. Add the following entry for the NRPE daemon to the /etc/services file.
nrpe 5666/tcp # NRPE

viii. Restart the xinetd service.
service xinetd restart

3) Test the NRPE daemon locally.

Its time to see if things are working properly. Make sure the nrpe daemon is running under xinetd.
Check the command :
netstat -at | grep nrpe

The output out this command should show something like this:
tcp 0 0 *:nrpe *:* LISTEN

Next, check to make sure the NRPE daemon is functioning properly. To do this, run the check_nrpe plugin that was installed for testing purposes.
/usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_nrpe -H localhost

You should get a string back that tells you what version of NRPE is installed, like this:
NRPE v2.8

So you finished the remote host part..Now you have to configure the monitoring host.

Instant File sharing in LAN

Do you wanna share something in the local area network quickly..without wasting your time with apache or any daemons..here is the technique for that..

First of all, open a terminal and move into the folder you wanna share.Say i want to share /home/xxx/Downloads folder..So open a terminal and then cd /home/xxx/Downloads.

Then type this command

python -c "import SimpleHTTPServer; SimpleHTTPServer.test();"




Then your folder can be accessed through web browser by typing http://your_ip:8000/.



Njoy

NMAP: The Best network exploration tool

Nmap (“Network Mapper”) is an open source tool for network exploration. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, although it works fine against single hosts.

WHAT IT CAN DO FOR YOU ?
Nmap determines what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, is there any open unfiltered ports and dozens of other characteristics.
Systems and network administrators find it useful for routine tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime and firewall monitoring.
In between the lines, it says that nmap is an unavoidable tool for a hacker..

INSTALLATION::

sudo apt-get install nmap

USAGE:

nmap -parameters -options target_specification

PORT SCANNING USING nmap::

What are ports? Don't think that they are the one you see behind your pc , used to insert the LAN cable and USB..these are not that physical ports..these are logical ones ..you can't see them.But they are the ways by which two computers can communicate. Processes in a computer will have ports associated with them..like port 80 for HTTP, port 22 for ssh etc.. So if you want to access some other computer, you should find a open unfiltered port in that..

Ports can have these stages:
1) open : these ports have some application linked to it( Attackers can attack this way..)
2) closed : these ports are accessible but there is no application listening to it..so no use
3) filtered: these are being monitored by firewalls..
4)unfiltered: Not under monitoring..may be open or closed.

There are different types of port scanning.

1) TCP SYN scan ( -sS )

> These are default and quick
> clearly differentiates open,closed and filtered ports
> Does not establish TCP connection..so nobody catches u
> it takes less time

2) TCP connect Scan (-sT )

> creates connection with target..so this takes more time

3) ACK scan ( -sA )

> This doesn't determine a port is closed or open.
> It differentiaties only filtered and non filtered.

The list goes on..i am not listing all here..

WHAT ELSE CAN YOU DO ?

> You can detect the Operating System of the target you specified. (option -O )

> You can scan an entire subnet and find the hosts .

> You can specify particular ports to scan.( -p <port ranges>)

> You can detect the services(and their versions ) running in these ports. (option -sV)

I will show u a few examples



nmap -v -O 192.168.75.97
This will scan the system and detect the operating systems used .Output of this command is shown here and you can see detected operating system is marked.




nmap -sS -p 22,53,110,143,4564 198.168.75.1-127
This will scan specified ports(22,53..) in host in specified ip range..

Njoy