Securing or Hardening a system is one of the primary tasks for any system administrator. A lot many things can be tweaked to make your system secure and I will point out a few of the standard baseline to make a linux box secure. I will not cover services or applications like Apache or Samba or Squid etc., since these are not needed for all linux systems. Also, security features requiring kernel patching is not covered. Read the rest of this entry »
Linux Comprehensive – back to basics
October 25th, 2011 
Sanjib I am not sure about the title used in this post but I couldn’t think of a better one. Many elementary and tricky questions are asked to a Linux professional when interviewed for a job. So I wanted to accumulate as much as possible so that someone ( more for me) can go through the article and get prepared for the interview or even know about a certain thing related to Linux system administration in a quick readout. Read the rest of this entry »
ParaGliding and Water Rafting
April 23rd, 2010 Sanjib Just returned from Kalimpong and Darjeeling, my second visit to the hill queen in a weeks gap but with an intention of experiencing Paragliding and water Rafting in the waters of Teesta during my second visit. The adventure sports can be experienced in Kalimpong and is a must-do for all who loves adventure. It is not atall scary as it may look from the snaps.
We arrived at New Jalpaiguri station early morning and had to move to Pani Tanki More in a rickshaw as Jeeps from NJP to Kalimpong is scarce. You can then travel to Kalimpong in Jeep at Rs. 80 per person. It was easy to find the Paragliding office as it is located in the heart of the town. You can also find more details about it from the official website. You will be greeted by some very friendly young lads in the office and you can book your flights with them. Roger, the Swedish guy, is an accomplished paraglider and is also very friendly and will make you enjoy your flight thoroughly. The flight merely takes 10 mins in air and if lucky can also see the mighty Kanchenjunga from air. Its a thrilling experience which everybody ( not for weak hearts ) should enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »
.avi file compression
March 24th, 2010 Sanjib Uncompressed video files ( .avi) which are recorded from cameras or webcam use a huge file size. A 25 sec moderate quality video takes 150 mb of space. It is not possible to share this raw format with others through internet and so I was looking for a method to compress the file and keeping it as a .avi file. After searching the net and testing with a few softwares I was finally able to compress my 150mb .avi file to 5 mb without losing the framerate or quality of the video.
VirtualDub was the answer to my problem. You can download VirtualDub from here. Its a zip file which you can extract and start using by just running the file VirtualDub.exe
You will also need a Xvid Codec for the compression, a good codec is Koepi’s XviD Codec 1.2.2 which you can download and install. I got an error to override the deafult codec while installing it, but I Ignored the error and everything worked fine after that. Read the rest of this entry »