Platonic

I couldn’t belive that I never tried Moodle before. I might have installed it before but never used this wonderful OpenSource educational tool.

I explored this tool couple of weeks back as there was a need for me to automate an aptitude test for our hiring process. It made our job so easier and even we could cut down the number of people used to get involved with the complete recruitment process.

“Social constructionist pedagogy” philosophy of Moodle has been helping educators create effective online learning communities. Its easy, simple, bundled with many modules, and moreover its scalable. You can even Implement it anywhere.

Tools which help us to improve our process efficiency are out there in Free and Open Source world. Educational institutes and Online learning communities could make use of these tool to create a better and smart learning systems for our young generation who are getting used to internet in this 21st century.

OSSEC is an Open Source Host-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS). It performs log analysis, integrity checking, Windows registry monitoring, rootkit detection, real-time alerting and active response.

OSSEC is now out with its release v1.5 with more bug fixes and features listed below :

-New log formats (info):

• Solaris BSM auditing logs
• Asterisk logs
• Checkpoint and Smart Defense logs
• Debian package (dpkg) install/status/remove messages
• Shorewall logs
• Postfix SASL error messages
• Localized pure-ftpd messages (for 12 different languages)
• DJB multilog

-Greek translation of the install.

-Added agent_control tool to manage the agents directly from the server (info).

-New options to syscheckd/rootcheckd to better schedule the scans (info).

-Performance improvements to the Windows Agent, specially when dealing with
large event logs.

-Added new options to Rootcheck to look for common web exploits installed
on the system (used to attack others).

Download it from: http://www.ossec.net/main/downloads .

It runs on most operating systems, including Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, MacOS, Solaris and Windows. A list with all supported platforms is available here. Haven’t tried it yet? try it now.

Its really hard to compiling php on plesk servers, that too for newbies. I have been searching for PHP 4.4.7 source rpm or ready solution or a script so that I can quickly give it to my team to resolve such requests coming from our customers.

By chance I found it on Hans Rackers DazeWorld blog space.This php-4.4.7 source rpm is found to be magic.

Remove all the existing php rpms which are on your box. Don’t worry you just have to take the backup of /etc/php.ini. Ignore all dependencies no worries.

Once you’re done with it, download and build the source rpm as follows.

rpmbuild –rebuild php-4.4.7-1.hrak.src.rpm

This will compile php for your box and build the rpms required. You will find all the rpms required for your system in /usr/src/redhati386 folder.

Go ahead and install them all

rpm -ivh /usr/src/redhat/i386/php-*.rpm

restart apache and psa from /etc/init.d . Your plesk box will have latest PHP 4.4.7