Ron's blog

Friday night I talked to Maynard and told him about the Perseids this weekend.

Had a lot of difficulties binding my Samba server to OpenVPN's TUN0 with the settings "interfaces = 10.0.0.0/24 tun0" and "bind interfaces only = yes".

It refused to work: no one could connect on any interface.

So, I removed "interfaces" and "bind interfaces only" from smb.conf and I used my firewall to block Windows share ports (135, 137, 138, 139, 445) on eth0. However, when I got Fail2Ban going, I discarded some of the old firewall rules. Not a problem.

Until...

Mom's new Nikon Coolpix S9100 takes HD video.

Once she got a card reader (her Linux PC didn't mount the camera due to a PTP vs MTP issue (I believe the issue is that Ubuntu 10.04 doesn't support MTP: I'm 5,000km away, cannot thoroughly test it)), she loaded her images & videos onto her hard drive.

But the video playback was jerky, played for a few seconds, paused (audio continued), pixelated some frames, paused, then played the final few frames.

This was using VLC or Movie Player in Ubuntu, and with Media Player Classic (a slightly old version), or Media Player 11 in Windows XP.

Seems others have encountered this issue too.

Here (finally) is my solution:

Fail2Ban is a brilliant piece of IDS (Intrusion Detection Software) that I've got a crush on.

I've developed a couple "jails" -- rules for banning IP addresses.

First, a couple thoughts, tricks, and tips:

It's rather annoying that with Ubuntu GNU/Linux and Gnome desktop manager using Compiz special effects, a screenshot of only a window excludes the window border. That's now fixed!