Switching my Parents to Ubuntu 1

Posted by James Wilford Sat, 28 Oct 2006 18:07:00 GMT

So I was round at my parents house last weekend, when I heard the dreaded words "can you have a look at the computer, it says we've got a virus". Switching on the PC, I was puzzled when some minutes after logging in, lo and behold, a window popped up onto the screen kindly informing me that the PC was infected by some sort of nasty, and inviting me to part with cash to procure an AV product known as "WinAntiVirus". I was not running IE at the time, and the window wasn't a browser window. So there was definitely something nefarious on the PC.

Now at this point, alarm bells started to ring. For one thing, I already had AVG antivirus installed, and it had not detected any viruses. Furthermore, I had never heard of WinAntiVirus before. A quick Google search confirmed that it was in fact spyware, and had numerous links to various instructions for its removal.

My next course of action was to run Ad-Aware, which was already installed on the PC. This completely failed to find the problem, let alone fix it. So I downloaded Spybot Search & Destroy, but this was equally oblivious to WinAntiVirus. Another google search suggested that Spyware Doctor could remove it, so I tried that. After chugging away and reporting that it had found about 146 problems, it then hung on the next step using 100% CPU, so I had to kill it.

At this point, I had to admit defeat. The next step would have to be a complete reinstallation of Windows. However, I started to think - if a PC can be infected with malware simply by clicking something on a website, and then that malware preys on the user's knowledge that "viruses = bad, antivirus = good" then how is the average user supposed to avoid falling victim to this kind of scam?

So I thought about whether this PC needed to be running Windows at all. My parents only use it for web browsing (mostly with Firefox), email, and getting photos from their digital camera. Nothing that Linux can't handle just as easily, if not more so. So I decided to install Ubuntu. Initial reactions were positive, although its too early to say how well they are getting on with it. I'll find out when I go round again tomorrow, so I'll post a follow-up article at a later date.

Ubuntu xinetd configuration for proftpd 5

Posted by James Wilford Wed, 04 Oct 2006 18:19:00 GMT

When you "sudo apt-get install proftpd" on Ubuntu, debconf will tell you that if you're using xinetd then you're on your own. Here is what you need to put in /etc/xinetd.d/proftpd to make it work:

# default: on
# description: ProFTPD FTP server
service ftp
{
   flags = REUSE
   socket_type = stream
   instances = 50
   wait = no
   user = root
   server = /usr/sbin/proftpd
}

Then just do "sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart", and you're all set.