Xfce 4.8 with Conky

I have been following a short discussion on the IRC channel #xfce regarding an issue with the use of Conky and transparency. I didn't use Conky for a very long time, but since I knew it was possible to have Conky perfectly running, I gave it a shot again and since I did a fresh reinitialization of Xfce on my workstation, I tweaked the configuration file to my need. Now I have it running in the background and I'll most probably keep it.

The configuration I was able to get for a good working Conky window with transparency is bellow. Of course I could tell you which combination doesn't work, with the why, but since there are so many of them I simply put a working one.

own_window yes # create a separate XWindow over the one from Xfdesktop
own_window_type desktop # the window cannot be moved or resized
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager # make it behave like it belongs to the desktop
own_window_argb_visual yes # true transparency, a compositor has to be active
own_window_argb_value 100 # make the background semi-transparent
double_buffer yes # avoid flickering

Here is a screenshot of the desktop with Conky in the bottom right corner, I made sure there is some I/O activity going on :-)

Xfce with Conky

Now if you want you can steal my .conkyrc file.

Analysing a phishing email

I've been hit by several phishing emails in a short time the last week. Having time this morning I took the initiative to look at the headers from one email and the phishing location.

The hosting server
The domains DNS zone is hosted on a particular network just like its website. Two different servers actually, but behind it seems to be a lucrative webhosting service where you can get your domain registered although it's not a registrar. All of this is hosted in Texas.

The email server
The email is originating from Italy. The FROM address is set up to show a truthful email (usually where you put the surname) with an inexistant email address behind that. The email address' domain name exists however and is hosted in France, but has no relation to the scam, at least the owner of this domain can't do anything about it.

The Return-Path shows a real email address with a different domain name but same network anyway. The domain name shows a dummy webpage "Under construction".

Who to contact?
All of them if you care, otherwise just let it go, because phishing pages are set up and down daily...

To contact the webhosting or email server, request the Whois information of the IP address and contact the abuse department, there is always an abuse section in the Whois of an IP address. You can also contact the domain name holder and/or look if the registrar or webhosting sevice has a dedicated abuse website page.

Of course it happens that an abuse email address forwards everything to the trash can. In order to have a chance to stop the scam, it is good to contact as many services as possible.

Changing PolicyKit settings per user

I have been hit twice by a required authentication on my workstation after the Wifi connection got lost and it is clearly irritating, especially when you are not around. The authentication requests are handled by PolicyKit (polkit for short) and can be tweaked.

The message by which I was hit was the following: "System policy prevents modification of network settings for all users."

Before you get started, the system wide configuration files that contain the default values reside inside the /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/ directory. In this directory resides the file org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.policy which contains all the default actions. It does also contain the message about the network settings for which the action id is "org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.settings.modify.system." At this point I was still clueless of what I was supposed to do.

After having search the web for information about PolicyKit I have found one interesting article that helped me getting done with my issue and learning more about this authorization framework. This action being very seldom to perform, I'm summing up everything here.

There are two useful commands to perform tests with PolicyKit, pkcheck and pkaction.

The first interesting command to use is pkcheck. It will trigger an authorization request and prompt you to type in a password, simply return true if no authorization is required otherwise false. For example:

pkcheck --action-id org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.settings.modify.system \
    --process `pidof gnome-session` -u `id -u`

You have to adapt the process and user parameters of course.

Next the command pkaction can be used to print the default system values, for example:

pkaction --action-id org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.settings.modify.system \
    --verbose

Now to have a custom setting for your user, what has to be done is to create a PolicyKit Local Authority file inside the directory /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/. Here is an example:

[Let user mike modify system settings for network]
Identity=unix-user:mike
Action=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.settings.modify.system
ResultAny=no
ResultInactive=no
ResultActive=yes

I have saved this file under /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/10-network-manager.pkla.

There are three main values you can pass to ResultActive that are no, auth_admin or yes. Respectively it will deny the authorization, ask for a password, and give access. For further information about the possible values check the polkit manpage, also don't miss the pklocalauthority manpage to read more about the localauthority tree structure.

Update the GeoIP database

GeoIP is a proprietary technology provided by MaxMind that allows the geolocalization of IPs. It provides databases as both free and paid solutions with IP records matching the country and the city. The GeoLite Country database can be downloaded for free and is updated about once a month.

The database can be used with the command line tool geoiplookup . By calling it, it will check for the default database, but you can specify another one through a command line option.

First download and install the latest database and license under your home directory, for example ~/.local/share/GeoIP/. Make sure to decompress the database with gunzip. The directory has to contain these files:

GeoIP.dat
LICENSE.txt

Next create an alias for the command geoiplookup, for example through your ~/.bashrc script put the following line:

alias geoiplookup='geoiplookup -d $HOME/.local/share/GeoIP/'

And done! But why all the hassle? Because your system may not provide the updates on a regular basis. Of course you can set up a scheduled task to download the database right into your home directory.