SSH (Secure Shell) is a remote adminstration utility typically for UNIX systens that provides secure access to the command line.

The service is provided by the UNIX deamon SSHD which listens on TCP/IP port 22.

A popular utility for providing SSH on BlackBerry is midpssh ( http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/ ) which is now maintained at http://ota.deltatech.com.mx/ and most importantly now digitally signed to allow low level features.

Recently midpssh this has stoppped working due to RIM BlackBerry Internet Service only allowing HTTP and HTTPS traffic through their proxies.

The solution is to change the SSH listener port on the SSH server to listen to Port 443 (HTTPS) instead of Port 22.

This can be done by editing /etc/ssh/sshd_conf and changing the line

Listen 22

to

Listen 443

Then restarting the SSHD service.

service sshd restart

To check to see if the sshd deamon is now listening on port 443 run the following command:

netstat -anp | grep ssh

If the sshd deamon is not listening on port 443 then it could be that the Apache web web server also running with that listener socket for HTTPS. To resolve this change the file /etc/httpd/httpd.conf/ssl.conf will have to be modified to change the listener port from 443 to something else such as 444.

Listen 444

To access secure services on the web server after this change requires the URL to be:

https://domain:444

The restart Apache and SSHD


service Apache restart
service sshd restart


Now you should be able to use midpssh to login from your BlackBerry to your SSH server using port 443 instead of 22 by using

domainname:443

If you need to access another server than only works on port 22 then login into your server then ssh from your server to the target server.

BuddyPress, the social networking plug-in to multiuser wordpress (WordPress-MU) has been released from beta to general availability.

I now use BuddyPress on my home CentOS Linux server to provide a internal social network and blogging facility for the family.

I am still trying out different calendar plug-ins to provide a central calendar for the family.

I use Windows and Linux interchagably so I like to choose open source toolsets that run on both platforms (I also find that Linux apps are generally also available on Mac OS X so that’s cool).

Miro is now my favourite video player (Xine has been deprecated in my A-List).

It supports all the video formats I use (Flash Video, AVI, H.264, Windows Media, Quicktime and MPEG), searches YouTube and Google Video, and allows downloads.

The only downside is the arms race between Miro and YouTube for enabling and disabling the download facility respectively but that is OK if you keep your version of Miro up to date.

You can get Miro here: Get Miro

Fedora 9 is soon to be released.

It contains amongst other improvements:

• Faster X Windows start-up
• Upstart service manager instead of initd
• Multi-timezone clock
• Preview of the ext4 filesystem (for the brave)
• Persistent LiveCD images on USB
• Firefox 3