Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Anadwo Kube on the Oxford Street

Anadwo Kube on the Oxford Street

You know how it often takes a lot of courage to do something unconventional in life? Well, it probably maybe something I’m growing to feel adamant about, much less ponder upon these days. This includes the very night I decided to do the big “chop” 4 years ago (nope..absolutely no regrets!)

So my visitor and I decided to take a supposedly short stroll within the neighborhood one evening. However, for lack of defining our destination, we found ourselves walking along the very busy streets of Osu-Oxford. This stroll was probably needful, since we both noticed our gradually bulging stomachs and arms which were definitely a no match for our youthful ages. Hence, we deemed it necessary to undergo some calorific crucifixion that night.

After traversing close to about 5 kilometers, we decided to allow our buds taste the sweet and nourishing liquid of kube…..at night. This however meant we were obviously missing out on one thing: no sunshine to help deepen our refreshing moment of the anadwo kube! Nonetheless, the missing weather element did not alter the sweet taste of the kube liquid which we joyfully lapped at; carefully savouring all the sugary juice of this fruit. ..yum!  

Of course, we ended up paying a higher price of 2.00 cedis per nut on demand from the coconut seller, even after our several negotiations! An amount I am still pondering and trying to reason out, as to whether it was because we bought the kube at night, or because the kube stand was directly opposite the Oxford mall or we simply just annoyed the kube seller with our excitement at the nut’s juice…these days you never know what could be the genuine reason for inflated prices..

Satisfied, though dismayed at our rude rip-off, we still made our journey back to the neighbourhood chatting and jittering over every silly issue that popped into those little round heads of ours. Some topics of course were triggered by the sights and scenes along the way home. Whilst at it, we each would occasionally and clandestinely stick out the tip of our greedy tongues to wipe away the remaining few drops of kube liquid lodged the sides of our lips..(Of course out of the sight of one another).

Finally, we completed our return journey back to House No. 220, and were greeted with a loud and harmonious chorale of croaking sounds of frogs, mixed with the shrieking stridulating sounds of the male crickets who were earnestly seeking their female counterparts in the dark thickets. Aaah..such wonderful music, that we wondered who the conductor of this musical piece could be. Indeed,  this ‘invisible’ choir conductor was doing a great job at directing each (in) vertebrate to sing their various parts in such unison!

A glance at our watches, showed the long arm strike a quarter to 10. The moonlight’s beams were getting stronger, with the twinkling of the stars glowing brighter as though to give a wink any time we glance up the sky in effort to stifle the yawns. Obviously no one of us wanted to be the first to admit tiredness for fear of being ridiculed as a weakling who couldn’t endure a 10 kilometer journey. 

It was then that we realized how worthwhile Anadwo Kube on the Oxford Street was!

By Vanessa Modupe Jobarteh

Sunday, July 26, 2015

It was the look of resilience!

It so happened that early this morning, I found myself walking along the narrow streets of Swedru town market, and I had the chance to interact with some business women I met there. The streets were crowded with several stores, each displaying their wares. Every store here, waiting for the day to bring upon them a smile of blessings and good luck.
The town gradually wakes up to a bustling atmosphere, but there's one thing that strikes me;... the look of resilience on the faces of the women here. The look that says a firm No in the face of adversity and the troublesome economy. The look, that implies they intend to fight on in spite of the little or no sales they made in the previous days.
Amazingly, I see something similar on the faces of the female farmers I meet on my way to the hinterlands of the Central region. It is the look of resilience.
This look is unmistakably noticed grâce à the wrinkles that appeared on their faces as they managed to break into a smile when I waved at them. The sweat beads I noticed, moved quickly down their darkened skins, as each muscle and ligament within their bodies worked hard in unison to support the burdensome loads of wood and farm produce they carried on their heads. Not to talk of how they bravely trod the red muddy road back to their homes....unfortunately, without shoes or slippers on their feet.
Yet one thing remained unchanged on the faces of these women; It was the look of resilience!

By: Vanessa Modupe Jobarteh

Sunday, April 19, 2015

Captive Portal - Zerotruth

Zerotruth Captive Portal

I am running zeroshell and needed some flexibility with captive portal especially delegating access to another user and that's where Zerotruth comes in.


Below is a snippet from the creator's site

Zerotruth Captive Portal





 
I came closer to Zeroshell trying an ready application in order to set up an Hot Spot for a square situated in front of a public library and school.
Zeroshell surprised me in a very positive way in respect of the speed and the simplicity to create an Captive Portal: I took an Alix and ten minutes later everything worked perfectly. The "limit" was then to give the management to an inexperienced person who could access to all the characteristics through Zeroshell' s interface. After a first experience in PHP, that presented some limits in respect of speed if the hotspot had to manage lots of users using "curl" hardly, I decided to realize an interface to install directly on Zeroshell, that could increase the elaboration speed and that could permit the access to others functions not available from an outside PHP . My choice was to use some cgi-bin in scripts bash, with lot of difficulties, especially to understand how the extraordinary work of Fulvio Ricciardi worked, from which I obviously copied almost everything. This is how, with some friends help of the Italian forum Zeroshell, Zerotruth was born.

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Best router Enterprise to SOHO Free

http://zeroshell.org/

Firewall Router

Zeroshell is a Linux distribution for servers and embedded devices aimed at providing the main network services a LAN requires. It is available in the form of Live CD or Compact Flash image and you can configure and administer it using your web browser. The main features of this Linux distribution for Network Appliances are listed below:
  • Load Balancing and Failover of multiple Internet connections;
  • UMTS/HSDPA connections by using 3G modems;
  • RADIUS server for providing secure authentication and automatic management of the encryption keys to the Wireless 802.11b, 802.11g and 802.11a networks supporting the 802.1x protocol in the EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS and PEAP form or the less secure authentication of the client MAC Address; WPA with TKIP and WPA2 with CCMP (802.11i complaint) are supported too; the RADIUS server may also, depending on the username, group or MAC Address of the supplicant, allow the access on a preset 802.1Q VLAN;
  • Captive Portal to support the web login on wireless and wired networks. Zeroshell acts as gateway for the networks on which the Captive Portal is active and on which the IP addresses (usually belonging to private subnets) are dynamically assigned by the DHCP. A client that accesses this private network must authenticate itself through a web browser using Kerberos 5 username and password before the Zeroshell's firewall allows it to access the public LAN. The Captive Portal gateways are often used to provide authenticated Internet access in the HotSpots in alternative to the 802.1X authentication protocol too complicated to configure for the users. Zeroshell implements the functionality of Captive Portal in native way, without using other specific software as NoCat or Chillispot;
  • QoS (Quality of Service) management and traffic shaping to control traffic over a congested network. You will be able to guarantee the minimum bandwidth, limit the max bandwidth and assign a priority to a traffic class (useful in latency-sensitive network applications like VoIP). The previous tuning can be applied on Ethernet Interfaces, VPNs, bridges and VPN bondings. It is possible to classify the traffic by using the Layer 7 filters that allow the Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) which can be useful to shape VoIP and P2P applications;
  • HTTP Proxy server which is able to block the web pages containing virus. This feature is implemented using the ClamAV antivirus and HAVP proxy server. The proxy server works in transparent proxy mode, in which, you don't need to configure the web browsers of the users to use it, but the http requests will be automatically redirected to the proxy;
  • Wireless Access Point mode with Multiple SSID and VLAN support by using WiFi network cards based on the Atheros chipsets. In other words, a Zeroshell box with one of such WiFi cards could become a IEEE 802.11a/b/g Access Point providing reliable authentication and dynamic keys exchange by 802.1X and WPA protocols. Of course, the authentication takes place using EAP-TLS and PEAP over the integrated RADIUS server;
  • Host-to-lan VPN with L2TP/IPsec in which L2TP (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol) authenticated with Kerberos v5 username and password is encapsulated within IPsec authenticated with IKE that uses X.509 certificates;
  • Lan-to-lan VPN with encapsulation of Ethernet datagrams in SSL/TLS tunnel, with support for 802.1Q VLAN and configurable in bonding for load balancing (band increase) or fault tolerance (reliability increase);
  • Router with static and dynamic routes (RIPv2 with MD5 or plain text authentication and Split Horizon and Poisoned Reverse algorithms);
  • 802.1d bridge with Spanning Tree protocol to avoid loops even in the presence of redundant paths;
  • 802.1Q Virtual LAN (tagged VLAN);
  • Firewall Packet Filter and Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) with filters applicable in both routing and bridging on all type of interfaces including VPN and VLAN;
  • It is possible to reject or shape P2P File Sharing traffic by using IPP2P iptables module in the Firewall and QoS Classifier;
  • NAT to use private class LAN addresses hidden on the WAN with public addresses;
  • TCP/UDP port forwarding (PAT) to create Virtual Servers. This means that real server cluster will be seen with only one IP address (the IP of the virtual server) and each request will be distributed with Round Robin algorithm to the real servers;
  • Multizone DNS server with automatic management of the Reverse Resolution in-addr.arpa;
  • Multi subnet DHCP server with the possibility to fix IP depending on client's MAC address;
  • PPPoE client for connection to the WAN via ADSL, DSL and cable lines (requires a suitable MODEM);
  • Dynamic DNS client used to easily reach the host on WAN even when the IP is dynamic;
  • NTP (Network Time Protocol) client and server for keeping host clocks synchronized;
  • Syslog server for receiving and cataloging the system logs produced by the remote hosts including Unix systems, routers, switches, WI-FI access points, network printers and others compatible with the syslog protocol;
  • Kerberos 5 authentication using an integrated KDC and cross-authentication between realms;
  • LDAP, NIS and RADIUS authorization;
  • X509 certification authority for issuing and managing electronic certificates;
  • Unix and Windows Active Directory interoperability using LDAP and Kerberos 5 cross realm authentication.
Zeroshell is a Live CD distribution, meaning that it is not necessary to install it on the hard disk since it can operate directly from the CDROM on which it is distributed. Obviously, the database, containing all the data and settings, can be stored on ATA, SATA, SCSI and USB disks. Any security Bug Fixes can be downloaded from the automatic update system via Internet and installed in the database. These patches will be automatically removed from the database by subsequent releases of the Zeroshell Live CD already containing the updates.
It is also available a 512MB Compact Flash image useful if you have to boot your box from this device instead from CDROM for example in the embedded devices for network appliances. The Compact Flash image has 400MB available to store the configuration and data.
The name Zeroshell underlines the fact that although it is a Linux system (traditionally administrable from a shell), all the administration operations can be carried out via Web interface: indeed, after having assigned an IP address via a VGA or serial terminal, simply connect to the assigned address by means of a browser to configure everything.

Thursday, October 9, 2014

eelingsfay nsideiway emay

Did I disappoint you or let you down? Should I be feeling guilty or let the judges frown? I am a dreamer, and when I wake, You can't break my spirit - it's my dreams you take. You touched my heart, you touched my soul. You changed my life and all my goals. And love is blind and then knew it, when my heart was blinded by you. I've seen you cry, I've seen you smile. I've watched you sleeping for a while. I've kissed your lips I've held your hand. Shared your dreams and shared your bed. I know your fears and you know mine. I know you well, I know your smell. I've spent a lifetime with you. I've been addicted to you. I'm so hollow inside right now. but I still hold your hand in mine when I'm asleep. You! have been the one for me. It may be over between us but it won't stop here for me, know that I am here for you if you'd only care. As you move on with your life, Remember me......, Remember us... and all we used to be. I love you, I swear that's true.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Ephemeral

How I wonder about how I'm wandering.
It can be different but it is not.
Progressive but degenerate.
Yesterday but like forever.

Help me to love

Lord thank you for another day and month.

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

^ - ^

When you choose to .................
You make it all ............
When what you choose gets frustrating ..............

You stick to it ..............
When you stick to it ........
You strive to make it all............
When that gets frustrating ...............

When you accept yourself...............
When you accept others...............
You change strife to focused acceptance...........

..........unfinished

18/08/14

Check Care Confirm Correct

 As I glance through the pages of a book I'm reading, I learn one crucial aspect of human interaction that is worth observing and modula...