Block Samsung Television ads (using ASUS router Firewall with URL Filter)

We switched to a Samsung Serif television last year, and it was not cheap.

But it feels cheap in the way it spawns ads every time we turn it on.

So let’s remove those ads by blocking the ads URL in our ASUS router, this way the television can not retrieve new ads anymore.

Log in to your ASUS router
Navigate to the “Firewall” menu item, located under “Advanced Settings”
Select the second tab “URL Filter”
Make sure the following settings are present;
1. Enable URL Filter: “Enabled”
2. Filter Table Type: “Deny List”
3. URL Filter List:
  1. Add “ads.samsung.com” and click the PLUS button
4. Click Apply

Important: make sure to choose Filter Table Type “Deny List”, which denies all entries in the list. If you would choose “Allow List” then you could only access the urls in the list and you cannot access any other site, effectively preventing you from accessing the internet from your home network.

October 20, 2015

Python pip without internet

The title of this post is a bit misleading. I will not outline the use of pip without internet but I will suspect most people will search for this search string, thus coming here for an alternative.
I’ve been blessed with a very thorough security officer, who decided that CLI internet access is not permitted, even using CNTLM (1)is blocked.
The easiest way to install packages is via pip, but it’s also possible to install them via the commandline.
Using the example of Django, we will first download the tarball from the Django site;
https://www.djangoproject.com/download/
On the right side there’s a link to the latest release.
Unzip and untar the tarball and open a Prompt in that directory.
Then run the following command:
python setup.py install
Next, we’ll check if it is installed correctly:

August 19, 2014

Can not connect to Virtualbox Guest Oracle Database 12c Developer Day Database VM due to Oracle Linux firewall

It seems there’s a firewall present on the latest Developer Days Database image which I’ve just downloaded from Oracle.

Description:

I enjoy using these images because it is a complete reference install of Oracle Linux, Oracle Database and Oracle SQL Developer (among others). Besides that, it only takes 10 minutes to setup a base install from the image.
Usually I like to connect from my local SQL Developer instead of the one inside the VM.

Problem:

But with this setup I could not connect when I added the NAT Port Forwarding in Virtualbox, it timed out when trying to connect. I could connect from the SQL Developer inside the VM, just not through the NAT port which was forwarded (important: see the bottom of this post to check the NAT Port Forwarding settings in Virtualbox)

Solution:

It’s fairly easy to add a firewall rule which allows access to port 1521 on Oracle Linux, we can even do it with a GUI:
Select Menu “System” – “Administration” – “Firewall”
Then follow these steps:

Click [Other Ports]
Click [Add]
Select [User Defined]
Enter Port: “1521”
Select Protocol: “TCP”
Click [Apply]
Click [Reload]

You’ve just added port 1521 to the iptables which makes it okay to connect to this port from another IP outside the local machine.
We can test from SQL Developer, running on the Host:

And it works! 🙂

Extra: NAT Port Forwarding in Virtualbox

Just to be sure, these are the settings you’ll need to set inside the Virtualbox Manager to setup the port forwarding on port 1521 from the guest to the host:
Select the “Settings” of the Developer Day VM and then:

Select “Network”
Click [Port Forwarding]

Then in the Port Forwarding Rules:

Enter a descriptive name: “DB”
Enter the host port: “1521”
Enter the guest port: “1521”