Firefox 2 Session Restore Flaw

Today I noticed a little flaw in Firefox 2. There is a session restore feature in Firefox 2 that will restore your previous session if something happens (like your computer freezing, rebooting at random, etc.). While this feature may be handy for private use, on a public computer this is a little bit of a privacy issue. This feature would allow a patron to access the web pages that the patron before them had been visiting. Not a good thing.

I did find a fix for it, and it’s rather simple. You’ll need to do this for each account you want to turn the session restore feature off on:

1. Open Firefox and type in about:config in the navigation bar.

2. Look for browser.sessionstore.enabled

3. Double click the line to disable it.

I tested this on one of my public computers and it did the trick. There are also some other choices for limiting the cache.

XAMPP For Linux

XAMPP is an awesome application that will install and configure Apache, PHP, and MySQL to work together. It all comes in one, easy to install package.

XAMPP can be used to quickly setup a fully working web server. Another great thing is that XAMPP is available for Windows and Mac OS X, too.

This post will only cover installing XAMPP for Linux, so let’s get started.

The official XAMPP page can be found here:

http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

To download the install files for XAMPP, go here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/

You can also download the install files for Windows and Mac OS X from this location.

Download the newest version of XAMPP for Linux. The install isn’t huge, but it could take a few minutes to download.

Once you’ve got the install files downloaded, we can begin installing.

Setting up XAMPP in Linux:

1. Download XAMPP
-> http://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/

2. Open a terminal window. Navigate to where you downloaded the file, and    become the root user (su command)

3. Type the command:

tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.4.7.tar.gz -C /opt

– Substitute xampp-linux-1.4.7.tar.gz for the name of the file you have

4. Navigate to /opt/lampp (cd /opt/lampp)

5. Start XAMPP by typing ./lampp start (still as root user)

6. XAMPP should start, and give the message XAMPP for Linux started.

7. Open a web browser and go to http://localhost/xampp

8. From here, you can begin using and configuring XAMPP from the web interface.
– Use step 4 and 5 to get XAMPP going after a reboot or power failure.

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Configuring:

1. Click security on the left side. Do as it says to configure security settings.

OddBoot

Hello, and welcome to OddBoot. This is a place where you’ll find all kinds of interesting junk about technology. I tend to cover Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and a bunch of other stuff.

There’s not much now, but I have plenty of tutorials already to post.