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I just finished some Server Hardening of the Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) server. It included working with iptables rules, audit, sysctl.conf, sshd_config, SELinux, AIDE, and a few other minor things. If anyone playing on that server notices any issues that started sometime between Friday and Sunday of this weekend please contact me ASAP so I can look into them before I apply these to Left 4 Dead.

The expected Left 4 Dead 2 server rebuild will not be needed anymore as I was able to fix the srcds_linux memory issues that were causing it to crash randomly. Looks like it was simple enough…well simple when you just completely remove the entire hlds and reload it. Best as I can assume is it must have became corrupt at some point.

Knowing how Linux Mint is I’m thinking I want something a bit better… therefor thinking about Sabayon (http://www.sabayon.org/) instead!

Well all is grand with Mint now! I ended up loading my HLSW software into the VirtualBox of Vista since I couldn’t get it to run at all in any form of Wine software. I also went with PuTTY and just let the Windows .EXE run thanks to PlayOnLinux (used to get my Steam on the machine) for all my SSH needs. Last but not least I got my screensaver I love to run – Fireflies – by switching from gnome-screensaver to xscreensaver; which if I wasn’t a Linux Desktop N00B I would have figured out a long time ago by just reading the note after it in the Software Manager (for xscreensaver or standalone – DOH!).

My only problem so far was when switching from gnome-screensaver to xscreensaver I let the machine idle and when I woke it back up – was connected to it via UltraVNC – it never gave me a login prompt so I had to reboot it.

NOTE: Since as of right now I can do 100% of my work on Linux Mint I am mostly done messing around with it, but I would love native (Wine is close enough) support for HLSW and some of my games (League of Legends for one!) so I plan to mess with different Wine options as I have time down the road.

Got everything working much better, except for my Fireflies screen saver which I haven’t even messed with. I really wish I could play my games, but alas I knew that was going to be out of the question, but I can still dream, right?
I had an issue with VNC from my Windows 7 desktop (on the LAN) not working to the Linux Mint (Gnome/Compiz), but I guess it’s an issue with Compiz, so I just went back to metacity for now – though the Compiz stuff was cool and I already miss it! I may go back to Compiz now that I know what the problem is and just not use VNC, but we’ll see.
Also had an issue with getting audio to work without a stutter running Windows Vista inside VirtualBox. To make my audio work in both the host machine (Mint) and the guest (Vista) at the same time I had to set the following:

Host Audio Driver: OSS Audio Driver
Audio Controller: ICH AC97

NOTE: I read that for some people this killed the local host OS audio while VirtualBox guest was running – not the case with me.