Wednesday, November 30, 2005

How To Set Up Database Replication In MySQL

How To Set Up Database Replication In MySQL

"This tutorial describes how to set up database replication in MySQL. MySQL replication allows you to have an exact copy of a database from a master server on another server (slave), and all updates to the database on the master server are immediately replicated to the database on the slave server so that both databases are in sync. This is not a backup policy because an accidentally issued DELETE command will also be carried out on the slave; but replication can help protect against hardware failures though."

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

iptables: The Linux Firewall Administration Program

iptables: The Linux Firewall Administration Program

"Article Description -
This chapter covers the iptables firewall administration program used to build a Netfilter firewall. For those of you who are familiar with or accustomed to the older ipfwadm and ipchains programs used with the IPFW technology, iptables will look very similar to those programs. However, it is much more feature-rich and flexible, and it is very different on subtle levels."

Monday, November 28, 2005

Simplifying Backups with "The Simple Backup Suite"

Simplifying Backups with "The Simple Backup Suite"

"Most computer users don't make use of a system backup tool until after they suffer the misfortunes of a hard drive crash without one. But even then, many find backup software too complicated to configure, and there seems to be little in between creating CD or DVD archives by hand and overpowered network backup systems designed for the enterprise. The Simple Backup Suite (sbackup) is a tool for configuring regular backups of system data and simplifying full and partial recoveries."

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Indexing .chm Files with ht://Dig

Thanks to Google cache, I was able to find this treasure I found long ago. The author appears to be moving/revamping his site. I figured I better save this some place for future reference, in case it doesn't make it to his new site.

Google Cache


Indexing .chm Files with ht://Dig

1. First, you need to install CHM lib to get the command line utility chmextract. In gentoo, just type emerge chmlib.
2. Apache needs to recognise chm files correctly. Edit /etc/apache2/conf/commonapache2.conf and search for AddType. Add the following line:

AddType application/x-chm .chm

3. Restart apache with /etc/init.d/apache2 restart. You can verify that the mime type is correctly identified by using wget to download a .chm file from your server, this should display the correct mimet type.
4. You can use cabextract to extract the html files from chm files. I wrote this little script, which creates the required output for htdig:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
FILE=$1
TMPFILE=`tempfile`
rm $TMPFILE
mkdir $TMPFILE
chmextract $FILE $TMPFILE >/dev/null
find $TMPFILE -type f -iname "*.htm*" -exec cat \{\} \;
rm -R $TMPFILE

Save this file as /usr/local/share/doc2html/chm2html.sh, and make it executable with chmod a+x chm2html.sh.
5. In /etc/htdig/htdig.conf search for external_parsers: and add the following line:

application/x-chm->text/html /usr/local/share/doc2html/chm2html.sh

Do not forget to add a trailing / in the previous line!

That's it. happy indexing!

LMMS - easy music-production for everyone

LMMS - easy music-production for everyone

"LMMS aims to be a free alternative to popular (but commercial and closed- source) programs like FruityLoops, Cubase and Logic giving you the ability of producing music with your computer by creating cool loops, synthesizing and mixing sounds, arranging samples, having more fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much more...

LMMS combines the features of a tracker-/sequencer-program (pattern-/channel-/ sample-/song-/effect-management) and those of powerful synthesizers and samplers in a modern, user-friendly and easy to use graphical user-interface."

Monday, November 21, 2005

Balancing Connections Over Multiple Links

Balancing Connections Over Multiple Links

"Say you have access to multiple links to the Internet, such as several wireless networks in range. Wouldn't it be nice to combine all that bandwidth into one big fat pipe for your downloading pleasure?

Unfortunately it's not so easy. You can't just trunk them together because they each have a different public IP address, gateway, etc.

What you can do however, thanks to some nifty Linux NetFilter extensions, is assign outgoing connections to different interfaces. This will allow protocols such as BitTorrent to utilize bandwidth from each of the links.

This document focuses on Linux iptables/NetFilter. You can achieve pretty much the same result with Linux Advanced Routing techniques. One small difference, as the link mentions, is that routes are cached, so connections to frequently used sites will always go over the same link. This may or may not be the behaviour you desire. "

Secure remote file management with sshfs

Secure remote file management with sshfs

"It's a dangerous Internet out there, kids. If you are going to work on remotely connected machines, do it safely. Simple file transfers and interactive sessions have scp and ssh respectively; in fact there is hardly a commercial Web hosting provider left that doesn't support them. For more complicated scenarios we have VPN tools. But what if you need to work with files on a remote server, but find scp tedious in repetition and FreeS/WAN too cumbersome? You might find just what you're looking for in sshfs -- a tool for mounting a remote filesystem transparently and securely as if it were just another directory on your local machine."

Thursday, November 17, 2005

ProduKey - Recover lost product key (CD-Key) of Windows/MS-Office

ProduKey - Recover lost product key (CD-Key) of Windows/MS-Office

"ProduKey is a small utility that displays the ProductID and the CD-Key of MS-Office, Windows, and SQL Server installed on your computer. You can view this information for your current running operating system, or for another operating system/computer - by using command-line options. This utility can be useful if you lost the product key of your Windows/Office, and you want to reinstall it on your computer."

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Setup the SSH server to use keys for authentication

Setup the SSH server to use keys for authentication

Everytime I need to setup ssh key authentication, I have to hunt with Google to be reminded of the proper steps. Raoul seems to have put togther a good outline that is very complete.

Anyterm - AJAX Terminal Emulater

Anyterm

"Have you ever wanted SSH or telnet access to your system from an “internet desert” - from behind a strict firewall, from an internet cafe, or even from a mobile phone? Anyterm is a combination of a web page and a web server module that provides this access."

Sunday, November 13, 2005

A $10 Linux Answering Machine

A $10 Linux Answering Machine

"This article describes how to build a Linux-based telephone answering machine using a low cost winmodem (softmodem) for the telephone interface. We describe how to install the drivers and libraries, and how to select and install the proper modem card. Our answering machine program is a couple of hundred lines of C code in a single file. If you've ever used a telephone you should have no trouble understanding the code"

Do It Yourself Caller ID Spoofing

Do It Yourself Caller ID Spoofing

"Spoofing Caller ID information is really simple these days. All you need is a few bucks and some open source software. The following steps should have you spoofing away in no time."

Friday, November 11, 2005

Linux-Vserver on Debian Sarge

Linux-Vserver on Debian Sarge

"Linux-VServer allows you to create virtual private servers and security contexts which operate like a normal Linux server, but allow many independent servers to be run simultaneously in one box at full speed. All services, such as ssh, mail, Web, and databases, can be started on such a VPS, without modification, just like on any real server. Each virtual server has its own user account database and root password and doesn't interfere with other virtual servers."

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Springdoo - Send talking emails from your phone without typing

Springdoo - Send talking emails from your phone without typing


Springdoo is a new email service that lets you send emails in your voice from any phone, without the need for typing.


Although it is not free, it does seem like a cool idea.

"Sniffing" Passwords - A Constant State of Insecurity

"Sniffing" Passwords - A Constant State of Insecurity

"For the past few months an acquaintance of mine has been sniffing various public wireless and wired networks around the world, looking to see what plain text passwords are visible. It was an eye-opening experiment."

Monday, November 07, 2005

Donwload PDF Free Sheet Music

Donwload PDF Free Sheet Music


"FREE SHEET MUSIC TO DOWNLOAD -- We are proud to participate to the transmission of free sheet music. Our project is to distribute for free the most important choice of domain public free scores."

CLI Magic: sudo voodoo

CLI Magic: sudo voodoo

Sudo is a great way to help audit people's actions on a machine... especially when something bad happens and it was user error. I highly recommend that people use it and deploy it!


"Sudo is a handy little tool that is of value to both system administrators and common folks like us. What does it do? It allows you to temporarily assume the permissions of another user, up to and including root. If you belong to the camp that says you should only have root privileges at the time they are needed, sudo makes your life a little easier by making it easier to shape-shift between the permissions for a mere mortal and those of the super user."

TurboDbAdmin - AJAX Database Administration

TurboDbAdmin - AJAX Database Administration

"A single-page solution for exploring and editing databases from a browser. Edit data just like you would in a desktop application, without submit buttons or page refreshes. Built using cutting-edge TurboWidgets and the Dojo Toolkit."

Saturday, November 05, 2005

SuprGlu - Gluing your life together

SuprGlu - Gluing your life together.


"Do you already use services like del.icio.us, flickr, blogger, typepad, etc? SuprGlu is a new way to gather all your content from those sites. In a nutshell, SuprGlu:

* gathers your content from popular webservices and publishes them in one convenient place.
* presents your content with simple, great looking templates which you can customize.
* is FREE to use!"

Top 21 PHP progamming mistakes

Top 21 PHP progamming mistakes

"This article is intended for the PHP programmer interested in avoiding some of the most common mistakes when applying PHP. The reader is expected to at least be familiar with PHP syntax, but should have a working knowledge of PHP functionality."

Friday, November 04, 2005

Jumpclaimer! - Use SMS to Map Your Travels

Jumpclaimer!

It is a cross between Mobile SMS and Google Maps... Pretty cool!


"Use your mobile phone to map your travels. It's as simple as an SMS.
Remember when your grandparents sent postcards from strange and exotic places around the world and you would stick a pin on the map to follow their progress? Welcome to the Internet version. The mobile phone is almost ubiquitous and many people travelling take their mobile with them. So why not keep friends and family up to date with each step of your journey?"

Cisco Router in Orbit Puts More "Wide" into WAN

Cisco Router in Orbit Puts More "Wide" into WAN

"If you are a router company with as much as 80% market share and a $3.2 billion R&D budget to play with, why not bolt a router to a rocket and shoot it into orbit?

This is what a group of engineers at Cisco did as part of its Cisco Low Earth Orbit (CLEO) project, which recently completed its second year orbiting Earth. CLEO is a modified version of Cisco's Mobile Access Router, typically used to connect computer equipment in police cars, ambulances, airplanes and other vehicles to an IP network. "

FreeBSD 6.0 Released

FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE Release Notes

FreeBSD 6.0 has been released! This is quite exciting, as they have been doing a lot of hard work on this release.

From Scott Long's email to the mailinglist:
"It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of
FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE. This release is the next step in delivering the
high performance and enterprise features that have been under
development in the FreeBSD 5.x series for that last several years.
Some of the many changes since 5.4 include:

~ Significant performance improvements to the filesystem and direct disk
access layers of the OS. The filesystem is now multithreaded and can
take full advantage of multiple CPU systems.
~ Expanded support for wireless networking adapters and new support for
the WPA wireless security protocol.
~ Experimental support for the PowerPC platform."


Wednesday, November 02, 2005

NIC Bonding/Teaming

NIC Bonding/Teaming

"The concept of NIC Bonding (or sometimes called NIC Teaming) is that you have two NICs bonded together to appear as if they are the same physical device. I.e. They will both present the same Hardware (MAC) address. This is accomplished through the ifenslave utility, which enables the kernel to see/use only one device, while it sends out packtes via the two slave devices using a round-robbin scheduler. Note: this was originally written for Debian Woody... but everything should function the same in Sarge+."

Replacing Microsoft DNS with bind9

Replacing Microsoft DNS with bind9

Isc Bind 9 for windows

I personally was not aware that there WAS a Windows version of Bind. Most of the Internet DNS servers run Bind, and as such it is considered to be a reliable solution. This article does help one make a step towards migrating to Linux, if you are currently a Windows shop.