I have to admit that, until recently, I’ve been negligent in my backup
plan. Oh, I did the occasional database backup and have most of my
files replicated on my local drive, but I didn’t have a real plan. If
disaster had struck I wouldn’t have been prepared.
Have you ever wanted to spy see on what is going on in your home while you are away? Motion
is a piece of open source software that acts as a motion detector. It
enables you to set-up a webcam server that you can have all your
cameras connected too, so you can view them remotely and also upload
them to a remote server. Motion should run on most linux distributions
Like other OpenOffice.org applications, Calc has several dozen
options in how it is formatted and operates. These options are
available from Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org Calc. Thanks to
OpenOffice.org’s habit of sharing code between applications, some of
the tabs for these options resemble those found in other OpenOffice.org
applications. Others are unique to Calc and the business of
spreadsheets. Either way, the more you know about Calc’s options, the
more you can take control of your work.
SSL-based VPNs were designed to eliminate the need for complex configurations on the user’s PC.
Unfortunately, that was before the dangers of public WiFi networks and tougher regulatory
requirements came into being. Thanks to WiFi, many attacks that were difficult are now quite
simple. In particular, a man-in-the-middle attack can intercept SSL-encrypted traffic, rendering
SSL-based VPNs useless – even if it’s protected by a typical one-time password system. The
man-in-the-middle can easily feed the one-time password into the SSL-based VPN within the alloted
time.
Innotek’s GPL-licensed Virtualbox
software lets you create a virtual operating environment inside your
PC’s real operating system. I’ve been using Virtualbox for several
months now on a 32-bit laptop running Ubuntu 7.04, and I’ve been
impressed with the software. However, my main PC at home utilizes a
64-bit version of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn, and Virtualbox didn’t
support 64-bit OSes — until this month. Now that I’ve tried it, I’m
happy to report it works just as well as its 32-bit sibling.
Maxemum TV-Guide is a KDE TV-guide. It is developed in C++, based on
QT/KDE and uses XMLTV as it’s back end to grab listings. At present
there are backends grabbing TV listings for Australia, Belgium and
Luxemburg, Brazil, Britain and Ireland, Denmark, Estonia, Finland,
France, Germany, Hungary and Romania, Iceland, Italy, Japan,
Netherlands, North America, Norway, Portugal, Reunion Island (France),
South Africa, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
Maxemum TV-Guide’s features
Today, many IT managers handle environments with hundreds, if not thousands, of virtual hosts that all require management and administration. One way they can take huge strides toward mastering that domain is mastering Puppet, a centralized configuration management tool.
In this tip I’m going to demonstrate how to install Puppet, a Ruby-based configuration management tool, on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. The instructions should also be useful for installations on distributions such as SUSE Enterprise Linux, CentOS and others too.
When reading a ‘hint’ on the website of LinuxFromScratch I discovered the special capabilities
of unionfs, specially in combination with chroot. Later I read a HowTo on a wikiwebsite of Gentoo,
about entering a chrooted
homedirectory when using a special script as shell. Combining these two
brings me to using a chrooted environment, which you enter when logging
in as a special user.
This environment is a exact copy (mirror) of the system you’re working
This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen on an Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04)
server system (i386). You can find all the software used here in the
Ubuntu repositories, so no external files or compilation are needed.
Around the time OpenOffice.org 1.1 RC was released, I was migrating
a small company from Corel WordPerfect to OpenOffice.org.
OpenOffice.org by itself does not support reading or writing
WordPerfect files, but a tool called wpd2sxw
can convert WordPerfect files to OpenOffice.org format (SXW). After
conversion with wpd2sxw, which was rather good but had problems with
some formatting features, I applied macros to documents based on
different templates to make more than 2,000 converted documents look
One of the strengths of Unix-like systems such as Linux is the
ability to easily customize them and automate tasks using scripts.
However, shell scripts usually need to run in a terminal window and
thus don’t integrate well with the modern desktop environments most
people use. Kommander
tries to remove this burden by allowing users to easily create
graphical applications using any scripting language of their choice.
While podcasting and video
blogging are all the rage, many people still prefer the simplicity of
the typed word for expressing themselves online — that is, a blog.
However, popular blogging platforms like WordPress and Movable Type
can be tough to configure and maintain. On the other hand, you might
not want to use an online service like Blogger or TypePad because you
want complete control over your blog. If you’re not afraid of the
Many people are interested in getting their linux or BSD desktop
interface to look as much like Apple’s very successful OS X gui as
possible. Now, I am well aware that many others are not thus enamored,
and in fact profess a real dislike for the look. This article is NOT
being written for the latter, and please if you don’t like the OS X,
don’t write and/or comment and put it down. Just ignore this article.
But for those of you who are interested in reproducing that look on
your linux desktop, here is a step by step method for doing so on the
This article describes how you can monitor your Postfix mailserver with
the tools Mailgraph and pflogsumm. Mailgraph creates daily, weekly,
monthly, and yearly graphs of sent, received, bounced, and rejected
emails and also of spam and viruses, if SpamAssassin and ClamAV are
integrated into Postfix (e.g. using amavisd-new).
These graphs can be accessed with a browser, whereas pflogsumm
("Postfix Log Entry Summarizer") can be used to send reports of Postfix
activity per email.
This is the first line in the Samba 3.0 release notes:
"Active Directory support. Samba 3.0 is now able to join an ADS
(Active Directory Service) realm as a member server and authenticate
users using LDAP/Kerberos."
The intent of this article is to show you how to configure
your Linux machine and Samba server to participate in a Windows 2003 Active
Directory domain as a Member Server using Kerberos authentication. This
involves using the security = ADS security mode in Samba.