Alternative to DynDNS
linuxaria blog article This article has a script how to use Dynamic DNS on afraid.org. ...
Articles posted on 2013
assist
Assist is my archlinux scripted installation script. https://github.com/alejandroliu/assist By default it gives you a menu driven archlinux installation with supposedly sensible defaults. It has command line hooks so that you can perform automated installs using bash scripts to customize it. ...
SSH Tricks
A bunch of stupid SSH tricks that can be useful somehow, somewhere... Forcing either IPv4 or IPv6 This is for the scenario that you know which specific protocol works to reach a particular host. Usually good to eliminate the delay for SSH to figure out to switch IP protocols. For IPv4: ssh -4 [email protected] ...
Running Windows on Linux for Free
Microsoft is now making available Windows VM image for testing Internet Explorer for free. You can find them at: Modern IE testing Currently the following versions are available: Windows XP Professional SP3 + IE 6 or 8 Windows Vista + IE 7 Windows 7 + IE 8, 9, 10 or 11 Windows 8 + IE 11 ...
Remote VirtualBox
RemoteBox is a Remote VirtualBox UI. It is similar phpVirtualBox in that allows to manage VirtualBox remotely (on a potentially headless server). They differ in their requirements: RemoteBox does not require much on the server, but you need to install it on the client. phpVirtualBox only requires a browser and rdp viewer on the client, but requires a web server with PHP support on the server. ...
IPv6 testing
When trying to get on-to the IPv6 Internet, here are a couple of links to do diagnostics: http://www.subnetonline.com/pages/ipv6-network-tools/online-ipv6-ping.php This actually contain generic network tools. http://ds.testmyipv6.com/ Confirm if your browser is connecting through IPv6 ...
PingTool.org
Another short and sweet. This web site provides a number of on-line tools. Useful for diagnosing problems when setting a home server. http://pingtool.org/ ...
Web Backups
As usual with any IT system backups are important. This does not change when using a free shared hosting provider. Because it is free, one would argue it is even more important. For my wordpress web site I used something called cli-exporter. It let's you create "Wordpress" export files from the command line so it can be run from cron. This is important because backups have to be automated. In addition to that, I copy the backup files to an off-site location. I do this by copying files using WebDAV to a storage provider. I did this by writing a simple script and using the PHP library SabreDAV which makes writing DAV clients quite easy. I myself don't mind using other people's Open Source code to do something. I was actually surprised that I was not able to find something that meet my criteria. However, thanks to the power of open source I was able to find something that fit the bill exactly. To make things more interesting, because I wanted to keep backup files as compressed Zip archives, my backup scripts did not work in one of the web hosts that I was using. They did not have the zip extensions enabled. This is surprising considering is quite standard. Luckily I was able to find a pure PHP library pclzip. ...
Mini-Howto: Setup proxy on Ubuntu
A quick and dirty mini-howto to setup a proxy on Ubuntu. This is meant mostly for doing quick setup of a proxy on a cloud environment. Install Squid with the following command at the Linux command prompt: ...
Using CloudFlare
So I have signed up 0ink.net to use the CloudFlare service. CloudFlare is a reverse proxy service that is supposed to speed up and improve web server security. This is done by: globally distributed reverse proxy cache network ...
Askozia Desktop Appliance
So last weekend finally had some time to work with a Askozia Desktop Appliance. It actually arrived much earlier but without a Power Supply. Initially I though, "this is strange; I didn't know this supported PoE". (Power Over Ethernet). It turns out it didn't and there was a shipping mistake. After contacting the vendor, they sent me the required Power Supply. Overall I think the product is quite nice. It has a very nice User Interface that is quite easy to use. Simple configurations are indeed very easy to set-up. My feeling is that, as with any GUI, it usually trades user-friendly with expressiveness. So while I could configure most of the things I wanted from the UI, it did not support my home network topology fully. Initially, I had a DMZ vs Home-LAN configuration, with the Askozia box in the DMZ. Because the separation between the DMZ and the Home-LAN was through the router, it considered all the IP phones (in the Home-LAN) on the other side of the NAT, so things did not work properly. ...
CipherUSB
This is an interesting concept. Essentially is an Encryption dongle that encrypts stuff between your PC and your USB mass storage device. Addonics Product: CipherUSB. ...
Upgrading pacman config files
So when upgrading software packages sometimes you need to merge changes. My recipe in archlinux is as follows: Look for *.pacnew files. Retrieve the original version (from /var/cache/pacman) from the old source package. Use a 3 way merge tool between old version, current file and the pacnew file. ...
libmspack
Recently I found this Open Source project. Apparently it recently gained support to unpack Exchange Offline Address Book files. What I don't know is after you unpack it, how would you use such a file. Intriguing but apparently falls a little bit short. Probably would need to try it out for myself to see how it works. libmspack. ...
atratus project
The other day I came across this project. Looks an interesting idea. It is a project that lets you run unmodified Linux binaries on Windows. It is more similar to WINE than to for example coLinux. While I conceptually I understand how it would work at a low level, I am curious how it works with dynamically link executables. This is something I would like to test out when I have time. ...
Media Tips
This is an article about different media (and more specifically) video files can be manipulated. This is just for historical purposes as now almost everything can be done using ffmpeg and the right options. libmp4v2 contains: ...
Diskless Archlinux
I am still to test this recipe Server Configuration First of all, we must install the following components: A DHCP server to assign IP addresses to our diskless nodes. A TFTP server to transfer the boot image (a requirement of all PXE option roms). ...
OpenWRT web
Some useful tidbits to use when using the OpenWRT embedded web server (uHTTPD). Embedded Lua uHTTPd supports running Lua in-process, which can speed up Lua CGI scripts. It is unclear whether LuCI supports running in this embedded interpreter. LuCI seems to work fine (if not better) with the embedded ...
Program Documentation
So these are my ideas on how to document projects. There are three types of documentation types: User guides Targetted and end-users of the software and people who want a brief overview. Man pages Again targetted at end-users but also sysadmins. Usually to address a specific feature. ...
Git Tutorials
Reference for Git tutorials http://linux.yyz.us/git-howto.html http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html http://spheredev.org/wiki/Git_for_the_lazy http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/gittutorial.html ...