Hi, we’re Radiohead. You may have heard of us before, maybe not. Our contract with Capitol expired after we released Hail to the Thief in ’03. Yesterday we announced the release of our next album In Rainbows on October 10th. If you’d like to pay for it, thanks, but we’re going to leave it at your discretion. Honestly, we didn’t much feel like promoting this decaying business model. From when dinosaurs roamed the earth; we’ve since paid our dues.

Prince had the right idea when he gave away his album Planet Earth for free. Then he sold out 21 consecutive shows. That’s brilliant. We like to play music as much as you like to listen. And we are quite pleased with this release, so do enjoy.

See you at the show,

Colin, Jonny, Ed, Phil & Thom

 

Scenario: FTP user is jailed to their home directory with chroot. FTP user needs to access an external directory (such as www).

Normally you would create a symbolic link in the user’s home directory.

But for some reason, this just doesn’t work with VSFTPD. After fiddling with permissions unsuccessfully for a few minutes, I found a better way.

So you could either do it this way, or use PROFTPD.

 

ARRR! Happy Talk Like a Pirate day.

In this scenario, we’re going to tunnel network traffic from a remote Windows box through a Linux firewall to the Windows desktop we’re currently using. The firewall of course has SSH enabled and functioning.

Before we establish a connection with PuTTY, we have to add tunnels for the services we want. The source port will be the local port we connect to and the destination will include the private IP and port number.

For example, let’s get connected to VNC (5900) and browse files (139) on our remote computer (10.0.1.20).

Note: In order for file sharing to work properly (obviously we’ve got file sharing turned on and configured on the remote end), we’ll need to stop two local services first. From a command prompt, type:

Next, add the tunnel source/destinations like so:

Save, open the connection and login to the firewall.

The moment of truth! Run \\127.0.0.1\share_name. If all is well, you should be prompted to authenticate and after a short delay, see an Explorer window open with your files.

And to connect to the VNC service running on the remote host, connect like this:

Remember, these sessions are encrypted and tunneled through the Internet, so they’ll be much slower than if you were on the same network. But I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Note: Remote Desktop (port 3389) does not work through a tunnel as Windows cannot connect to the localhost. You could experiment with the Microsoft Loopback adapter or run Terminal Services on alternate ports, but that seems like a real waste of time given that VNC is so easy to setup.

 

Assuming you are a superuser, create a new database:

Import data:

Dump the db:

Backup!

Here’s a script called db_backup (make the file executable with chmod a+x filename):

Edit the crontab with crontab -e and add the following line (which runs every day at 11 pm and logs to the file specified):

Alternately you can backup all databases with one command:

Or backup the database files directly from /var/lib/mysql/. You don’t have to be a guru to administer your databases (though some knowledge of relational databases & SQL definitely helps). PHPMyAdmin is a handy tool that you should setup if you haven’t already.

 

Does Internet Explorer peg your CPU, rendering your computer useless until you end the process with Task Manager? Or does it crash repeatedly? There’s an easy way to find the culprit. Open Internet Options in the Control Panel. On the Advanced tab, hit the Reset button near the bottom. This will default your browser to its original state.

Chances are good that somewhere along the lines, a plugin or add-on was installed and is the cause for your troubles. Thus, you can enable add-ons one by one again (or not at all) to find the source of the problem. IE is generally stable without 3rd party software, with the exception of apps from Google, Sun, Adobe, etc.

Unfortunately, Microsoft is not regularly developing IE. At this time, only security fixes and bandaids are periodically released. Alternately, you may wish to use a browser that’s lightweight, more fun, standards compliant, significantly more secure (i.e. not vulnerable to ActiveX controls or VB script), and very well respected. Get a real browser. .