So I want my servers to email me when there’s problems or when I just need to feel like I matter and someone cares about emailing me. Unfortunately, my university (MTU) blocks outgoing smtp on the default port (25) hence I need to use an external service like gmail to send email. How do we do this? 1) setup a gmail account (or use a current one, whereever you want your emails to come from)
Continue reading ↦So I setup some automated emails to my housemates to remind them to PAY THEIR RENT! I ended up doing this via exim4 using this method by using a gmail account to send the mail instead of sending it straight from the system itself. (MTU blocks outgoing smtp) To ensure that the message wasn’t getting flagged as spam and html formatting was working correctly, I used a really great email test page by Brandon Checketts
Continue reading ↦Ridiculously long titles are fun…Now on to other things… One of the latest things I’ve done is look into streaming media to my newly bought PS3 and/or Xbox that I have lying around. Obviously, because of certain companies (cough MS and Sony cough), these “media” devices don’t support all the formats they should hence requiring users to at some cases find upnp serving applications that can remux and re-encode content on the fly if need be.
Continue reading ↦So there’s no way I’m going to blog if I have to log into wp-admin everytime. Luckily you have a few alternatives thanks to WordPress and its awesomeness.. 1) Email blogging…Send an email to an account watched by your wordpress install. When it sees a new email, it will post the contents as a new post. This is already built into WordPress but its in a minimal manner. I suggest the WordPress plugin, Postie which allows more fine grained options supporting categories and specific address filtering!
Continue reading ↦So yeah VMware is not liking the new kernel versions Linus and company are pushing. As a result, it has become necessary to patch your installs of 7.1.5 and 8.0.2 of Vmware workstation, a piece of software I can’t live without. Luckily a very sweet person named Weltall has this handy dandy blog that provides patches for this! I have tested on latest ubuntu 12.04 with 8.0.2 and all is well.
Continue reading ↦Aww. this is nice…. 1) Putty Tunnel Manager - A beautiful things that lets you setup and forget your tunnels from the task bar. Supports reconnections and ensures they don’t overlap on ports.. Forced to used Windows? This is necessary. 2) Gnome SSH Tunnel Manager – If you’re like me, classic gnome (version 2) is where it’s at. gSTM is an app that allows you to manage your tunnels easily with a nice gui and configuration utility.
Continue reading ↦Since I can’t sit still, here’s the cool stuff I’ve done. Click the image to check it out! LDAP Course Project This is a project a friend (Ryan) and I did for our Directory Services course. It includes creating a managed network of LDAP authenticated clients talking to a centralized OpenLDAP server. These clients are virtual machines with varying operating environments (Win/Linux). We implemented ACL’s, SASL, TLS/SSL, and replication to create a fail-over system in order to provide our client machines with high availability and secure connectivity to our bdb database.
Continue reading ↦A few of my machines authenticate to my central LDAP server and allow LDAP users to log in. However, I don’t want every user in LDAP to be able to log into every single one of those machines; rather, I would like to make a posix group in LDAP and when I put a user in that group, they will get access to the given host. This guide will describe how to accomplish this task using PAM.
Continue reading ↦Here is an updated tutorial on installing OpenLDAP server on your box. These instructions were done on Debian 6 Squeeze apt-get install slapd ldap-utils libldap-2.4-2 libldap-2.4-2-dbg libldap2-dev libnet-ldap-perl libnss-ldap libpam-ldap phpldapadmin Configure slapd – Enter the Administrator password to use confirm Configure libnss-ldap – Enter the ldap server URI – the hostname to connect to the server This should be localhost so…ldap://127.0.0.1 -Enter Distinguished Name of the search base.
Continue reading ↦I recently needed to compress images using one of the best compression types available, lzma. I did some research and with the help of commandlinefu and google, I was able to find what I was looking for. 7z a -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -ms=on file.7z file.img The above uses lzma with the best compression selected. “file.7z” is the resulting file while “file.img” is the source file to compress. 7z a -t7z -m0=lzma2 -mx=9 -ms=on file.
Continue reading ↦