If you want to back up your Mozilla settings, whether it be Firefox or Thunderbird, this is a very hand page:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Migrating_settings_to_a_new_profile
I had actually figured out most of these, but it help me catch a few I might have otherwise missed.
A friend of mine showed me what looks like a nice (free) secure remote access solution for visually managing a remote PC:
It’s based on TightVNC and therefor has the advantage of using encryption on the control session, helping reduce the risk of prying eyes. It also has a pretty cool way of letting the user choose to delegate or not delegate control by reading you a generated key. In particular it looks pretty handy to maybe manage those pesky (note, I’m smiling when I say that) friends and family when they get into trouble.
Definitely worth looking into. From what I undestand it works on both Unix and Windows.
Here’s a potentially interesting Novell SUSE blog where you might expect a little more “off the cuff” information from the SUSE development teams:
There seem to be some interesting articles about a range of things including licensing, desktop lockdown, how to add/update drives to AutoYast etc…
One major issue with Fedora 8 in shops that use a network user repository like NIS or LDAP is “gdmgreeter” breaks (note “gdmgreeter” is the Fedora replacement for XDM). The symptom is X11will fail repeatedly and not come up. In that case you will also see errors like this in “/var/log/messages”:
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Jun 13 12:18:00 myhost kernel: gdmgreeter[2614]: segfault at 74207372 ip 08058ddc sp bfa229c0 error 4 in gdmgreeter[8048000+30000] |
What is going on here is that by default on Fedora 8, “gdmgreeter” wants to iterate all the possible users on the system to offer them up on the “greeter” window. Unfortunately it seems to have a bug and when you’re using something like NIS or LDAP as your authentication store, it blows up. My guess is that it has a finite array for storing the user list and doesn’t do bounds checking.
Regardless it doesn’t really matter why. The solution is you have to go into the “gdmgreeter” configs and disable this new functionality. However, that isn’t very simple because to do so you need to get the “gdmgreeter” control panel up, and to do that you need X11 up and of course you can’t get X11 up with this broken.
The answer is to temporarily disable NIS/LDAP support in the “/etc/nsswitch.conf” by changing the “passwd” entry to just read “files”, eg:
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password: files |
Then restart the computer (or “telenit 3” followed by “telenit 5” to switch out and back into graphical mode). This will at least let you log in under X11 (though you’ll probably have to do it as “root” since you’ve removed the network authentication option from “nsswitch.conf”).
Once logged in, assuming you are using Gnome not KDE, start the menu item:
System / Administration / Login Window
Select the “Users” tab and deselect the checkbox for:
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Include all users from /etc/passwd (not for NIS) |
the select “Close”. After that is done you can re-add back the NIS/LDAP “nsswitch.conf” entry, eg:
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passwd: files nis |
Note that I have no idea why having an option labeled “Include all users from /etc/passwd (not for NIS)” checked would in fact turn on the NIS when it seems to clearly imply that that’s exactly what it does not do by the text, but in opposite world apparently it does.
Oh well, we all make mistakes. Hope that helps.
While in the organizations I have sway over we are working to rid ourselves of older out of maintenance OSes, I do occasionally run into some Fedora Core 6. When I do there are a couple of minor hacks you regularly have to do to make things work (note these are after applying the latest “yum” updates).
First of all, if using LDAPS with the “uri” specification in the “/etc/ldap.conf”, even though you’ve specified “LDAPS” it’s too dumb to use the correct port. Thus, a line like this:
uri ldaps://myldapserver.mydomain.com
has to become:
uri ldaps://myldapserver.mydomain.com:636
Why the redundant “:636” is needed I don’t know. It also seems to affect a few later versions of Fedora as well. It does not seem to effect SLES 10.
Another Fedora Core 6-ism, is if you’re using automount. In that case you need to add:
OPTIONS=”-Onosharecache”
to the “/etc/sysconfig/autofs” settings. Without it automount breaks for no apparent reason (well it is actually apparent, it was a “nfs-util” bug). Later versions of Fedora do not suffer from this issue.
Good documentation for maintaining/creating Linux RPMs is difficult to find. This Wraptastic site seems to have so good stuff:
It appears official, but it’s hard to say since the site seems to lack an “about” to key off of.
In a related line, these two RedHat sites seem to have copies of the “Maximum RPM” book in electronic format:
I have an older printed version and it goes a long way, but not quite enough, to figure out how RPMs work.
Ok, lets you’re using a great Firefox plugin, like say “QuickProxy” and you go to upgrade Firefox and it doesn’t work because it says the plugin doesn’t support this version of the Firefox.
Well, there’s an easy “hack” (kludge, whatever) around it:
That’s it. Note it may or may not work as there could really be an incompatibility. My guess is usually there isn’t (neither QuickProxy nor Exif Viewer had an issue when I fudged them).
Note this was taken from Mr. Sandman’s review of QuickProxy here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/reviews/display/1557
and I assume it will probably work with all other Firefox plugins.
Imagine if you went to file your income tax return, only to find out that someone had already filed it and gotten your refund:
http://csoonline.com/article/381513/UnitedHealthcare_Data_Breach_Leads_To_ID_Theft
That is exactly what happened to 155 graduate and medical students of UC Irvine who were victims of identity after UnitedHealthcare’s (the provider of their medical insurance) records were breached.
Too many IT professional don’t see security in real terms. This is a great example of a very real effect. I can tell you, I would be pissed (er, technical term there)!
If you have an older system that doesn’t have an internal DVD but you do have an external USB DVD, here’s how to build a CD to boot from. This will probably work with any version of SLES 10:
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mkdir /tmp/mini–boot |
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cp <path–to–DVD–mount>/boot/i386/loader/* /tmp/mini–boot |
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mkisofs –o /tmp/mini–boot.iso –b isolinux.bin –c boot.cat –no–emul–boot –boot–load–size 4 –boot–info–table /tmp/mini–boot |
This will leave a “/tmp/mini-boot.iso” that you can burn to a CD using your favorite CD burning software (eg: “k3b -cdimage /tmp/mini-boot.iso”, Nero, or Roxio).
Note that it will initially say it cannot find the media, but when you say “try again”, it will find the DVD.
A “kind of” funny video about Bill Gates “retirement”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr5w3X4R8b4
It’s perhaps a little too self aware and woody but still worth watching.
Of course if you’re a bit of an Open Source person like myself, you might also enjoy this:
http://strom.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/giving-thanks-to-bill-gates
It has a little “bite” shall we say though.
I’m not sure how useful this would actually be in practice, but this “Goosh” or “Google Shell” is a pretty neat trick:
which is an unofficial command line tool to access Google.
For those of us Unix types, it’s fun to see it presented this way, though as noted I’m not sure how useful it really is…
Whenever I enter IT acronym hell (SOA, ITIL, IPAM, ETL, etc, etc…) I always think of this quote:
“Excuse me, sir. Seeing as how the VP is such a VIP, shouldn’t we keep the PC on the QT? ‘Cause if it leaks to the VC he could end up MIA, and then we’d all be put on KP.”
– Robin Williams playing Adrian Cronauer, Good Morning Vietnam