Ubuntu: page 2

• Handy Linux Commands May 12, 2009

  I use most of these commands every day to simplify my terminal interactions with an Ubuntu development box. This is more of a personal reference but thought I would share incase you find it useful. Task Command Get all users on the system for user in `getent passwd | cut -d: -f1`; do id $user; done Delete all .svn or any file name by replacing .svn in the command with your filename Read more ⇒

• Samba File Share Over SSH Tunnel April 30, 2009

  This is not a post about setting up Samba shares. If that is what you are looking for then I can recommend the following book; Using Samba: A File & Print Server for Linux, Unix & Mac OS X. Sometimes you need to be able to access a remote Samba server in a secure manner from a Windows machine. This is a relatively simple procedure on an XP SP3 machine like mine linking into an Ubuntu server pre setup with Samba file sharing. Read more ⇒

• Memcached and APC: Two Simple Techniques to Speed up your PHP Webpages April 23, 2009

  Memcached and APC are two tools that you can install on your server and gain almost instant gratification! APC basically caches executions that you send to a PHP process so that the next time you ask the parser to run your script it only has to look for some pre-chewed opcode in memory rather than parsing your PHP from the disk. APC also has another feature up its sleeve, memory object caching, which allows you to store objects such as results from a database table in memory. Read more ⇒

• Installing APC and Memcached for PHP Sessions on Ubuntu and Debi… April 10, 2009

  Installing APC on Debian or Ubuntu is as simple as: **user@server:/directory/$** sudo apt-get install php-apc Now let us reboot the Apache process to enable our new cache: **user@server:/directory/$** sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart APC should now be ready to run on your server. Try running the following command to verify it is setup; you should get something in response like mine: **user@server:/directory/$** php -r ‘phpinfo();’ | grep ‘apc’ apc MMAP File Mask => /tmp/apc. Read more ⇒

• Using phing for good - Unfuddle Add Repository and SVN Import Ta… March 24, 2009

  As you may be aware I have recently been playing with the excellent Agavi framework and it introduced me to the interesting phing tool. Phing can be used to automate tasks with build files that are close to interoperable with Apache Ant, which uses XML files to configure builds. The advantage phing has for us PHP users is that it is entirely written in PHP so extending it is as simple as adding a new class. Read more ⇒

• CrunchBang Linux on the Eee Pc March 10, 2009

  So far I have tried out Ubuntu, eeeBuntu, EasyPeasy Linux and CrunchBang Linux (all of which are Debian based) on the Asus Eee PC. Ubuntu was a bit of an annoyance to get setup and it was troublesome trying to get all the buttons or the sound and microphone to work so I then tried EasyPeasy. It was easy to install (it already contains the Array.org kernal) and I liked the NBR interface with its easy to use tabbed system not to mention that after using Ubuntu it was nice to be able to see most of the system dialogues on screen (Ubuntu’s dialogues were so long they fell off screen! Read more ⇒

• A Good Windows Development Environment and Ubuntu Virtualbox February 18, 2009

  Often Linux just does it better! Often I find myself developing a Windows machine without access to a Linux development server, but I still need to access to some of the Linux binaries and features such as cron jobs, the at command and binaries such as imagemagick, pdftotext, etc. Some things can be emulated with ported binaries or through Cygwin, but I feel a lot more comfortable developing on a platform that is representative of the live server the web site will run on. Read more ⇒

• Enabling sites and modules in Apache on Ubuntu or Debian January 24, 2009

  I really like the way the Apache modules and virtualhosts are seperated out on Debian into folders containing those, which are available and those which are enabled. There is one small problem with this – it is more work than before! Luckily there are some helper scripts. The Apache configuration files are layed out in the following way: mods-available – the actual text files containing the modules configuration sites-available – the vhosts text file for the site Read more ⇒

• Securing SSH with Key Based Authentication January 20, 2009

  Certificates are a useful way of restricting access to your SSH server because a user must have three things to log onto the server: Username Password Certificate Normally they would only need to have a password and username, which can be guess at or (potentially) brute forced. Forcing the user to supply a certificate on log on means that they must also have a tangible source of identification (without the key file they cannot log in! Read more ⇒