Linux

Disable SNMP Printer Scanning in Ubuntu Intrepid

Posted Wed, 11/05/2008 - 10:35 by Justin Ellison

After installing Ubuntu Intrepid on my laptop, I got a nastygram from IT saying that my laptop was tripping alerts from their NIDS.  They could tell me that it was an outbound SNMP request, but they couldn't supply the OID or anything.  Setting aside the fact that the NIDS should be configured to disregard SNMP requests for this particular OID, I set forth to try and figure out what the heck was causing the traffic.

5
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Google Reader + Podcasts + MP3Player == GReaderSync.pl

Posted Fri, 09/19/2008 - 14:06 by Justin Ellison

Google Reader is great, it lets you keep up on your feeds from anywhere - your phone, your MAC, your PC, and on and on. Podcasts are great too. Free education and entertainment abound. Most podcasts can be subscribed to via RSS. Google Reader is great for keeping up on the latest podcasts, but the interface sucks and I prefer to listen to podcasts on my MP3 player. I needed a good way to integrate Google Reader and my MP3 player. GReaderSync.pl is the result.

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VirtualBox 2.0 Quick Impressions

Posted Wed, 09/10/2008 - 22:03 by Justin Ellison

I'm not new to the virtualization scene, but I'm no expert either -- I've been using VMWare Workstation since 1.0, VMWare Server since 1.0, and Xen since around 2.0. Well, I needed a Windows XP install on my laptop, and decided it would be a good time to see how VirtualBox compared. VirtualBox 2.0 was just released (changelog), so I went with the bleeding edge. Read on for my quick review of Virtualbox 2.0.

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Set it and forget it: Tether your Windows Mobile 6 Phone to Linux

Posted Sat, 09/06/2008 - 22:15 by Justin Ellison

I have a love/hate relationship with my phone - an HTC PPC6800. I can't live without it - I can check my work email from anywhere, and surf the web. While I've tried many PDA's through the years, none of them have stuck, because I got tired of lugging them around. I always have my phone with me, so therefore my smartphone has made me much more organized. My wife loves it because I can remember all the upcoming appointments. Yet, I hate it. It's UI is horrible. It locks up and needs rebooted, and I feel dirty using a M$ product.

Well, I found one more reason to like it. I can tether my Ubuntu laptop to my phone and get Internet access from just about anywhere. This howto is for Ubuntu, but it should work for any distro that uses bluez-utils. Note that I briefly tried to get my laptop tethered via USB, but I found several comments that it wouldn't work without a custom kernel module. Bluetooth is easier, works out of the box, and is much cooler besides ;-)

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Use GMail as an SMTP relay using SSMTP

Posted Mon, 09/01/2008 - 21:05 by Justin Ellison

On some of your home workstations, and especially on a laptop, setting up a full-blown SMTP server such as Postfix, Sendmail, or Exim might be overkill.  Follow the jump to learn how to setup the lightweight ssmtp to relay all outbound mail through your GMail account by using Gmail as a smarthost.

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Quick & Painless Ubuntu Speed Tweaks

Posted Sun, 08/31/2008 - 21:16 by Justin Ellison

As far as performance, Ubuntu 8.04 isn't bad out of the box. However, the developers had to make some performance sacrifices in order to remain compatible with older machines. If you have a newer machine with at least 512MB RAM, enabling these tweaks will significantly speed up your Ubuntu experience.

There's a lot of copy and paste blog posts out there on Feisty, and a lot of so-called tweaks that I feel are unnecessary.  Where I aim to differentiate this post is to specialize on tweaks relevant to 8.04, and to cover only the 80/20 rule of performance -- 20% of the work done tweaking will net you 80% of the speed boost. There's a lot more that you can tweak, but it really won't net you that much gain. Here's what I use on all my desktop Ubuntu installs.

4.5
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User-level configuration of CPU speed in Gnome under Ubuntu

Posted Sat, 08/09/2008 - 14:08 by Justin Ellison

When I ran Fedora on my laptop, I loved how I could manually set the CPU speed in Gnome using the "CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor" applet.  I noticed that I could not do this under Ubuntu (you can monitor speed, but you can't change it).

It's actually a feature, not a bug.  In order to change CPU frequency, the binary needs to be SUID, which Ubuntu doesn't enable by default.  In order to change this behavior, run the following:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets
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Quick & Easy Apache SSL on CentOS

Posted Mon, 08/04/2008 - 07:24 by Justin Ellison

Follow the jump to find out how you can quickly and easily setup your own SSL certificate and install it into Apache on CentOS/RHEL.

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Simple & Effective Apache+MySQL Backups for your Blog/CMS

Posted Sat, 08/02/2008 - 12:59 by Justin Ellison

As part of setting up my new Linode host, I needed a quick, easy, and maintanable way to create backups of my LAMP webapps.  Follow the jump to see how I set up my backup strategy.

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Linode Review

Posted Fri, 08/01/2008 - 08:17 by Justin Ellison

I recently switched from Aplus.net shared Unix hosting to Linode Xen-based VPS hosting. Follow the jump to read my reviews of both.

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