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UnixStickers project

I usually don’t like a stickers on the notebooks. Especially the large one which after some time became dirty and ugly. Also, it isn’t very nice to open your laptop on the presentation in front of the 200 attendees while the laptop looks a like teenage room with posters on the wall.

That is the main reason why I always keep my laptop nice and clean.

But I changed my mind a few days ago when I heard about unixs tickers.com project. The main idea behind this project is to test the Linux user’s interest in customizing pc and notebook case with a sticker of a favorite distribution.

The stickers are small and nice so I didn’t wait to much before I decided to create an order. Two days ago I received them

Sorry for the bad image quality (the image is made with my phone because the Canon camera is not at home :( ). You can see that stickers are very nice and small so they fits perfectly. Another good idea behind this project is that every time when someone buys Linux Mint sticker, they donate 0.10€ to Mint Linux project.

Very very nice idea

I forget to say that price is very nice – only 0,45€ for one sticker. The link is HERE.

EDIT 4th Feb 2012.

As you can see from the comments below, this project is probably dead. The link will lead you to the parked domain and I’m not sure why. To avoid any problems I may have, I broke all links inside this post because I don’t want to create a negative advert.

To save your time here is the whois output for unix stickers.com domain

Registrant:
   stefano di luca
   viale filiani 14
   pineto, teramo 64025
   Italy
 
   Registered through: Go Daddy
   Domain Name: UNIXSTICKERS.COM
      Created on: 16-Mar-08
      Expires on: 16-Mar-12
      Last Updated on: 24-Jan-12
 
   Administrative Contact:
      di luca, stefano  stef.il@gmail.com
      viale filiani 14
      pineto, teramo 64025
      Italy
      (085) 949-0560
 
   Technical Contact:
      di luca, stefano  stef.il@gmail.com
      viale filiani 14
      pineto, teramo 64025
      Italy
      (085) 949-0560
 
   Domain servers in listed order:
      NS1.FASTPARK.NET
      NS2.FASTPARK.NET

In case you didn’t received your stickers (and you already sent a payment), try to contact the domain owner via posted email or open dispute process on PayPal.

Posted in Linux, Other.

5 comments

By admin – October 3, 2011

scp, ssh and rsync without prompting for password – howto

Using scp, rsync and ssh requires the password unless you add the public key from src host to authorised_keys on destination host.

scp and rsync commands are used to transfer or backup files between known hosts or by the same user on both the hosts.

Lets say you want to copy between two hosts SOURCE and DESTINATION. SOURCE is the host where you would run the scp, ssh or rsync command.

On the SOURCE host, run

# ssh-keygen -t rsa

It will prompt for a passphrase but do not enter anything. Instead, just press the enter key. It’ll generate an identification (private key) and a public key. Do not ever share the private key with anyone!
The public key will be generated in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

For example in root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Copy id_rsa.pub file to DESTINATION inside the /root/.ssh/
On DESTINATION host, login as the remote user which you plan to use (in this case root) and copy the contents of id_rsa.pub to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys

# cat id_rsa.pub >> /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
# chmod 700 /root/.ssh/authorized_keys

If this file authorized_keys does not exists, the command above will create it. Make sure you remove permission for others to read this file.

On some distros, ssh by default does not allow root to log in. To enable root login, edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and changing the option of PermitRootLogin from no to yes (on DESTINATION host). Restart sshd to apply changes and that is it.

In case you want to ssh, scp or rsync from DESTINATION to SOURCE host you will be asked for password. You can reverse the steps above (generate the public key on DESTINATION and copy it to the SOURCE host) and it will work in both directions.

In case that one server gets hacked, the other one will be too :)

Posted in Linux, Tips & Tricks.

No comments

By admin – September 28, 2011

Mail relay testing service

In case you want to check your mail servers for relaying, check the next link: LINK.

Posted in Postfix.

No comments

By admin – September 26, 2011

Mobile patent suits

Patent related suits between mobile device/components manufacturers

Posted in Android, Other.

No comments

By admin – September 14, 2011

Test your sql skills online

Very nice 5 questions quiz about SQL performance

http://use-the-index-luke.com/3-minute-test/

Posted in MySQL.

No comments

By admin – August 19, 2011

Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

Quality links are always welcome :)

I’m using Perl from time to time and it is very hard to switch between programming languages without quality references. For quick Perl course, check the next link

Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

Posted in Programming.

1 comment

By admin – August 1, 2011

phpMyAdmin with mod_fcgid – http auth with CGI

One of the mod_fcgid benefit is using different user for executing scripts in different directories (for example every hosted virtual domain has its own system user which can only execute his own scripts). This is a some kind of protection so one exploited site can’t harm other hosted domains (of course, chmod 600 on config files is a MUST).

Unf. phpmyadmin has problems with php in CGI mode. When using HTTP basic authentication, phpMyAdmin kept popping up the authentication dialog over and over again. The solution is to create .htaccess file inside phpmyadmin web dir with next content

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* - [E=REMOTE_USER:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]

According to phpmyadmin documentation, when using PHP in CGI mode, the authentication data is not passed over to the script by default and the lines in .htaccess shown above should fix this problem.

Posted in Apache.

No comments

By admin – July 29, 2011

Disk usage analysis

Taking care about disk usage is a very good habit. There are several options for this and now I will only describe df and du commands.

The df utility displays the disk space usage on all mounted filesystems.

[root@abc ~]# df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                      35772016  20297132  13628408  60% /
/dev/sda1               101086     17692     78175  19% /boot
tmpfs                   513044         0    513044   0% /dev/shm

Adding the -T option (type) will print the filesystem type. Also, the good idea is to add -h option because df measures the size in 1K blocks, which is difficult for a desktop user to recalculate.

Now we have

[root@abc ~]# df -h -T
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
              ext3     35G   20G   13G  60% /
/dev/sda1     ext3     99M   18M   77M  19% /boot
tmpfs        tmpfs    502M     0  502M   0% /dev/shm

As you can see, it is much easier to understand.

You can use the du command to determine which files or directories need to be deleted or reduced. A simple du will print usage for the present working directory and its subdirectories, along with the size of each directory.

du directory will print the size of an particular dir.

Avilable options:
-h – print the size of the podcasts directory in a more readable format
-c – prints the grand total size of the directory at the end.
-a – displays the file names along with directories
-s – display a summary, without showing all of the subdirectories.

For example, du -ch | grep total prints just one line with the total size of the directory.

Posted in Other, Tips & Tricks.

No comments

By admin – July 11, 2011

Fedora 15…

Thanks but no thanks…

Posted in Other.

1 comment

By admin – June 10, 2011

Switching from Windows to Linux – is it possible ?

Few days ago I had a failure with my computer. The Windows installation on C partition decided to die. It was impossible to recover it and the only solution was to backup my emails, desktop and my documents, then format.

Luckily I had a dual boot with Mint Linux and it was extremely easy to backup my files… Also, like I said a few days ago, I became a father and the whole day was like the days before… Tea is very nice baby and she had a very nice schedule (eat, sleep, dump) and yesterday was the same. While I was in “the father loop” I decided to abandon Windows XP.

The reasons:

  • it is an old OS and Win 7 works much better
  • I’m lazy and I don’t have enough time to reinstall it. I will keep the Win XP license sticker just like a note that I had a Win XP on this notebook.

What exactly do I need from my computer:

  • LAMP (done)
  • Winbox (done via Wine)
  • Netbeans, Eclipse (they work better on Linux)
  • MySQL workbench (it works perfectly on Linux)
  • Putty, Pidgin, Skype, XChat, Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, … (done)
  • Photoshop (Gimp can be used for the basic image manipulation. I already gave up from my professorial photography career so I can live without Photoshop)
  • Corel (maybe Inkscape can be a replacement… I’m still not sure…I didn’t use Corel for years and I don’t need it at all.)
  • TrueCrypt (it works fine)

Three days after I switch to Linux, I’m still trying to forget on Windows. For now, I’m doing well.

Don’t worry… I still didn’t forget on FreeRadius howtos. I’m working on the next post about Freeradius and MySQL. Also, I have a few tricks which you should consider in case you want to tune your MySQL and FreeRadius.

Best regards

Edit:

Ten days later, I’m still struggling. :)

Posted in Linux, Other, Windows.

1 comment

By admin – April 25, 2011