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What a n00b is a blog about current trends in technology with a how-to mixed in every now and then.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'how-tos tips'
Want Faster Browsing? Google FTW!
Well, Google is at it again. I am now relying on yet another set of Google products.. This week was a big week for non-Windows users waiting for the Chrome browser. Earlier this week they released the beta of Chrome for Linux and Mac. I actually hel...
Easy and Free Network-based Time Machine Backup
I’ve been looking for a network-based (free) solution for backing up a couple of Macs using Time Machine at home for some time. Plugging external drives into our two Macs was doable, but not exactly convenient. There’s plenty of how-tos ...
Running LAMP Applications Using Nginx
While playing with WordPress on nginx for my last post, I discovered that a majority of the how-tos out there on running PHP/MySQL applications using nginx left a bit to desired. Here’s the steps that I took to get my application (WordPress, sp...
More Tab Complete Awesomeness on Ubuntu 9.04
It’s a slightly older post, but after I read Workswithu’s report on the four features that they believed set Ubuntu apart, I had to agree whole-heartedly with the fourth one regarding implementation of auto-complete on the shell. As I was...
Zenoss SSH Troubles on Ubuntu 8.04
Fresh off a stack installer of Zenoss Core on Ubuntu 8.04, I had a little trouble with SSHing to other hosts using the Zenoss user. When I tried to SSH, I got a this error: ssh: /usr/local/zenoss/common/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8: no version information ...
Deploying Linux Just Got Easy with SUSE Studio
Deploying Linux out to hundreds of desktops or as a downloadable appliance just became a really easy task to accomplish. I knew that Novell had a trick up their sleeve with SUSE Studio, but I had no idea how big it was until I tried it out today. The...
Installing VirtualBox OSE on Ubuntu 8.04
Tonight I wanted to play with a couple of Linux distros on my desktop and I decided to install VirtualBox since it’s free and already has packages in Ubuntu for it. That turned into a much longer process than I thought, but not too bad. There&#...
SSH (and tunnel) In One Click of a Mouse
I can’t believe I haven’t seen this tool before. Worse yet, I can’t believe how much time I must have wasted SSH’ing to hosts. Tonight I discovered SSHMenu for Gnome. I’m a systems administrator on a mostly Linux networ...
Constant Disk Activity from MythTV
Last night I was playing with my MythTV box setting up a frontend on my MacBook and I noticed after I was done playing that the MythTV backend server’s disk was constantly making noise. When I stopped the MythTV backend services, the noise stop...
Why IT People Become Jerks
It seems that IT and technical support staffers are constantly at war with end users and other branches of their companies. I’ve read several articles and best practices on how to deal with end users in the past. Heck, I even wrote a blog entry...
Umounting NFS Share After Deletion on the ‘Server Side’
Since I like to be an example to others of what not to do, I thought I’d share my fun today. Today I was doing a little cleanup on our systems and removed an empty directory that had been mounted by another system via NFS. (HINT: if you’r...
Cleaning Up After Safari 4
There’s been a few reports in the blogosphere of an issue with the Safari 4 beta not cleaning up after itself on OS X Leopard. Apparently this version of Safari leaves some data in the ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari directory when clearing hi...
Sharing Printer from Ubuntu to Mac OS X
Quite often we read about how small things are so much more complicated on Linux than on Windows. I set out on a journey today to add a printer via USB to my Ubuntu desktop and share it out to my MacBook at my new apartment. If there’s one thin...
iTunes 8.1 Window Weirdness In OS X
After upgrading to iTunes 8.1 on my MacBook, I noticed a weird behavior of the window. After unplugging from my external monitor at work, the iTunes window was too big for me to see the whole thing and I couldn’t grab the “resizer” ...
Slow Apache Starts on Ubuntu
An Apache server that I was working with was having an issue starting in a reasonable amount of time. This particular server was running on Ubuntu 8.04 on top of VMware ESX 3.5. The service would start eventually, but would hang for a fairly signific...
Another Important Password Management Reminder Courtesy of 8,000 Comcast Customers
Today news reached the media that Comcast had a list of over 8,000 usernames and passwords in a publicly accessible directory on a web server. The file apparently had been accessible for months and had been viewed 345 times and downloaded 27 times be...
Installing Multiple Instances of Zimbra Desktop in Linux
Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop is almost reaching full release status, but it still has one limitation: only one installation on a machine is supported. The problem lies in the fact that Zimbra Desktop uses a Jetty server for the backend application and each ...
Machine Restarting After vMotion in ESX 3.5 Update 3
I ran into a nasty bug in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3 during an implementation at work and thoght I’d share the solution. The bug is a known issue with VMware and I found the documentation with the workaround. The problem goes something like this: ...
Migrating Mail and Contacts from Hotmail to Zimbra
For anyone wanting to switch their email address from a free hotmail account to a Zimbra mail account without losing any email the switch can be made quite easily. You’ll need a Windows installation and your Hotmail and Zimbra account info to g...
Tail Multiple Logs At Once
I discovered a little trick today that I will probably be using every day. I wasn’t sure exactly which log file I needed to be watching while a coworker was doing some work on a server. There was a lot of log files in a directory and I had no i...
