I recently wanted to setup an automated backup system for a company I purchase hosting through (who promptly shut off full backups), and wanted to do so using FTP to my home computer.

The first thing I did was setup vsftpd. This is an FTP daemon that provides the ftp service. After installing the daemon and creating the system account with /bin/false as a shell, I edited /etc/vsftpd.conf. I didn't run it on a non-standard port, although you can for greater security. I did NOT enable anonymous access and neither should anyone else not requiring them.

Jeff pointed me to an article, supposedly breaking news, that described a "new" "web 2.0" threat, trojans using XML feeds as command and control, and using social networking sites, or other "web 2.0" sites like MySpace to store stolen information.

Here are some simple commands to use to get the disk usage in Linux.

$ df

will give you the disk usage for all mounted drives, including available and percentage of use.

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 17077684 7868596 8341580 49% /
varrun 1038144 272 1037872 1% /var/run
varlock 1038144 0 1038144 0% /var/lock
udev 1038144 84 1038060 1% /dev
devshm 1038144 0 1038144 0% /dev/shm

I switched my desktop back to gnome (think Ubuntu not Kubutnu), mostly because of AWN which is a cool menu with nice applets that extend the functionality (I have a system monitor, a weather applet, desktop switcher, file stacker, etc) (many examples can be seen on YouTube. AWN is still in heavy development so a few of the applets don't work and there are some minor bugs, but very cool.

I have been struggling with copying a DVD in Linux. I like to copy the ones I purchase in case they get damaged.

In any case, copying a dvd in kubuntu (or ubuntu) requires the installation of libdvdcss2, which isn't easily found.

I finally found the answer here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DVD::Rip

Using the following lines, the library is installed and K3b (and other applications) can read an encrypted DVD.

sudo apt-get install libdvdread3 debhelper fakeroot

I hate to say "I told you so," but I did...

The economy is now taking a beating as the situation with the housing market worsens. It all started about a month ago with record defaults in the sub-prime lending market. Simply put, people purchased homes they could not afford. I should say it all started with the mortgage boom back in 2003. Rates were at an all time low and housing prices were also low.

I have definitely learned the importance of saving my money with my latest engine debacle, and the best ways to do it. I am going to share what has worked for me.

First, you have to "pay yourself first." No matter how in debt you are, no matter the bills, you have to save something every paycheck. Start with 10% off the top, before you do anything with your money. I am up to about 30% now.

After setting up AWStats On IIS, I wanted to use awstats.pl instead of the static pages. I configured it according to what I found on the internet, but there was a problem. I would go to the awstats.pl and I would get the html on the page rather than the rendered html. I found the problem, but it requires editing awstats.pl.

On line 550, there is a function called http_head. In line 553, the following line:

else { print "Content-type: text/html; charset=$PageCode\n"; }

should be changed to:

else { print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK Content-type: text/html"}

I ran into a strange problem at work today. We have a web server on which is installed a self-generated SSL certificate. This page has worked fine as far as I know for several years. The certificate, however, was not generated for the URL and is therefore not valid. This is something we were going to get around to fix, but it looks like we'll have to do it sooner than later.

Normally, in Windows XP with Internet Explorer 7 and 6, Firefox on Windows and Linux and many other browsers and platforms I assume, a prompt is shown to the user asking if they want to connect to the website anyway.

Why is Linux so cool and fun? Because many of the things people do with their computers are very easy to do in Linux. Like ripping a CD.

Using Kubuntu 7.04, go to the KDE menu and click system settings. Click on the advanced tab. Click on audio encoding and finally the MP3 Encoder. This is where the MP3 settings are located at (quality, bit rate).

Now, put a CD into your CD-ROM drive. You should see an icon that looks like this on your desktop.