July 2006 - VirtJunkie

Month: July 2006

Use AIM on the Command Line

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Jon

I get bored a lot. There are up sides to this and down sides to this. For some reason I decided that I wanted to find a command llne (CLI) AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) client. I found one that works great called BSFlite.

You an see an image of what it looks like at their site Here.

There aren’t any binaries for Debian or Fedora, but compiling from source was easy. Just “make” it and then copy the compiled binary to a directory like “/usr/local/bin”.

Give It a shot!

Jon Howe

CMS Switchover

Posted on July 29, 2006 by Jon

After using Drupal for almost 2 years I decided that it’s time for me to try out something different. As you can see I decided on WordPress.

I used the guide at spindrup.us to convert my database from drupal to be used with wordpress.
You can still see my drupal installation here if you want to, but there won’t be any more updates there.

Enjoy,

Jon Howe

How To Reset Your Root Password Using Grub Single User Mode

Posted on July 28, 2006 by Jon

Today I was confronted by someone who lost their root password, lucky for them they were using grub as their bootloader and it wasn’t password protected. This is the default for Ubuntu, Fedora, and other distros

There are X steps to this process:

Step 1. Get into the Grub Editor
When you boot you’ll probably see a few options in your grub menu. Unless you’re sure what kernel that you want to use, select the kernel at the top of the list and press e.

Step 1.1 Get into the Grub Editor (Part 2)
Hit the down arrow until the line that starts with kernel is selected, then press e again

Step 2. Enable Single User Mode
All that you have to do in order to enable single user mode is add the word “single” to the end of the line. Hit enter to return to the previous screen.

Step 3. Boot into your Single User Environment
With the same kernel selected press b to boot into the your new os.

Now you should be in a nice shiny root prompt. Feel free to do whatever you want here, including typing passwd to change the root passwd.

I’m Okay (and so is my blog)….

Posted on July 27, 2006 by Jon

Long story short:

The computer that this blog is on was up for over 220 days, and when I restarted it, things were all messed up.

The only thing that I really wanted to back up was this blog, but I was unable to dump the mysql database because I couldn’t get it (mysql) to start.

I ended up copying the raw database in /var/lib/mysql to a backup directory.

Then I went on this whole crazy journey trying to convert my drupal database to be used with wordpress…… That didn’t work too well.

Then I realized that all along all that I had to do is enable mod rewrite in apache in order for it to work.

So there you have it: how my blog is working, and why I sound a little bit scatterbrained.

More later (hopefully),
Jon Howe

Scan a File with Multiple AV Scanners at once Online

Posted on July 8, 2006 by Jon

I recently got a file that could have been contaminated by some kind of a virus. I decided not to risk my newly installed, and unprotected Win 2k3 Server installation, so I found a great scanner online that scans it with multiple viruses at once.

It’s located here.

Later,
Jon Howe

Enabling Samba and SWAT on Ubuntu

Posted on July 6, 2006 by Jon

I recently got an album from AllOfMP3.com on my laptop while I was away from my house, and wanted it on my desktop computer. In the past I’ve used Samba to transfer from Windows to Linux, so that’s what I did this time.

There were a couple of problems though, i didn’t have samba installed or configured because I just switched from Ubuntu Breezy to Ubuntu Dapper. Samba can be a bit of a pain to set up by hand, so that’s why I use SWAT (Samba Web Administration Tool).

SWAT doesn’t work automatically in ubuntu though, in order to get it to work the install the following packages if you’re using inetd (not recommended):

apt-get install samba swat netkit-inetd sudo update-inetd --enable 'swat'

Otherwise, if you’re using the recommended xinetd use the following fix:

Create a text file called ‘swat’ with the following information in it:

# default: on # description: SWAT - The Samba Web Administration Toolkit service vmware-authd { disable = no port = 901 socket_type = stream protocol = tcp wait = no user = root server = /usr/sbin/swat type = unlisted }
Then restart either (x)inetd and in your browser goto http://localhost:901 to log in.

That should work, if it doesn’t email me at howe dot jon -at- gmail _dot_ com