If you, like me, can’t stand that obnoxious system beep in VMWare and have discovered that you can’t cut speaker wires inside a VM, you will probably appreciate this tip. Add the following line to your preferences file (~/.vmware/preferences on linux, preferences.ini on windows):
mks.noBeep = TRUE
Now your internal speaker will no longer drive you crazy [...]

Over the weekend I was involved in Joining a Windows 2003 server in the US to our domain here in Sydney over an IPSEC VPN. Due to MTU limitations imposed by the T1 connection, and the additional overhead of the ipsec encryption, it seemed that machines could join the domain, but when we tried to [...]

If you’re getting this error when trying to start sshd:
Could not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key
Could not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key
Disabling protocol version 1. Could not load host key
Disabling protocol version 2. Could not load host key
Re-generate your host key with this command:
ssh-keygen -t dsa -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key
That should get you sorted, make sure you tell everyone [...]

At some stage you may find that you need to run the ssh daemon on multiple ports, for example so that you can have it accessable on the normal port 22 from the internal network, but obscure it from outside snoopers by running it also on a second port, allowing the normal ssh port (22/tcp) [...]

This error was the bane of my life for a while, and it was very hard to get a definitive answer as to what was causing it, I hope this saves you some trouble.
My website occasionally got large traffic spikes, and at the top of these peaks, I would start to see errors like these:
MySQL [...]

After installing Ubuntu Linux on my laptop, I found that although I had totem-xine and mplayer installed, I couldn’t play most DVDs. After a bit of mucking around I found that it was because I needed libdvdcss2 installed, and whilst it is not available in the ubuntu repositories, they do provide a script which will [...]

Need Linux system-state backups? Mondo to the Rescue!
Recently I’ve come across a fantastic package for Linux called Mondo Rescue. It’s a series of scripts which let you take a snapshot of your system, and write it to a bootable cd, an iso file, you can even send it to another host across the network or [...]

As a sort of Christmas present, the company that I work for gave all employees a 512MB ipod shuffle. I though that this was all pretty cool, until I realised that unlike normal mp3 players, you can’t put songs on the ipod without iTunes, apple’s proprietry software. Not a problem for Windows users, but as [...]

I’m finally using only Linux, and no Micro$oft, thanks to TransGaming. These guys produce Cedega and Point2Play. These are emulators based on wine, which mean that I can play the latest games, right from the comfort of my Ubuntu laptop.
I know what you’re thinking… It must be slow because of the emulation layer. If you [...]

I’ve Purchased my last bit of Netgear kit .. Netgear wireless is crap. Worse than D-Link and that’s a pretty big call. I say this because after trying THREE DIFFERENT netgear Access Points and Wireless Routers, none wanted to work with the onboard card in my centrino notebook and whilst they would work with another [...]

Sometimes SELINUX isn’t neccesary and adds a lot of admin overhead. Other times it’s just plain annoying, like when today it didn’t let apache access its config file.
To turn it off, simply edit the file /etc/selinux/config and where it says
SELINUX=enforcing
Change it to read
SELINUX=permissive
then reboot your machine.
-Jonesy