Monday, August 4, 2008

Firefox flash plugin: no sound

If you can not hear any sound when playing flash video in Firefox, It's probably because that you hasn't installed the package 'libflashsupport'. To solve it, just install that package and restart Firefox.

For Fedora, you may use the command
# yum install libflashsupport

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Using `cvsd' to setup cvs pserver

CVS was designed to use `xinetd' to startup service. But now most Linux distributions do not install xinetd by default, and configuration of CVS is somewhat complicated. `cvsd' is a wrapper program for CVS in pserver mode, it can startup CVS as a standalone daemon, under a special uid/gid in a chroot jail. It is relatively easy to use cvsd and its configuration file to setup CVS repositories.

In this article, I will describe how to setup a cvs pserver step by step.

1. Installation of cvsd package

For RPM-based distributions, you may download precompiled RPMS from this site:
cvsd-1.0.14-1.i386.rpm
cvsd-1.0.14-1.src.rpm (source)
For other distributions, you may download source tarball here, compile and install it yourself.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Setup of VSFTPD - another approach

If you are hosting several web sites, for security reason, you may want the webmasters to access their own files only. One of the good way is to give them FTP access by setup of VSFTPD virtual users and directories.

In my last article, I described how to setup VSFTPD virtual users. In this article, I will describe another approach to setup VSFTPD, it needs real users on the system.

1. Installation of VSFTPD

For Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora, you may install VSFTPD by the command
# yum install vsftpd
For Debian and Ubuntu,
# apt-get install vsftpd

Monday, April 14, 2008

Be Linux - Penguins Linux Ad on YouTube

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLHjT5-XM9o[/youtube]

Be Linux.
From: kroperx

Added: April 02, 2008
A little Ad i made editing a well known video from the B B C.

Song:
Joe Bongiorno - Chasing the Wind
from Destined

(The video is adapted from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrxmpihCjqw)

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Setup of VSFTPD virtual users

If you are hosting several web sites, for security reason, you may want the webmasters to access their own files only. One of the good way is to give them FTP access by setup of VSFTPD virtual users and directories. This article describes how you can do that easily.
(See also: Setup of VSFTPD virtual users - another approach)

1. Installation of VSFTPD

For Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora, you may install VSFTPD by the command
# yum install vsftpd
For Debian and Ubuntu,
# apt-get install vsftpd

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Method to solve `Downloading bookmarks ...' problem

I am migrating to `Google bookmarks', but the button on Google Toolbar always says `Downloading bookmarks ...'. But in Windows, Google Toolbar in Firefox can import, download, add bookmarks normally. What's different in Linux?

After googling for some time, I realize that it is due to lack of the library `libstdc++.so.5'. This is one of the old versions of C++ libraries, most of current Linux distributions do not install this library by default. The method to solve 'Downloading bookmarks' problem is:

1. Install the package that contains libstdc++.so.5. For Fedora 8:
# yum install compat-libstdc++-33
For Ubuntu:
# sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
For other distributions, you should install the corresponding packages.

2. Exit Firefox, restart Firefox, re-install Google Toolbar. This is very important, or else the problem will not be solved!

3. Restart Firefox. Now you can see all your bookmarks in your Google toolbar!

Monday, March 3, 2008

Installation of CentOS on a server with a SmartRAID V controller

We are going to reinstall Linux on an old server with a SmartRAID V controller. Since CentOS can be updated easily using 'yum', we decide to use CentOS 5.1. There are some difficulties in installation, but we can bypass them and accomplish it successfully.

The basic parameters of the old server:

  • 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz
  • 4G Memory
  • Adaptec (formerly DPT) SmartRAID V Controller
  • 6x 36704 MB SCSI disks
  • Intel Corporation 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller
  • ATAPI 52X CD-ROM drive
The main points of installation are described below:

Monday, January 7, 2008

MySQL live backup using replication

Assume that you have a website using MySQL as its database. You want to make a live backup of your database on another machine, so that if your host machine encounters a hardware failure, you can recover your web service ASAP. MySQL replication provides a simple way to do that.

First, you should prepare your backup machine:
  • it is 'closed' to your host machine, in the meaning that data transfer speed is fast between them.
  • it is installed MySQL, the major version should be the same as MySQL on the host machine, ie, both are MySQL 5.x.x, or both are MySQL 4.x.x.
Assume that your host machine's IP is 192.168.1.111, your backup machine's IP is 192.168.2.222.