Day in my life

2012

Aug 5

Google Music from UK

I recently bought Nexus7 from Google Play. It’s an amazing tablet for the price. If you haven’t seen it yet, I would highly recommend you to give it a try. Google sell it as one stop device for all the content they offer online. But one thing thats missing for us on the other side of atlantic is the ability to use Google Music which is at the moment available only in US.

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Jun 18

SSH session gets clogged/stuck

This happens to me all the time, when I’m connected over VPN or sometimes from outside network. If you are new to *nix world and using a headless terminal immediate reaction is ‘shit my system hung’. You wont notice this until you execute commands like tail, head, ls, emacs, vi etc… any if it trying to load a larger data set. Problem is not with the box you are on or the …

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May 25

MacBook Pro and Debian key-map

I recently had to install Debian on VMware Fusion (a product similar to VirtualBox) for the work I was doing. Everything went smooth until I started using the command line. My favourite key on *nix world ‘THE PIPE’ wasn’t mapped correctly. It easy to correct and this is how its done. Install console-data package and configure the key-map with the right type. As I use MacBook Pro …

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May 24

GeoIP mod and Named Virtual Hosts

Problem: I have a multi-site Apache web-server, hosting localised copies of the site for many countries. I would like customer visiting the site to be automatically re-directed to their country specific site. Something similar to google, where if you visit www.google.com you will be re-directed to country specific site in my case it is www.google.co.uk Solution: As the heading says, I will be …

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Apr 16

Managing mixed Debian packages using APT pinning

I use Debian “stable” as my primary Linux OS. Anyone using Debian stable would know getting the latest and greatest package you really need is bit of a nuisance. If you are in this situation i.e. looking to upgrade just a package from a different repository here is how to do it. APT pinning is a way to have a mixed package system (i.e. packages installed from different repositories) …

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2011

Aug 27

Postfix smarthost with SMTP authentication

Problem I’m facing is that emails from my Debian box is not sent outside of my local network. Glad I found the solution and here is how to go about it. This solution applies to following issues Setting up a smarthost to send emails using a authenticated SMTP servers (like Gmail, AOL & Yahoo!) You have a *nix box and want to backup status emails to be sent external (outside your LAN) …

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Jul 20

FTP Server on Mac OSX Lion

I was one of the earlier birds to adopt Mac OSX Lion. Bad luck after upgrade, FTP service stopped working, as I need it for my current work found this way to enable and run it. Create a “Sharing Only” account Go to “Advanced Options… " and edit Login Shell from “/bin/false” to “/bin/bash” and Home directory to the location of your choice …

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2010

Jul 24

Howto Netboot SunBlade 100

I recently bought sun blade 100 of eBay for throw away price, as I was curious to explore SPARC based systems as I more used to x86. To put in short, I was new to this architecture; here are some of the difference that I found rather interesting or boring however you choose to look at BIOS == OpenBoot OpenBoot is equivalent to BIOS, and it’s far away from those familiar curser based …

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Jul 8

How to upgrade HTC Hero to Android 2.1 (Orange UK contract phone)

Like most of HTC Hero users, I was keen on getting an update on my Orange HTC Hero phone. But was disappointed when I came to know it won’t be released until Orange releases their version of the firmware. I have spent days looking at breaking this, below is the way I achieved it Call orange on 150 and ask your phone to be unlocked, I was in 7th month of my contract and agreed to pay £20 …

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