There's an exciting world out there, and I want to conquer it.

From: http://www.jonlee.ca/how-to-automate-your-ssh-login-with-putty/

As many web developers can attest to, logging into your server through SSH (Secure Shell) is one of the more common day-to-day tasks (you can even use it as a secure tunnel for your traffic). It only makes sense to automate this process which in turn can save many many keystrokes.

This how-to is written with PuTTY and Windows in mind and requires several other tools that are available from PuTTY’s website. So from their download page, make sure you have these files:

• PuTTY (putty.exe)
• PuTTYgen (puttygen.exe)

Then to automate SSH login, do the following:

1. Run PuTTYgen.
2. Select SSH-2 DSA as the Type of Key to generate.
3. Click generate and move your mouse around to generate randomness.
4. Click “Save Private Key” and save it somewhere on your computer.
5. Copy the entire content inside the box to your clipboard (this is your generated public key).
6. Login to your SSH server.
7. Create the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys containing the generated public key(from step 3) on a single line.
8. Make this file readable (chmod 755).
9. Then open up PuTTY and navigate to Connection->Data and fill in the auto-login username.
10. Navigate to Connection->SSH->Auth and under Private-key, browse to the file you had saved earlier on your computer.

That’s it! Now you can try logging in to your SSH server and it should login automatically. If it works, make sure you save your session so you don’t have to repeat these steps every time!

Hopefully these steps work for everyone! Let me know if there are any problems.

As mentioned previously, I’m reusing a Dell Dimension E521 to run my media server in CentOS 5.5.  The funny thing is that I couldn’t start up the system because it would hang at “Starting udev”.  I looked at the boot sequence and noticed that it was trying to initialize peripheral drivers.  So, I went ahead and started disabling peripherals from the BIOS.  The sound card did the trick.

I’m installing CentOS 5.5 on an old Dell E521 in the hopes to use it for my new media server.  The first time I booted to the CD, I was presented with the normal Disc Boot Install options of running it graphical or text.  I chose graphical, and the system halts at a line that says: “Enabling HT MSI Mapping”.  I waited 5 minutes and there was no movement, so I restarted the system and was back at the Disc Boot Install screen.  From here, I decided to type in “linux noapic” and the install has gone through.  Just a little tip!

I’ve been using Ubuntu 9.10 on my Lenovo Thinkpad T60p for a while and decided that I should update my OS to Ubuntu 10.04 to keep up with the kiddies.  My setup is having a Dell monitor attached to my Lenovo where I usually do most of my work.  After ~2-3 hours of updating packages, I was finally prompted to restart my system.  Once the 10.04 desktop came online, I noticed that there were a ton of squiggly rows on my secondary monitor which signalled a bad video output.

I decided to do a quick google search for “Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade squiggly monitor”.  This lead me to this forum post: http://www.uluga.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1466072

Several forum posters reiterated what the OP was mentioning and finally, someone had a solution:

“create file /etc/modprobe.d/radeon.conf with contents “options radeon new_pll=0 modeset=0″ and reboot.”

Boom, I did that and all is good now.  If you want to follow this bug, here is a link: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/linux/+bug/541501

-K

I’ve been really wanting to convert the file type of my .cbr and create some php pages with them to view from anywhere. The first step I’m covering is how to convert the files into a compression format that I can work with.  First of all, .CBR and .CBZ files are .RAR and .ZIP, respectively.

So, starting with CBR:

for file in *.cbr ; do cp $file `echo $file | sed ‘s/\(.*\.\)cbr/\1rar/’` ; done

CBZ:

for file in *.cbz ; do cp $file `echo $file | sed ‘s/\(.*\.\)cbz/\1zip/’` ; done

Next time, I’ll write this in python.  Just for fun.

No!  If you got an response from someone claiming to be the Craigslist CEO for an ad you posted on craigslist do not believe it!  The name of the CEO is actually Jim Buckmaster.  Be careful, though, as scammers can still change their Contact Name and visible email address.

Here is the email I got from a Gerald Darr who was using the email chingi797979mu@hotmail.com

Attention Craigslist User,

My name is Gerald Darr, Chief executive officer of Craigslist. We have recently partnered up with The apple company for a one-time promotional event today, we are giving away free Apple iPads to randomly selected folks who have published an ad on C-list. You have been chosen as one of our latest winners for today. We randomly choose numbers to match up with ads on Cl and your ad matched with our latest drawing.

We have partnered up with Apple to advertise their most popular product yet, the Apple iPad. Once again, we are operating this campaign for one-day only. All you need to do is CLICK HERE to go to our website made for this promotion and enter your email to get yours for free. Simply make sure you enter your email so we can locate our records to ensure that we have reserved one for you. That is it!

Congratulations on winning a free Apple iPad (valued at $800). In case you have any question or concerns, feel free to email me back. However, you need to claim your free iPad first to ensure one will be set-aside for you before the deadline ends. We do understand that you may well not receive this email until after the deadline, but, we suggest you check out the website and enter your email to see if we still have got yours on hold, which we often-times do because others have not claimed theirs in time.

Gerald Darr
CEO, Craigslist

Edited on 1/5/11:

Thanks everyone for reporting your information in the comments.  Here is the information gathered.

Names used by these scammers:

Gerald Darr
Cliff Halliday – reported by Tiffny
Curtis Timothy – reported by ari
Curtis Smith – reported by Janet
Herman Fischer – reported on the consumerist
Mark Osborn – reported on akronwebdevelopment

This past week, a customer asked this question after we let them know that we ran our servers in Amazon EC2.  Of course, I was stumped, since the only thing I know about decommissioning servers at the moment is just formatting them 5 times, and/or killing virtual instances.  This was definitely a question I had not thought of.  Well, I decided to create a post on the AWS Forums to ask the great AWS community if they had the answer.

Thanks to the moto@AWS, we had our answer by the next day.  moto@AWS pointed me over to the AWS Security Whitepaper.  Here is the answer:

Storage Device Decommissioning

When a storage device has reached the end of its useful life, AWS procedures include a decommissioning process that designed to ensure customer data are not exposed to unauthorized individuals.  AWS uses the techniques detailed in DoD 5220.22-M (“National  Industrial Security Program Operating Manual “) or NIST 800-88 (“Guidelines for Media Sanitization”) to destroy data as part of the decommissioning process.  If a hardware device is unable to be decommissioned using these procedures the device will be degaussed  or  physically destroyed in accordance with industry-standard practices.

I hope that helps if you were wondering, too!

For the past year or so, I’ve taken a role to try to upkeep the maintenance of our SQL Server Database Systems.  One of the problems we were having was with defragging indices and updating statistics while international customers were accessing the systems.

I started working to find a Smart Defragging solution that would not Defrag every index on every system.

I was able to use SQLFool’s  Automated Index Defrag Solution with some small modifications, including increasing the page_count criteria from 8 to 1000 and adding a variable for fillfactor.

http://sqlfool.com/2009/03/automated-index-defrag-script/