Might should have typed this up sooner, but… a while back I did an article on the daylight savings changes with regards to Windows 98 and how timezone editor tzedit could be used to make sure these OS’s kept the correct time. Well, on the linux side of things there’s not a lot to the fix either. Depending on the age of the install you may have an update available that addresses your daylight savings change, but if not… here’s how to do it. wget ‘ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz’ – then tar -xzvf tzdata2007c.tar.gz……. then…
Category: Linux Tech Support
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Virtual Server on Apache to listen on an alternate port
In the last few days, I had to set up something a bit unusual with apache. Basically the goal was to have apache listen for connections on two different ports (the standard port 80 and an alternate port 85). The problem was that I wanted different content at each port. Port 85 was to be an .htaccess redirect for another domain (with some port forwarding magic at the firewall.) Port 80 was to remain an internal intranet page. So…. this was all done with vhosts (virtual hosts.)
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Clamav .90 build problems on Mandrake 10.0
As I’ve mentioned, there are a few older Mandrake (now Mandriva) systems that I maintain and one of the packages that I’m frequently rebuilding for those systems is clamantivirus. Well, 0.90 came out recently and on an attempted rebuild from the src. rpm that I acquired from ftp.neocat.org, I got this error message libtool: unrecognized option `–tag=CC’ in the rpm –rebuild process. The process bailed out fairly quickly.
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Sleuthkit – windows and linux file recovery
http://www.sleuthkit.org/ Sluethkit… is a collection of tools for forensic analysis of a system. Usually it’s something that would be done when you’ve had a suspected rootkit on the system and you boot to another operating system with sluethkit installed (maybe livecd/etc.) and want to try to analyze and hunt for traces of the rootkit. However you do have some similar procedures for forensic analysis that you would for the “I accidentally deleted a file” syndrome… For both situations you DON’T want to be running the live filesystem that’s affected.
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Big Ubuntu Linux news
This is something that really looks interesting. Recently Linspire announced their intent to open source the CNR (Click N Run) concept for installing software, launching a wiki based web site that would allow supported linux distributions to install software (open source or commercial) with as easy a process as possible (visit web site, browse, click). Well, today Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) and Linspire have announced how some of this will look and then some. For starters, Freespire and Linspire are going to be based upon Ubuntu in the future (instead of directly based on debian linux.) That is a fair enough shift. The other part of the news is that as of the release of Fiesty Fawn (The Ubuntu Linux release due in April), Ubuntu users will be able to access Click N Run. So what does this mean?
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Caching downloaded deb files with apt-cacher
It seems silly with multiple machines to download the same file multiple times. At some level it’s not THAT inconvenient. It really depends on your connection speed and the size of the files in question. For Ubuntu and other systems based on the .deb package format and apt-get there is a nice option for setting up proxy’ing to allow a single download of deb files for install on multiple machines. That option is called apt-cacher. There’s a good wrietup here on the setup of this cache -ing software.
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Offline web browsing script
In the US and Europe and many more developed parts of the world we take our internet connectivity these days for granted. (And some go into panic attacks when it’s not available…) In some parts of the world though internet connections are not as wide/broad and peak usage times can make for very slow viewing, or can interfere with other vital communications. Linux excels at SO many things and this is something we could use linux to help with…
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Building Deb packages from source….
Openvpn has been one of the tools of choice this week, so as I was tinkering on my ubuntu boxen…. I thought why don’t I install openvpn there as well for a little broader testing. So, I did, but was a bit disappointed to see that the version was not the most current. (Yes, they may have merged changes from the current version and left the version number at 2.0.6, but 2.0.9 is out and easy to build an rpm from source….. so….) I’ve compiled from source before, I’ve built RPM’s on Mandrake/Mandriva, but never a deb package.
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Good collection of linux commands ….
This is a good quick reference for some command line linux commands…. pixelbeat.org – linux command line tips. Nice reference. (of course you can also make use of man/apropos and -h to find out more….)
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Converting mpg to dv
One of the slickest video editing tools I’ve used in linux is kino. The only problem is that it’s geared towards dv files which comes straight from a camcorder (using the dv format.) Most of my video clips are in mpg format…. so there are ways to get it converted… here’s one such suggestion….
ffmpeg -i some.mpeg -s PAL -r PAL -ar 48000 -ac 2 out.dv
of course, you may want to adjust the format (PAL/NTSC) according to your situation.