Anyone who has expanded a drive in Linux knows it’s a two step process. First, the partition table must be altered to include the new space. Second, the file system must be expanded to make use of the new space within its partition. It’s a fairly straightforward process I’ve done many times, but I ran into an interesting issue when attempting this within VMWare.
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For those of you who use Reddit, if you’ve ever wanted to abandon one account for another, or just copy your subscriptions between your primary and your throw-away account, I’ve written a Python script called copy_reddit. I uses the praw API to copy both subscriptions and friends lists.
Typically, internal DNS entries for websites must be different than the external addresses due to NAT issues. If your organization has a lot of web sites that exist on either a single server or a set of identical servers behind a load balancer, it’s best practice to have all DNS entries be CNAME records to either that particular server’s DNS entry or the entry for a server farm’s load balancer. Recently I was involved in a mass server migration where actual IPs were used throughout a Windows DNS server. The following is a Power Shell script designed to rename DNS records in mass on an Active Directory Domain Controller.
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Using public/private key pairs to digitally sign text is a common way to validate the authenticity of a piece of data. However dealing with RSA keys, certificates and signatures can often be a bit overwhelming, especially between two different languages or platforms. This tutorial will demonstrate how to use RSA keys to generate and validation signatures in both Java and Python 2.
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It’s been a little over a year since I lasted updated RearViewMirror. The new version contains the following features:
RearViewMirror is an application developed to be a fancy cubical mirror. It can support multiple camera and MJPEG sources and pop up a window when motion is detected.
Up until Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0, the MacOS version would show you the number of new messages in Thunderbird since you last clicked on the window, in the dock icon. Now by default it shows you the total number of unread messages, which is pretty useless if there are just a ton of messages in your bulk mail accounts you have no intention of reading. A bug report was filed for this issue, in order to restore the old functionality (or at least make it optional). Although the bug was closed and the option was added to Thunderbird, it’s not in the main user interface. It must be set using the advanced configuration editor.
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It’s been nearly two and a half years since the last release of RearViewMirror. There aren’t any new features on this release, just several updates to help improve speed and to check for future releases.
For those who have never used it before, RearViewMirror is an over-glorified version of those mirrors office workers attach to their monitors so people don’t sneak up on them. Instead of using a mirror though, it uses a webcam and allows users to share their webcams with others around the office.
Shibboleth’s IDP can store audit logs that indicate when people authenticate against the IDP web application. These files are written to disk by default using the settings in the logging.xml configuration file. This tutorial will show how audit logs can be placed in a MS SQL database and also include the IP addresses of the connecting clients.
At home I use the latest version openSUSE with network updates and patches, but in a corporate environment a server administrator or developer often finds him or herself having to deal with older enterprise versions of products. I was surprised to discover that SUSE Enterprise Server 10 SP2 did not contain a subversion package (or anything above python 2.4.2, but that’s for another post). I found several conflicting and outdated instructions, so here is a current version of how to install subversion 1.6 on SUSE Enterprise Server 10.
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Many institutions are using Shibboleth for unified single sign-on between both internal and external web application. Shibboleth is an authentication engine and, as its backend, it can use a variety of sources for authentication including LDAP, a SQL database or other resources. It simply deals with authentication, so more advanced configurations, such as systems which allow grace logins after a password expires, may require more customization. The following tutorial shows how to use Shibboleth with a Novell e-Directory server that allows grace logins after a user’s password has expired.
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