Create a VPS instance on OpenVZ

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

Followings are commands to create a test VPS instance on OpenVZ.

vzctl create 101 --ostemplate centos-5-minimal
vzctl set 101 --hostname vz101.sudhaker.com --save
vzctl set 101 --ipadd 192.168.0.101 --save
vzctl set 101 --nameserver 192.168.0.1 --save
vzctl set 101 --onboot yes --save
vzctl start 101

Optional: To install common utilities inside VPS

vzyum 101 install findutils wget jwhois bind-utils -y

Optional: To install yum inside VPS

vzyum 101 install yum -y

Optional: To set bigger disk quota (4GB soft limit, 5GB hard limit)

vzctl set 101 --diskspace 4194304:5242880 --save
vzctl set 101 --diskinodes 80000:100000 --save

Install Firefox without adminstrator rights

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Source: WikiPedia

Mozilla Firefox (abbreviated officially as Fx, but also unofficially as FF) is a web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, managed by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox had about 15% of the recorded usage share of Web browsers as of January 2008 making Firefox the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide after Internet Explorer.Firefox uses the open-source Gecko layout engine, which implements some current Web standards plus a few features which are intended to anticipate likely additions to the standards.

Firefox includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and a search system that uses Google. Functions can be added through around 2,000 add-ons created by third party developers;[2] the most popular include NoScript (script blocker), FoxyTunes (controls music players), Adblock Plus (ad blocker), StumbleUpon (website discovery), DownThemAll! (download functions) and Web Developer (web tools).

Firefox runs on various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and many other Unix-like operating systems. Its current stable release is version 2.0.0.12, released on February 7, 2008. Firefox’s source code is free software, released under a tri-license GPL/LGPL/MPL.

No wonder why you want to use Firefox for your day to day browsing experience. But your network administrator has not given you required rights and you are unable to install this wonderful browser on your laptop/desktop. Pretty bad, huh!

Well, there is an easy answer to it without breaking any rules.

Browse to PortableApps and download Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition. Install it on to USB drive (or any local writable folder) and ENJOY!

This technique can be useful even if you have administrator rights. With Firefox your private information (like cookie, history, bookmarks, cache etc) are stored on the disk and exposes some risk. My suggestion will be to create a virtual encrypted disk using TrueCrypt and install Firefox PE into that. Now you can relax because your private informations are secured using some strong encryption algorithms.

Cheers,

Do not leak your million dollar idea unknowingly

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

Tom is discussing his next venture with his friend Sameer. They have done all the number crunching and are very excited about the opportunity. Everything is finalized and details are worked out. Right, they must be talking about an internet based idea (similar to youtube, orkut, facebook etc).

Next big thing is finding and reserving a perfect domain name for the operation. They started their favorite browser Firefox and jumped on to one of very popular registrar’s website. They started searching their name. They did like some of them but not very catchy. All of sudden someone popped the “perfect name” and got excited to find that it is still available. BINGO! They are happy but still not sure so did not reserve the domain name. They wanted to discuss more and decided to wait for few more days.

After 3 days when they were finally ready to register the domain :-) Guess what? It’s gone! They now see a web-spam there which is trying to sell everything from Viagra to “cheap flight tickets”.

This domain was not taken by anyone for years. What happened all of sudden? YOU LEAKED YOUR IDEA.

It is no longer a trade secret that domain-registrars sell their domain search history to “domain junkies” for a decent subscription fee. These junkies grab any good and catchy names immediately and try to re-sell it for bigger bucks. Many simply add them to their pool of domains engaged in pay-per-click based advertisement.

Moral of story is “never wait after finding your perfect domain, reserve it immediately”. If you still want to go with search and wait policy, do not use any registrar site to perform search queries. This can be also done using “whois” command that comes with most of Linux distributions.

A second piece of advice is “make sure you also reserve any similar domains names”. As an example, if you are planning to launch next cool hot deal site http://x1deals.com ; you should also reserve http://x1deal.com ; There can be a big loss due to typo-traffic (traffic generated by typing mistakes) and junkies are hunting for such opportunities.

Hope this helps in saving your next “million dollar idea” :-)

Cheers,
Sudhaker

Powerful Yum (Yellow dog Updater, Modified)

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

Source: WikiPedia

The Yellow dog Updater, Modified (YUM) is a free software/open source command line package management utility for RPM-compatible Linux operating systems. It was developed by Seth Vidal and a group of volunteer programmers, and is currently maintained as part of Duke University’s Linux@DUKE project. Though yum is a command line utility, several other tools provide graphical user interfaces to yum, among them pup, pirut, and yumex. Seth Vidal now works for Red Hat and a number of other Red Hat programmers are involved in the development of yum.

Yum Quickstart

To update system

# yum update

To install package

# yum install pkgname

To un-install package

# yum remove pkgname

To clean yum cache

# yum clean all

To list all package name

# yum list

To search by package name

# yum list pkgname

To search package containing a given file

# yum provides filename
ex: yum provides whois
out: jwhois

To list all software group

# yum grouplist

To install a software group

# yum groupinstall “groupname”
ex: yum groupinstall “Development Tools”

To update a software group

# yum groupupdate “groupname”
ex: yum groupupdate “Development Tools”

Google Sites makes Google Apps platform more complete

Monday, March 10th, 2008

I am using “Google Apps” for a long time to host email for my domains. It is not very complex to setup and works great (powered by gmail - wow)! I don’t have to worry about my mails being delivered to spam-folder or being rejected because my shared host IP was misused by other folks. “Google Apps” has a friendly limit of 500 emails per day, which is pretty decent for a normal usage.

The initial web builder was pretty basic and barely enough for “Hello world” or “Under construction”.

Things has become even better with “Google Sites” release, I’m playing with this new google-toy and will update this article very soon with my findings.

Cheers,