4J

If you are still a MS Office 2000 user, you might have been frustrated when people send you Office 2007 files, since you can not open these - unless of course you install the compatibility pack...

I tested on MS Windows 2000 Professional with Service Pack 4, and all is working as advertised.

Here is an interesting project that has drawn a lot of attention yesterday...

"The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. Data input is primarily through an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. It runs on linux and Firefox. It would be great to have it be built entirely on open source hardware, but including Skype for VOIP and video calls may be a nice touch..."

Some more resources:

• http://www.techcrunch.com/
• http://www.techcrunchit.com/

It would be nice to follow the progress on this project.

Sometimes I can just not belief the brilliant quotes people come up with...

Take this one from a recent Slashdot article...

"And anyone who likes to bitch about MySQL deserves an Oracle bill... Or they could use Postgres..."

:-)

I was searching around for a solution on how to authenticate users via OpenSSH on a Linux system, if the users live in a DB. It appears that not a lot of information is available on the topic on some of the more obvious search terms, but after some digging the solution was actually straight forward.

Of course I'm running Debian stable, so the following solution should work for all Debian based systems. However - try at your own risk :-)

Step 1: Install all dependencies:

# apt-get install mysql-server libpam-mysql libnss-mysql-bg

Step 2 : Prep your database:

# mysql -uroot < /usr/share/doc/libnss-mysql-bg/examples/linux/sample_database.sql

Step 3 : Modify your /etc/nsswitch.conf file by replacing the following lines:

#passwd:         compat
#group:          compat
#shadow:         compat
passwd:         files mysql
group:          files mysql
shadow:         files mysql

Step 4 : Restart SSH and TEST

Also refer to the libnss-mysql-bg documentation online.

Labels: authentication, linux, mysql

I recently had a question on c.o.l.s about real time process monitoring. Although there is still refinement required, I have my fav solution here:

#!/bin/bash

PROG=$1
N=0
while :
do
       if [ ! -x $PROG ]; then
               echo "$PROG is not executable" >&2
               exit 1
       fi
       if [ $N -lt $SECONDS ]; then
               N=$SECONDS
       elif [ $(($N - 5)) -ge $SECONDS ]; then
               echo "$PROG restarting too frequently -- sleeping" >&2
               sleep 10
       fi
       N=$(($N+1))
       $PROG
done