Linux: Changing UIDs and GIDs for a user

Just had to do a quick switch over of UID [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_identifier_(Unix)] and GIDs [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_identifier_(Unix)] for a couple of users. I'm using Puppet [http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet] to manage server configurations and it'…

SSH SOCKS Proxy

I first saw this tip a while back on the Ubuntu Blog [http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/12/08/ssh-tunnel-socks-proxy-forwarding-secure-browsing/] and it's a useful way of using SSH to set-up private web surfing. Not to mention I've come across several public wifi installs that leave port…

Dedicated server recovery mode

This is really just a note for my future reference, but these details should pretty much apply to most linux servers that have a recovery mode. As is the case with several suppliers the instructions for how to mount the hard disk to fix problems are often left out or…

Ubuntu Edgy under Parallels Desktop for mac

As Ubuntu [http://www.ubuntu.com/] Edgy has not long been released I thought I would see how it runs on parallels [http://www.parallels.com/] desktop for mac. I downloaded the standard .iso and followed pretty much the same instructions as when I installed Ubuntu Dapper [https://muffinresearch.co.…

Keeping ssh connections alive

Picture this; you come back from lunch at "My Old Dutch Pancake house" and every one of your ssh connections has been closed due to lack of activity. It's reasonable that the server you are connected to (or the hardware you are connecting through) closes connections…

Ubuntu Breezy Badger install horrors

I decided to check out Breezy Badger the latest version of Ubuntu linux [http://www.ubuntulinux.org]. First I thought I would try the in place upgrade from Hoary to Breezy by altering /etc/apt/sources.list to the Breezy repositories and then running sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get…

fscked up beyond all recognition

Strange things were afoot this evening when I switched on my laptop. Ubuntu [http://www.ubuntulinux.org/] did the intermittant "HAL could not be initialized" error first of all. A quick reboot and everything seemed ok for a couple of minutes. The update indicator was red so I…