Winnipeg Experts

I was banging my head on this for a quite a while.

* Edit the following line in your site-specific apache config file:
* (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/<site_name>) <– This is the conf file. It has no extension.
AddType application/x-httpd-php .html
* sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 (start/stop/restart)  <— this restarts apache.

I’ve normally been a big Red Hat linux guy. I found most of the other distros like SuSe put items in places you’d never think of looking and their patch and software management were never really all that good. I have been playing around with ubuntu and I’ve been finding their distro to be really Enterprise ready. Always looking for new ways of making my life easier I started using SSH a while back. SSH stands for Secure Shell. Basically when you use a program like putty you can actually bring up the command line from a remote workstation. What I didn’t like about Putty is the commands you had to do in order to copy files to and from your machine. I recently found out a program I’ve used for years “FileZilla” will actually allow me to connect using SSH. Ubuntu has made setting up a SSH server so easy it’s almost sickening.

Here are the steps:

1. Go to your ubuntu server and type “sudo apt-get install ssh”. Because Ubuntu does not use the user root to avoid certain security issues you must use “sudo”. sudo lets you become root for a very short time. The apt-get part is Ubuntu’s software and patch management program. “install” should make sense to anyone who knows english. “ssh” basically tells apt-get which program you want to install. Because ubuntu is setup to use repositories on the Internet it will automatically download all the items you need. It installs them and then starts any daemons(ie services) if needed.
2. Go to your Windows machine and download and install “Putty”. Make sure that Putty points to the proper IP address of the ubuntu SSH server. This will give you remote access to the server through a remote terminal.
3. Download FileZilla. Setup a new site making sure that you select the SSH option instead of FTP.

Voila! You now have a SSH server up and running. You can copy files back and forth in an encrypted manor!

You can read the whole transcript of how the deal between Microsoft and Novell went. Here is the transcript.

This is going to be a very interesting story to follow and see how it plays out. This is a very well written article from ZDNet.

Click here for the story… 

Linux seems so overwhelming that sometimes we don’t realize some things might be easier then they seem. The best way (in my opinion) to update linux (I am using Fedora 5) is by opening up a terminal prompt and typing:

yum -y update

Yup that is all! It will look at all the repositories that are setup on the machine and find any new updates as well as removed any old ones that might be kicking around in the cache.

On a side note you can install almost anything for linux by typing:

yum -y install “application”

** Note - Sometimes this name is something you’d expect and sometimes you need to write out the FULL name like:

yum -y install compat-libstdc++-33

I know when I was starting out with Linux i could never find out this piece of info. The command “su” in linux means either “Switch User” or “Super User”. The later being used more often. When I tried running commands like “ifconfig” (Linux’s version of Windows “ipconig”) I would get error messages. Y? The reason for this was: The path being used was for the currently logged on user! If You type in “su -” at the terminal prompt you will switch the user and gain access to their path info as well! knowing this now I can look back at things and laugh as I wondered why “ifconfig” would work when completely logged on as “root” and not when switched to from another user account