How-To Geek

If you are new to the world of Linux, you probably unzip your tar.gz files first, and then extract them from the tar file… at least, if you are even bothering to use the command prompt at all. It’s easy to gunzip or even bunzip2 the files with a simple command-line switch.

Creating a new user on Ubuntu server is easy—just sudo your shell to root, or run the following command:

Windows Server 2008 R2 is the latest version of Microsoft’s Windows Server operating system. Microsoft tries their best to make each task as simple as possible, and Server 2008 R2 is a shining example of that goal in action. We’re going to take you through a basic install and show you just how easy it is.

Finally another Friday has arrived and you’re sick of dealing with your IT department because they never fix anything. Today take a look at Server Quest II which is a fun game from Microsoft’s TechNet that puts you in the roll of an IT professional.

Want an easy way to share documents, photos, and other files with people over the web?  Now you can with Opera Unite which is a new service to be included with the Opera 10 browser.  Today we take a look the new Unite feature and what it has to offer.

This weekend we finally upgraded the HTG backend system to WordPress 2.8 from an ancient 2.0 installation, thanks to the hard work of Shawn, our new programming wizard.

This article was written by MetroTek Geek from Metrotek Solutions, a provider of Computer Help in the DC area.

One of the most talked about annoyances in Windows Vista are the UAC prompts that constantly pop up when you are trying to make system changes. It’s especially irritating when you often need to run a particular tool that requires administrator mode in order to run. Thankfully there’s a simple hack that you can do to create an administrator mode shortcut that doesn’t prompt for UAC.

One of the reasons we started the How-To Geek Blogs was to give bloggers the chance to focus on other topics that we don’t cover as regularly here. If you are interested in Windows Home Server, our very own Gmedia blog has been running a series covering the addition of a new server in his already impressive home media setup.

Editor’s Note: Online-Tech-Tips is a great site covering a wide variety of topics, and is well worth subscribing to.

Have you ever tried to unzip a file to the Program Files directory in Windows 7 or Vista? You’ll get all sorts of permission denied errors, and generally be unsuccessful. So how do we open up the zipfile as an administrator? For that matter, how do you open any file as administrator?

As regular readers know well, I’m a huge fan of using AutoHotkey  to automate my entire computing experience… but in Windows 7 and Vista there’s a serious limitation since you can’t run a script as Administrator by default. This means that your hotkeys can’t interact with windows running in Admin mode… so how do we get around this?

If you have multiple users on your network domain and want to give a user administrator rights you need to add them to the Admin user group. The process is relatively simple, here is how.

If you have an issue with your system clock losing time, you’ve probably had to go and re-sync your clock with the internet time servers. The problem is that there are just way too many clicks required to get to the right screen, so the command line is much simpler.

Many people familiar with prior versions of Windows are curious what happened to the built-in Administrator account that was always created by default. Does this account still exist, and how can you access it?

In the blogging world, it’s important to post articles at roughly the same time each day so you can be consistent for your readers. So how do we accomplish this in WordPress?

If you are using WordPress as the platform behind your blog or website you probably know that there have been a lot of security holes, not just in the software itself, but also in the plugins as well. In light of these problems, we’ll look at how to prevent hacking attempts by locking down your administration folder.

While troubleshooting a programming problem today I noticed that you can’t use a LIKE search for string columns containing special characters like % or _ without using a special syntax. Figuring out the problem took only a few minutes, but remembering syntax is always easier if you write about it.

Has this ever happened to you? I created a new virtual machine running Ubuntu on my VMware server before I left home, but forgot to install the ssh server… so I couldn’t get to that machine at all from my remote location. Rather than driving back home I decided to find a solution.

One of the biggest security holes you could open on your server is to allow directly logging in as root through ssh, because any cracker can attempt to brute force your root password and potentially get access to your system if they can figure out your password.

When you are working on increasing the speed of your website, a very important piece is making sure you get every last drop of performance out of your database server. Unfortunately, for most of us that aren’t normally database administrators this can be a difficult proposition.

In IT having good backups is extremely essential.  Your worst nightmare is when an end user deletes the company yearly accounting reports.  If your business is using Server 2003 getting those files back in a hurry is extremely easy with the Shadow Copy feature.  This feature was added to Server 2003 for just such instances.  In fact, by educating the end users they can retrieve the files without having to involve IT.

This tip won’t be useful for everybody, but for anybody with a dedicated server you’ll probably be familiar with this error message that gets sent weekly from the security scanner on your server.

One of the best ways to speed up your web application is to enable query caching in your database, which caches commonly used SQL queries in memory for virtually instant access by the next page that makes the same request.

I’m the type of geek that has an SSH client open at all times, connected to my most frequently used servers so that I have instant access for monitoring and anything else. As such, it irritates me greatly when I get disconnected, so I’m sharing a few methods for keeping your session alive.