How-To Geek

Note that this is Not very secure, and should only be used for a local development box where you don’t feel like setting up individual permissions, but still need to connect from other machines.

If you are a command line junkie like me, and have been testing out Windows 7 or Vista… one of the first things you’ll notice is that there is no way to run a command from the run box in “Administrator” mode. Until now.

If you want to share files between your Ubuntu and Windows computers, your best option is to use Samba file sharing.

If you are using the linked clone feature in VMware (and you should be), then you might be annoyed that you can’t move the base virtual machine around without breaking all of the linked clones.

Installing MySQL 5 Server on Ubuntu is a quick and easy process. It almost feels like it should be more difficult.

Installing MySQL 4.1 Server on Ubuntu is a quick and easy process. It almost feels like it should be more difficult.

Ubuntu Server is like any Linux variety, and has full multi-user capabilities, and a common task on any server is adding users.

Screen is like a window manager for your console. It will allow you to keep multiple terminal sessions running and easily switch between them. It also protects you from disconnection, because the screen session doesn’t end when you get disconnected.

Connecting to a server across the internet is much more secure using SSH. There is a way that you can mount a folder on a remove server using the SSHFS service.

If you install Ubuntu from a cd-rom, when you try to use apt-get to install new software it will prompt you for the cdrom every time. Kinda frustrating!

Ubuntu Server has the native ability to run multiple console sessions from the server console prompt. If you are working on the actual console and are waiting for a long running command to finish, there’s no reason why you have to sit and wait… you can just open another console and keep working.

When you are on the Ubuntu server console, you will invariably run commands that scroll past too far to see them on the screen. Since you aren’t in X, there’s no scrollbar for you to use to look back.

If the Ubuntu Server installer has set your server to use DHCP, you will want to change it to a static IP address so that people can actually use it.

Solaris is usually used as a server operating system. Because of this, you want to make sure that you shut the system down as gracefully as possible to ensure there isn’t any data loss.

If you are running an Ubuntu guest in VMware, you may have found that you cannot switch into the Console mode using Ctrl+Alt+F1. If you try, you will encounter a blank screen and won’t see a login prompt at all.

If you are running a virtual machine on your computer, you may want to access that virtual machine from another computer. Let’s use an example: Say you have an Ubuntu virtual machine with Apache running on port 80, and you want to show other people on your network to access the website you are hosting.

VMware Workstation includes a network utility that allows you to manage the virtual networks. Typically virtual machines will use NAT (Network Address Translation) to automatically assign a virtual IP address that hides behind your host address, but the default range of 192.168.200.0/24 may not work for everybody.

Ubuntu has an easy way to keep your system synchronized with the internet time servers. This is especially useful on older computers that may have problems with the system clock losing time.

VMware has a set of shortcut keys or hotkeys for quick control over your virtual machine. This is a list of them.

Setting the default route on Solaris is easy. If you are trying to just set the route temporarily you can use the route command:

If you have installed multiple versions of an application into your system, you may wonder which command is being run from the command line when you launch it. This is especially useful to figure out the path of php when running on a shared server, as many shared servers have both php4 and php5 installed.

Setting the system date and time is fairly easy on solaris. Because you can easily set the time from the command line, you can set the time on a server remotely.

It’s really easy to figure out how long a system has been up and running on solaris. Absurdly easy.

Solaris includes a command line utility to get basic current system configuration information and output it to the console.

Getting the exact version of the Solaris operating system running on your system can be useful, especially if you are connected to a remote server.