Mind Circus

In a business environment, people who switch from Microsoft Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird often miss having the calendar/task features in Outlook. Fortunately, you can add Calendar and Task functionality to Thunderbird with the Lightning add-on.

• Go to the Lightning download page
• Right click on the download link and Save As… (If you don’t, Firefox might try to install the add-on itself.)
• Open up Thunderbird and click on Tools > Add-ons
• Install the Lightning file you just downloaded
• Once you’re done, restart Thunderbird, and start using your new Calendar feature!
• If you need Holiday calendars, you can get them here

A few of our websites receive high traffic and, as a result, the apache log files grow very large, very quickly. By default, Plesk rotates logs every 2,025,139 KB (2GB). This is way too large for a virtualised server such as ours, which provides 10GB of precious disk space.

To combat this, I set up a regular log rotation in Plesk like so:

• Log in to Plesk.
• Domains > yourdomain.com > Log Manager > Log Rotation
• Choose the log rotation condition.

I choose monthly, but if you’re rapidly running out of disk space you might want to set a shorter time span, or set a low size limit. Don’t forget to enable compression to save on disk space!

To install smartctl (and smartd with it):

sudo apt-get install smartmontools

Why would you want SmartMonTools?

The smartmontools package contains two utility programs (smartctl and smartd) to control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (S.M.A.R.T.) built into most modern ATA and SCSI hard disks. It is derived from the smartsuite package, and includes support for ATA/ATAPI-5 disks. It should run on any modern Linux system.

Ubuntu smartmontools page

Very handy; especially as the OS drive just died in the RAID5 box I’m now taking extra precautions!

Earlier today I upgraded from Ubuntu Server 6.10 to 7.04 from the command line in just a few simple steps:

Make sure we have the latest updates

Check for updates:

sudo apt-get update

Install any updates:

sudo apt-get upgrade

Now prepare to upgrade to 7.04

Install the latest upgrade manager:

sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

Run the upgrade tool for servers:

sudo do-release-upgrade

And everything went smoothly. The only issue I had, was that I had to install inetd again to get SWAT working (sudo apt-get install netkit-inetd). Everytime I use Ubuntu I fall more and more in love with it

Here’s how I got Kismet running on Ubuntu on my Asus W3V laptop. Read the rest of this entry »