The Ledge of Know

Setting up the Drupal Install class

Submitted by lishevita on Thu, 02/07/2013 - 03:40

Tonight I'm teaching a class in which all the students will be able to log into my server, create a database, download Drupal 7, install the site, and then go and look at the apache logs to see what they've done. The class is aimed at newbies, and I could just give everyone an account with full sudoers privileges on my server and hope that no one does anything nasty, but I'm not so dumb as to think that a clever student won't get bored and start poking around at other things.

So, how am I going to do this and keep everything safe for my own websites, and those of my clients, that sit on that server? Essentially, I have built sandboxes for the students to play in.

User accounts
First off, I created users for each of the students using a format that identifies them as students of this class. I'm not bothering with their names at all, actually. Just giving them usernames like "student1", "student2", etc.

Each account has a home directory at the usual place (eg /home/student1) plus two more directories underneath that: web and log.

An Ubuntu 10.4 LTS server on Openhosting

Submitted by lishevita on Fri, 04/06/2012 - 01:48

I'm in the process of upgrading my server for fun and for profit, as they say. I was on an ancient Fedora 4 system and finally I reached a point where I couldn't upgrade some of my software to work on the system at all without compiling a bunch of other requirements by hand, too. I've been with Open Hosting for a long time now. For years now, they've had a cloud service that fits my needs in pretty much the same way as their old VPS servers did, only with new and improved cloudiness. I've never been too convinced that I needed to move, but now I guess I'm gonna. Sooooo... here I go, into the jaws of the abyss.

Saving myself from Nookish disaster

Submitted by lishevita on Tue, 02/22/2011 - 21:05

To do a hard reset, turn off your NookColor. Then, hold down the Home Nook button and then press the power button at the same time until your machine powers back up and gives you a choice to reset your nook. Power button will cancel it and the Nook home button at the bottom will continue with the reset. Confirm it and it will take a couple minutes and your machine will be back to square one.

edited from: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=9568755&postcount=4

That reset will clean out all your data, but it will not fix a messed up operating system.

Network Problems with KDE

Submitted by lishevita on Sun, 09/05/2010 - 09:17

Every so often, for no apparent reason, KDE kills the network manager. After rebooting or switching users, suddenly the network manager icon says that the network is "unmanaged" and if you try to right click, it tells you that network manager is disabled. I have read that this same thing can happen if you have a failed sleep or hibernation mode.

Creating a new partition on a hard drive with Linux

Submitted by lishevita on Thu, 08/13/2009 - 12:04

I have been having troubles since I started doing development for embedded software with the amount of available space in my /opt directory. You see, normally, you put all of your cross-compilers and software development kits (sdk's) underneath the /opt directory. Unfortunately, when I set up my laptop and partitioned the hard drive, I didn't set /opt into its own partition and so it was sitting in the root (/) partition.

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