TheLedgeOfKnow

Collecting mail from external servers on Zimbra

Submitted by lishevita on Mon, 02/11/2008 - 11:02
Do you have Zimbra users who want to pull mail into their Zimbra accounts without having to press "Get Mail" or "Get External Mail" every time? It's easy.

In the Zimbra server's command line, running as user zimbra, try:
zmprov gc default | grep zimbraDataSourcePollingInterval
If you get a response, the number it gives you is the number of seconds between checks of the external mail boxes. If you don't get any response, that means that the zibraDataSourcePollingInterval isn't set yet. Set it like this:

Locking Down Root

Submitted by lishevita on Thu, 02/07/2008 - 08:59
Having an active root user is generally not a good thing. If the machine is used by lots of people and several individuals do superuser tasks under the root user, you have no way to track who did what in the event that someone decides to get evil. And of course, hackers like to get root access, because it lets the do anything that they want. You don't want that, so let's lock root up.

Creating A New *Nix User

Submitted by lishevita on Thu, 02/07/2008 - 07:41
The easiest way to create a new user on the command line is:
sudo useradd george
sudo passwd george

But that's not always enough. Let's say, for instance that you want people to change their password the first time that they log in and then again every three weeks. Let's set georgette up like that:
sudo useradd georgette -c "Georgette Userina"
sudo passwd georgette
(give her a throw-away password)
sudo passwd -e -x 21 georgette


Here's what we just did:

Improving Web Research

Submitted by lishevita on Thu, 01/10/2008 - 09:31
This isn't my usual level of geeky tips, but something that comes up a lot for anyone who has to learn on the Web all the time. "Back in the day" when I was in college, I read books and highlighted them as I went, or else I'd take copious notes on 3x5 cards. Then, when it was time to review or to gather the information to put into a report, I'd have easy access to everything. On the Web it's a bit different.

Give a user a new group

Submitted by lishevita on Sun, 12/09/2007 - 10:49
So, you have someone who just got a new position within your organization and now s/he needs additional permissions on the server. It makes more sense to give people permissions based on their position rather than on their user. That way, you can give and take exactly the right group of permissions for the position based on a well thought out policy rather than a spur of the moment, "I think they need x to get things done today," sort of thing.

Turning rpm's into deb's

Submitted by lishevita on Mon, 11/19/2007 - 10:56
The phone system we use at work right now has a program called MXIE that handles telephone call logging and other whatnotery on your computer. They are nice enough to have a Linux version of the software, but not nice enough to provide source to build it from. They have binary installation files, but only in rpm format. I'm running Kubuntu on my work laptop. Rpm's will do me no good.

Internationalization/Localization Cheat Sheet

Submitted by lishevita on Sun, 11/18/2007 - 11:46
ISO 639-2 Language Codes live here:
http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php

Command Line Tools
xgettext will collect all your strings for you from a file or set of files into a po file.

msgfmt will turn your po files into mo files.

Cups Printing from the Command Line

Submitted by lishevita on Thu, 11/15/2007 - 11:15
Sometimes you just need to print something without going into an application. Here's how...

First, find out what printers are available
lpstat -a

That will tell you what printers are available to you. Then you can print to one of them
lpr -P [printer_name] [file_name]

Need to find out what jobs are running right now?
lpstat -o
(that's the letter oh, not the number zero)

Need to cancel a job?
lprm [job_id]

Modding an old Razr V3

Submitted by lishevita on Sun, 11/04/2007 - 14:53
Work gave me what is possibly the worst Motorola Razr phone ever. Not only that, they gave me a phone that someone must have bought on a trip to Thailand or something. It had no Hebrew fonts. No predictive typing. You couldn't move photos or videos that you took with the phone on to your computer using a USB cable the way that I can with the Razr v3x that I bought in New Zealand in December. Nope, none of that very basic stuff.

Modding an old Razr V3

Submitted by lishevita on Sun, 11/04/2007 - 14:49
Work gave me what is possibly the worst Motorola Razr phone ever. Not only that, they gave me a phone that someone must have bought on a trip to Thailand or something. It had no Hebrew fonts. No predictive typing. You couldn't move photos or videos that you took with the phone on to your computer using a USB cable the way that I can with the Razr v3x that I bought in New Zealand in December. Nope, none of that very basic stuff.

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