There Word, Excel, and Powerpoint from Micro$soft that are usually very expensive.

There is also money management software, project planning software, and graphic software.

Well there is a solution for small [...]]]> There is a ton of software a new business sometimes feels that they must purchase right when they are starting off a new business.

There Word, Excel, and Powerpoint from Micro$soft that are usually very expensive.

There is also money management software, project planning software, and graphic software.

Well there is a solution for small businesses that are starting out is to use Open Source Software.
There is a great web site that lists all of the commercial software along with it’s Open Source Alternative.
Check out Open Source Alternatives web site.

They will show you stuff like
Expensive App             Free Apps
Photoshop                   The GIMP
VISIO                         DIA
MS Office                    Open Office
Illustrator, CorelDraw  Inkscape
Quickbooks                 Postbooks

There are many more and almost every big commercial application now has an Open Source alternative.  It is possible that you may need to be running Linux for some of these, but Ubuntu has become as easy to use as Windows or a Mac.

I found another Blog posting about 50 top applications and their alternatives.
The post was made early in 2008 so the software most likely has gotten even better since then.

Check out http://whdb.com/2008/the-top-50-proprietary-programs-that-drive-you-crazy-and-their-open-source-alternatives/

I have tried a few and the one that seems the simplest to use and has collaborative abilities and excellent exporting formats is  Mind42.com.  Manage all your ideas, whether alone, twosome or working together with the whole world – collaborative, browser-based and for free.

http://www.flashgames247.com/

http://www.playfuls.com

http://www.kongragate.com (My personal favorite)

http://www.miniclip.com/

http://play-free-online-games.com

1. Change Tomcat’s server.xml. (<application>/tomcat/conf/server.xml) Edit the non-SSL <Connector> entry listening on port 80 and add or edit the redirectPort atribute to point to the port on which the SSL <Connector> is listening. By [...]]]> Need to have http redirect to https within Tomcat.
Here is a good page on setting up SSL for Tomcat tomcat-6.0-doc/ssl-howto.html

1. Change Tomcat’s server.xml.
(<application>/tomcat/conf/server.xml)
Edit the non-SSL <Connector> entry listening on port 80 and add or
edit the redirectPort atribute to point to the port on which the SSL
<Connector> is listening. By default, the redirectPort was pointing
to port 443.  Note: if you have an internal system running SSL on port 21101, for example, and your site uses a global load balancer, then you need to redirect to port 443.  Otherwise, the URL would be rewritten as https://your.site.com:21101 which would fail at the loadbalancer.

Was:
Connector port=”80″
enableLookups=”false”
redirectPort=”8443″
maxThreads=”100″
minSpareThreads=”100″
maxSpareThreads=”100″

Changed to:
Connector port=”80″
enableLookups=”false”
redirectPort=”443″
maxThreads=”100″
minSpareThreads=”100″
maxSpareThreads=”100″

2. Setup a security constraint in the Tomcat web.xml file.
In the Tomcat web.xml file the following <security> has
to be added within the <web> element. This new element must be
added after the <servlet> element: Note: The Tomcat documentation states that https will only be redirected to the Port listed if there is a <security> listed for some path.  I found the best location to add the info is just prior to the last line in the web.xml

Place the following code just above the last line (</web>) in the web.xml file
(<application>/tomcat/conf/web.xml)

<pre><security>
<web>
<web>Application Name</web>
<url>/*</url>
</web>
<user>
<transport>CONFIDENTIAL</transport>
</user>
</security>

 
<security>
    <web>
        <web>Application Name</web>
        <url>/*</url>
    </web>
    <user>
        <transport>CONFIDENTIAL</transport>
    </user>
</security>

In Apache 2, shared modules must be compiled with the directive: –enable-mods-shared=’rewrite’

Multiple modules can be configured that way like so: –enable-mods-shared=’rewrite dav dav-fs’

A simple config string would look like this: ./configure –prefix=/usr/local/apache –enable-mods-shared=’rewrite’

# [...]]]> I seem to need this information often enough so I thought I would post it here for safe keeping.

In Apache 2, shared modules must be compiled with the directive:
–enable-mods-shared=’rewrite’

Multiple modules can be configured that way like so:
–enable-mods-shared=’rewrite dav dav-fs’

A simple config string would look like this:
./configure –prefix=/usr/local/apache –enable-mods-shared=’rewrite’

# EVEN if you screwed up and failed to compile it, by using the horribly broken and often incorrectly documented ‘–enable-rewrite’ switch (which DOES NOT WORK: even ./configure –help and the apache install docs includes this BS compile directive that DOES NOT WORK), ALL IS NOT LOST. You can still compile any modules by changing to the apache source dir and then the sub directories /modules/mappers (for example: /path/to/your/httpd-source/modules/mappers ) and executing the following command:

/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs -cia mod_rewrite.c

# This will compile the modules as a “so” or “shared object”, and add the proper enabling string to your httpd.conf file: LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

The apxs method of compiling in a module should work for most of the modules you may need.  For instance mod_speling is very useful in dealing with mod_rewrite as it is used to ignore case.

I also just thought that I could download the latest XAMPP version from www.apachefriends.org and get the modules I need from there.  It may or may not work.

The script works by pulling the latest data and database backup from the production server.  The script can be placed in a cron. The DR server [...]]]> Here is a script I wrote to keep 2 or more web sites in sync.  The data files can be anything under the data tree.
The database is MySQL.

The script works by pulling the latest data and database backup from the production server.  The script can be placed in a cron.
The DR server user should be able to ssh without a password to the production server.  This is accomplished using RSA keys under SSH.

Once both the web site and database are setup, this script pulls the newest files, and latest mysql database backup via rsync.

Change the First set of VARIABLES, and <usernames> and <pathing> where needed.

I should probably have more information on the script here, but I wanted to save a copy somewhere before I forgot about it.

Anyway, my thought is if I setup a primary web server somewhere and want n+1 backend systems I might be able to use this poor-man’s approach.  If the backed systems need to have database updates then you are looking at database replication.  But, the rsync file copy and all of the rest could be used to make web server production updates to a cluster of systems.  You just update the main instance and all of the slave servers pull the latest information, including a database update script if needed., unix, script

#!/bin/ksh -x

#######################################
#
# Script to sync Prod web with DR server.
# The script is designed to pull from the
# production server.
#
# 12/2008:  Initial setup.
#        :  Mike Byers
#######################################

PRIME_HOST=’prod.edmz.com’                  #Production host
DR_HOST=’dr-orprod2.edmz.com’              #DR server
DATABASES=”mysql DB1 DB2″                  #database to transfer space sepa
rated
#MYSQLUSER=backup                               #User for database backup
MYSQLUSER=restore                                  #User for database restore
#MYSQLPWD=’ABC123′                             #Backup user Password
MYSQLPWD=’ABC123′                               #Restore user Password (Restore user needs more DB permissions)
DB_PATH=’/opt/mysql5/backups’                 #Path to database backup files
#YESTERDAY=`date +%Y%m%d -d”1 day ago”`         #Linux Version
YESTERDAY=`TZ=GMT+24 date +%Y%m%d`              #Solaris Version
TODAY=`date +%Y%m%d`
PATH=$PATH:/opt/mysql5/bin/;export PATH  #Path to mysql binaries

/usr/bin/rsync –exclude ‘configuration.*’ \
–exclude ‘**/logs’ \
–exclude ‘**/modules’ \
–exclude ‘**/conf’ \
–exclude ‘**/bin’ \
-vaue ‘ssh -x -C -l <username>’ $PRIME_HOST:apache/htdocs/* /<path>/apache/htdocs/

for DB in $DATABASES
do
/usr/bin/rsync -vaue ‘ssh -x -C -l <username>’ $PRIME_HOST:$DB_PATH/$DB-$TODAY.sql.
gz $DB_PATH
#Compare sizes of database backup files to see if anything changed
S1=`du -sk $DB_PATH/$DB-$YESTERDAY.sql.gz | awk ‘{ print $1 }’`
S2=`du -sk $DB_PATH/$DB-$TODAY.sql.gz | awk ‘{ print $1 }’`
if [[ S1 -eq S2 ]]; then
echo “No update for database $DB needed”
else
/bin/gunzip < $DB_PATH/$DB-$TODAY.sql.gz | mysql -u $MYSQLUSER -p$MYSQLPWD
$DB
fi
done

This is typically due to something being echo’d or sent back to your login attempt.

Usually, it’s something you have in your .profile or .bashrc login files.

Just add the [...]]]> If you have ever used scp or sftp you may have encountered the dreaded ( ”Received message too long” or “Bad packet length” ”) errors.

This is typically due to something being echo’d or sent back to your login attempt.

Usually, it’s something you have in your .profile or .bashrc login files.

Just add the following to the very top of your login shell settings file.

if [ ${TERM} == "dumb" ]; then
return
fi

This will exit out of running the login shell commands if you login using a “dumb” terminal.