So if you are in a same situation as mine, you probably…

• Are on an MNC’s intranet which is being simultaneously used by a ton of other souls
• Get pathetic internet speeds, at times – measurable sometimes in BYTES!
• Even “git pull” takes like ages to complete…
• Any connection to Twitter is severed before it even sees light of the day!

The solution to all these worries is simpler than you think.

We can create an SSH tunnel to a *much* faster server and push our internet traffic over it. If the server is local, this will work even better – as your SSH on local LAN connections would be definitely faster than that on real WWW.

Follow http://wiki.freaks-unidos.net/weblogs/azul/firefox-ssh-tunnel and create a tunnel on any port. Lets call it $PORT
Basically, you need to run…

ssh -fND localhost:$PORT username@some-fast-server.com

Install tsocks – its a Transparent SOCKS Proxying Library which uses the magic of LD_PRELOAD and patches the connect() call to appropriately use a pre-configured proxy (via /etc/tsocks.conf). Hence any call like…

git pull

becomes

tsocks git pull

Your /etc/tsocks.conf looks something like this (after removing all the comments)

#Define a local network for which tsocks won’t patch the connect() call
local = 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0

path {
reaches = 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0
server = 127.0.0.1
server_type = 5
server_port = $PORT
}
server = 127.0.0.1
server_type = 5
server_port = $PORT

Replace the $PORT by the port you selected when creating the SSH tunnel. Server remains 127.0.0.1 as your tunnel exists on your own machine.

To configure your Firefox to use this new tunnel, goto Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Network Tab > Settings and make it look like

Add URL’s and IP ranges to “No Proxy for” field to exempt them from using the SSH tunnel.

That’s it. Click OK and you are ready to rock!

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Problem Scenario
I migrated my blog from makuchaku.info to makuchaku.in – and wanted everyone who was linking to my “.info” domain, automagically gets linked to my “.in” domain. Ofcourse, I cannot change all the possible places from where my .info blog is linked.

Challenges

1. I want “.in/” to be served when “.info/” is cliked
2. I want “.in/blog/this-is-a-post” to be served when “.info/blog/this-is-a-post” is clicked.

Ofcourse, Challenge 1 is very east and straight forward. Just put up a redirection at .info domain and you’r done. Challenge 2 is interesting.

Solution
Goto your theme editor (old wordpress blog) and edit the template for which you want to setup redirection. For me, it was all posts and all pages. Next, insert this javascript code at the top of template code…

Thats it. Now whenever you’ll hit http://makuchaku.info/blog/why-makuchaku – you will be redirected to http://makuchaku.in/blog/why-makuchaku – sweet!

Assumptions
This solution assumes that your new blog is a mirror replica of your old blog.

Please Digg this post if it helped. Thanks.

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Very recently, I upgraded from Ubuntu Intrepid to Ubuntu Jaunty – and to my horror, the system went very slow! I wasn’t sure what was causing the problem but Xorg reported near 100% CPU utilization in “top” output, Firefox felt very very heavy, flash videos on youtube were choppy and slow – even Gedit felt like a 200 megs java app – …that slow!

I googled a bit and realized that many were facing the same problem. Reason were the Intel video drivers in Jaunty.

This is how I fixed my Lenovo ThinkPad T61 running on Ubuntu Jaunty

Installed Kernel

Linux Warrior 2.6.28-15-generic #52-Ubuntu SMP Wed Sep 9 10:49:34 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

My T61′s Graphics Card

00:02.0 “VGA compatible controller” “Intel Corporation” “Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller” -r0c “Lenovo” “Device 20b5″

Step 1
Follow the guide at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReinhardTartler/X/RevertingIntelDriverTo2.4 and install xserver-xorg-video-intel-2.4 package/drivers. Restart GDM.
After installing these drivers, my system was back to sanity (firefox, gedit, etc) – however, flash videos were still choppy.

Step 2
Follow the changes mentioned at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/IntelPerformance and reboot.
This fixed the choppy flash issues for me.

Step 3
Thanks to the comment http://allredb.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/speed-up-flash-and-firefox-in-ubuntu-jaunty-904/#comment-2 – use the CPU Frequency scaling applet to make your CPU cores perform permanently at peak levels. Though this will cause higher battery consumption, I guess you are looking for better CPU speed (considering you are reading this post )

Thats it folks!
I hope this helps… my $0.02 – to make Ubuntu a better $home

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Given, you are a new GIT user/admin and want to setup an SVN like client-server architecture for your git repositories, wherein a server hosts the repository and many developers use that repository to track source code.

Do checkout Peepcode’s screencast on using Git. It is a MUST watch for any new Git user/admin.

ORIGIN
(we cannot create a –bare repo as redmine needs a .git directory, while –bare does not creates a .git dir)
git init
git add .
git commit -m “initial import”

LOCALHOST
git clone user@origin_server.com:/path/to/git/repo
git remote show origin # Confirm that master is tracking master
git commit -a -m “some changes”
git push # push to origin, content from local master as master is tracking master

## Creating a new branch on the clone
git branch experiment
git commit -av “changes i made”
git push origin experiment # To be done only once after creating a branch. Next time onwards, just “git pull/push”.
git remote show origin # confirm that master is tracking master, experiment on local is tracking experiment on origin

## Using someone’s branch from origin
git branch -a
-> *master
-> origin/master
-> origin/new_experiment
git branch –track new_experiment origin/new_experiment # Creates a new tracker with new_experiment of local is tracking new_experiment on origin
git branch -a
-> *master
-> new_experiment
-> origin/master
-> origin/new_experiment
git checkout -b new_experiment
git commit -av “my changes to new_experiment”
git push # Commits changes to new_experiment branch

Once you are through with creating initial repos, and your branches on local are tracking the respective branches on remote, pushing/pulling is just a matter of doing “git push” and “git pull”.

I am simply loving it… err… git

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This was supposed to be the easiest thing (as in CPanel – goto Subdomains, click create a new subdomain, specify a directory and you’r done!)… but allas! It took me a full day to figure this out
I’m sad…

Anyways… as Enom’s Domain control panel is, there is no way of doing this. All you can do, is create A/CNAME/Redirection/TXT records. Ofcourse, they are not providing the hosting… so them knowing about the directory structure is perfectly – a valid problem.

After conversing with Enom’s helpful support staff (in near realtime), I was able to solve the problem…

Problem
But then, how do you create a subdomain on a domain which is bought via Google Apps and who’s DNS is managed by Enom?

Assumptions

• You want to create a subdomain test.example.com
• You have a r00t access
• You are using Ubuntu with Apache2
• Your example.com resolves to 1.2.3.4

Solution
At Enom control panel – add an “A” record with the value of 1.2.3.4 (address field) and “test” as hostname field (without the “”) and save.

At your hosting server end…
Apache2 needs to be told to create a VirtualHost for your subdomain
Your /etc/apache2/sites-available/example-com file (example-com is just a random name, replace it with your virtual hosts file name) should look like

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName example.com
DocumentRoot /my/document/root
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName test.example.com
DocumentRoot /my/document/root/test
</VirtualHost>

Restart apache2 and you’r done!
Wait for a few minutes for the changes to propogate… and try hitting http://test.example.com in your browser.

Good Luck!

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I assume that you are running a version of FC

1) Import the GPG key from the fedora server

Assuming you are doing it on a FC6 base system
wget -c http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/RPM-GPG-KEY
rpm –import RPM-GPG-KEY

2) Once import is done, check your rpm with

rpm -V rpm_name

…thanks to paranoid Lap_64 to bring this up!
lolz!

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