I’ve recently had to make modifications to a WHM cPanel powered server which involved direct manipulation to the httpd.conf Apache configuration file. Now, due to the managed element of WHM cPanel systems, it is very likely that any changes made to httpd.conf will be reverted after an automatic WHM cPanel update. To prevent your httpd.conf [...]

SSH stands for secure shell and is an encrypted data transfer protocol which is commonly used for Linux server communication. Tunnelling, in the context of computer networking, is the act of creating a link between two systems with one protocol that encapsulates additional protocols within itself. One of the most simple ways to set up [...]

I’m quite highly anticipating the release of Google Chrome OS – Google’s net book and appliance cloud operating system. There are a few main reasons behind this. Simplicity and Openness Note that I combine the two here. It is very important that both software user friendliness is combined with the nature of free and open source software to prevent [...]

Ubuntu 10.04, currently in development, has hit the second alpha release. As a quite update, here are some of the features you can see in the Alpha 2 release of Ubuntu 10.04. A new graphical boot screen manager called ‘Plymouth’ which is to replace the currently used xsplash and usplash boot screen systems. The user menu and [...]

It turns out that Avatar, the hugely successful science fiction epic film from James Cameron, was rendered using a huge Ubuntu rendering server farm, at Weta Digital. The Weta Digital server farm or ‘rendering wall’, as they call it, has a disk array capable of storing roughly 2 petabytes of data in total. The individual servers are [...]

Google have released a very simple explanatory video, aimed at new computer users, detailing their new operating system which is focused around the Google Chrome web browser. If you’ve ever needed to ask, what is the difference between Google Chrome OS and Google Chrome, this video explains the answer in the simplest manner possible. Google [...]

So, you’ve recently downloaded an ISO disc image in Ubuntu and want a quick and easy method to mount it as a drive? Simple. Locate the file within your file browser and give it a right-click, then from the pop-up menu click ‘Open with Archive Mounter’. Archive Mounter is a tool which mounts several types [...]

What is open-source software? Open-source software is software which is under a special type of license in which the source code, which is usually copyrighted, is instead open to all. Specifically, this refers to code which meets the Open Source Definition for code licensing or is released to the public domain, and thus available without [...]

I recently discovered Ubuntu has home directory permissions default to world readable. In other words, any unprivileged user, including guests users, are able to access and read the home directory data for any other user. For those who store sensitive information on a multi-user computer, this can be a significant security problem or at least [...]

Ubuntu 9.04, known during development as Jaunty Jackalope, features a major new notifications system known as ‘notify-osd’. The new notifications are graphically very nice and appealing, however some features are not necessarily desirable to everyone. I came across certain issues with the new notifications system and have made some modifications which I would like to [...]