So, you’ve decided you want to setup a symlink, well look no further! It is a fun tool that is most commonly used to set up a shortcut or a filesystem redirect.  Well the full explaination of one and how it works can be found at this page .  But really, it is quite simple:

ln -s target linkname

target=where you want to the shortcut to go

linkname=where you want to name the shortcut

Here are a couple examples:

Say you’re tired of typing in a full path to something like a web root, you can setup something like this:

ln -s /var/www/vhosts/google.com/httpdocs/ /root/google.com

Then when you log in as root, you can just do cd google.com and be dumped into web root

Alternatively, say you moved mission critical files for a program like libs to a different dir for tidiness reasons and adjusting the code would take too long, you can just symlink it to save time!

ln -s newdir olddir

so ln -s /usr/local/php5 /usr/local/php4 would direct all calls to the php4 dir to the php5 dir, where all of your new libs are.

So, with my ongoing usage of the Ubuntu Hardy Heron os on my spare work laptop, I needed to get a good, flexible music player.  After a little bit of searching, I came across the Amarok player.

This nice little KDE player has all the gizmos you could want, including a MySQL driven database of your music.  Upon setting up the player, it takes all of your music, from a specified location, and reorganizes it Alphabetically by artist.   From there, it also imports all of your cover art, as we all know your “collected” music does not always come with the art work.

Some of the other nice features are : MP3 device management, hookup with streams like last.fm , scripting (what open source system would be good without this), as well as the simplest cd burning I have ever seen.

One snag with the burning though is that the proper libs are not installed.  HowToGeek has  pretty good guide for this, but you can also use your Synaptic Package Manager to install these libs as well.  The appropriate libs to grab are k3b, libk3b2, and the libk3b2-extracodecs.  You can also install k3b-il8n for internationalized k3b.

All in all I recommend this player, but if I find something better, I will be sure and let you know.

Ever wanted to run Linux or Unix distros while running your Windows, Mac, or even *nix desktop?

Well, I recently had the need to, as I am testing out different distros, in earnest attempt to find one I like for dual booting with my Windows laptop.
To check it out go to VirtualBox.org . The usability is pretty simple, but has some nicely advanced features.

Screen Shots after the jump: Read the rest of this entry »

So there comes a time and a place where you want foo.com to redirect to www.foo.com for design, clarity, seo, and possibly other reasons, and doing so can seem tricky. Well I’m here to let you know, it is not. Using some simple mod_rewrite coding, it can be done quickly and effectively.

First things first, make sure you have mod_rewrite enabled on your server. If you don’t, you’re pretty crazy.

Next, either create or edit your .htaccess file in your webroot directory, which tends to be public_html, www, or httpdocs.

Drop in the following lines of code:

RewriteEngine on
#HTTP REDIRECT
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^foo\.tld$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.foo.tld/$1 [R=301,L]
#END REDIRECT

Replace foo with your domain name, i.e. theubersexualman
Replace tld with your domain extension, i.e. com

So you should end up with code resembling this:

RewriteEngine on
#HTTP REDIRECT
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^theubersexualman\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.theubersexualman.com/$1 [R=301,L]
#END REDIRECT

Save your .htaccess file and test it out.  You should not need to restart or reload apache for this to work.

This however, will not take care of https, so if you are running a secure site and non secure site with the same directory housing, you’ll want to use this code:

#HTTPS REDIRECT
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^foo\.tld$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.foo.tld/$1 [R=301,L]
#HTTP REDIRECT
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^foo\.tld$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.foo.tld/$1 [R=301,L]
#END REDIRECTS

And again, replacing foo and tld respectively .

So apparently Dominoes pizza gets cool stuff, like a new Batman trailer:

Its basically bejeeezus amazing.  And, as bad as it sounds, I’m pretty sure Ledger knew what he was doing when he O.D.’d cause I don’t think he could ever make a better movie than this and he probably knew it.  It is highly unfortunate though, cause he was a stand up guy….. really, he was.

With the recent decline in the performance of the Arizona DiamondBacks, one must wonder why it is happening. My guess, is that the rise in the Mexican population of Arizona is spooking them. I mean think about it, more Mexicans means more Mexican Flags. And what is on the Mexican flag?

That’s right! An eagle shanking a diamondback rattlesnake with its beak. Seeing this all over the place would reduce my morale if I was part of the team. Its like if the Raider Nation were carrying around pictures of Indians getting brutally murdered and raped when the Redskins came to town. I’m sure it would mess with their head too!

Best pic I could find

I have had a spare 1G thumb drive lying around, a gimme from a conference my company went to, and really haven’t decided what to do with it yet. In lieu of this, I went searching for some distros to put on it. Obviously the prime choice is Damn Small Linux but I wanted to see what else was available. After some fine Google searching, I came across Fedora 9’s new Live USB Creator

Now, I know all good admins hate Fedora with a passion, but hey, this is for the sake of testing stuff out!

So I downloaded the tool via this link: Download

Once you download, extract, and run the exe, you get this screen:

Here is where the tool excels immediately:

You can use an existing live cd you have downloaded to your pc, or you this tool will download it for you.

Here are the different distros you can choose from:

I did not have an active live cd on my machine, so I let the tool download one for me. I went with Fedora 9 KDE , as Fedora doesn’t seem like Fedora without a GUI .

The persistent overlay function is highly valuable as it sets your working storage space. Typically you will want to set this to at least 205M but, ultimately this is up to you.

So, I was able to finally test out the USB key, and man, the new KDE is amazing.  Almost makes me want to take out my centos system and load in this new Fedora 9.   Fortunately though, I wont be as CentOS is better for OpenVZ .

So, in summary, this system is truly bad ass, especially for you rack monkeys out there that are tired of live cds, and want to make easy live keys.

Yeah, looks pretty goofy, but since it has Notorius BIG in the sound track, I can let that go.

Steve was on the Daily Show being funny, because that is what he does, hes Steve Carell