How to view local websites on your iPad with Squid
I like developing and testing websites on my local network before they go live. On both Mac and PC it’s easy to tweak the /etc/hosts file so that the URL doesn’t point to a numeric IP, but instead to http://yourserver (or something equally catchy). On iOS devices we can’t tweak that file unless we deal with the highly unethical practice of jailbreaking. Turns out there is an easier way to surf local websites on mobile devices, simply by using a Proxy Server such as Squid. A Proxy Server is often used as a caching server or...
read moreWhere is the hosts file in Windows
It’s in C:WindowsSystem32driversetc You can edit it with Notepad with Administrator rights. Works in Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.
read moreHow to block Spam Trackbacks in WordPress
Trackbacks are a great way for other blogs to notify your blog about a link back to you. Many blogging platforms support this feature, including WordPress. But sometimes it’s very obvious that those trackbacks aren’t coming from a legitimate source, especially when you get several dozen of them every day from the same source. No one loves you that much. The most recent two examples are semalt.com and buttons-for-website.com, the latter can’t even properly mix a plural with a singular. But that’s not for here. To make...
read moreHow to enable automatic logins in CentOS and GNOME
I was researching auto login options for CentOS today. I thought those would come in handy when GNOME is used as a standard desktop, so that the computer starts straight into the desktop environment without the need to provide a password. It’s also a handy feature to have if the machine lives in another room and needs GNOME to login to the wireless network when I issue a remote restart. Turns out there are two parts to the puzzle: providing auto logins and removing a pesky Keyring Dialogue that appears to come up when those are enabled....
read moreHow to fix ProFTP Handshake Trouble in Plesk
I fixed a problem this morning which wouldn’t let the latest version of FileZilla v3.10.1.1 connect to one of my client’s servers anymore. This had not been a problem in the past. The connection itself worked, but FileZilla failed due to a problem with the TLS Certificate. Here’s the error: Status: Initializing TLS... Error: Received TLS alert from the server: Handshake failed (40) Error: Could not connect to server Turns out that FileZilla have made a few changes and deprecated the insecure RC4 algorithm in FTP over TLS....
read moreHow to copy a CentOS ISO to USB on Mac OS X
Windows users have a great free tool called ISO2USB which efficiently transfers ISO images to a USB stick. Mac users don’t have such a luxury – at least I haven’t found one yet. Instead we can make use of a command line tool named dd which can do this for us. It needs a few parameters though, and in this article we’ll look at what those are. The following will work in both Mavericks and Yosemite, with ISOs from CentOS 6.5 and above. Our operation will result in a bootable USB stick. First, head over to a CentOS Mirror...
read moreHow to set firewall rules from a GUI in CentOS
Sick and tired of countless command line statements to set your firewall rules? Me too. No matter what I try, I never get the results quite right. There’s always some switch I forget and ultimately something isn’t working. For years I was thinking, “there has to be an easier way, like there is in Plesk”. And today I found that there is: a rather un-obvious tool called system-config-firewall. It’s a godsend and works in CentOS 6 with iptables, and in CentOS 7 with firewalld. Installation To make use of it, install...
read moreFIXED: WordPress refuses to send you a Password Reset Link
I ran into an interesting problem today: on a CentOS 6 server a colleague of mine wanted to reset her WordPress password via the handy link provided in the login dialogue. But rather than sending an email, WordPress got back to her with the following error message: The e-mail could not be sent. Possible reason: your host may have disabled the mail() function. Intrigued I had a look at the server. To my surprise sendmail was installed, and emails could be sent from the command line as well as from PHP scripts. But not from WordPress. What was...
read moreHow to fix “This file is damaged and can’t be opened” in Mac OS X
Yesterday I was trying to open an installer which was offered as a .dmg file. That’s a disk image which mounted itself fine, but when I ran the installer contained in the disk image, all I got was an error message: “ZBrush to Keyshot Content Installer is damaged and could not be opened”. At first I thought perhaps the download had a problem, or perhaps the source file was corrupt. But in such cases the .dmg usually doesn’t even mount – which mine did. Perplexed, I raised a support ticket with the provider of the...
read moreHow to install Java SE 6 Runtime on Mac OS X Yosemite
When you’re trying to open any of the Adobe CS5 or CS6 applications in Yosemite, you’ve likely encountered a friendly message such as this: This happens because CS5 and CS6 applications were relying on Java 6, and the current version of Java at the time of writing is Java 8. I’m not an expert on Java, but I can only assume that things have changed and backward compatibility wan’t high on ORACLE’s to do list. Lucky for us, we can have both Java 6 and Java 6 installed at the same time, the latter is an option offer...
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