OK folks, I came up with something helpful and I thought I would pass it on. Recently I had a spam bot (or maybe a real person, who knows) join the forums. Went right through all of the security controls and verifications. Then, said user went about posting almost 500 porn posts all over my site’s forums. Posting topics, posts, pics and embedded videos, it was really bad and I was really mad. First off I banned the user, no problem. I figured I would do that so I could keep relevant info like IP and email addresses rather than just deleting him. Now I had the arduous task of removing all those damn posts and topics.
I do know that you can delete a user and tell SMF to also delete all of those users topics posts as well, but that hasn’t worked in the past so I did it on my own. Here is what I did.
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Here we go folks, I thought I would share a handy little script with you that I use to backup all of the databases on a particular Linux/UNIX server. I do this by getting a list of the databases, and then using mysqldump to dump them all to a text file. This seems to be the best way (short of replication) to get good clean backups of the data. Toss it into a cron job and you can have it done automagically. There isn’t anything yet to rotate files, but I might add that later. Also, I am going to try and rewrite this in PERL so our Windows (and other OS’s that don’t have a shell like Bash) brethren can run this script as well. For now though, it’s written for Bash but almost any shell would work I think.
OK, onto the script. Read the rest of this entry »
I have updated the article about labeling in Linux to include some special stuff for Ubuntu and Debian since they use UUIDs instead of LABELs. Check it out and get to adding and mounting those drives!
Heads up, I have added something that I think you will find useful. I have added a MySQL reference to the Library! This is more than a cheat sheet, I try to explain the things that are going on in there as we do it, so it should be a good way to not only see how to do specific things, but also understand them as well. Check it out here and see what you think, if you see anything wrong with it or you have some tip of you own you’d like me to add, drop a line and let me know. Enjoy!
Recently I got another external USB hard drive for backing up data. I plugged it in and everything was great except for one thing. The drive came up with the name (label) that Seagate put on there by default. So I was looking a drive mounted at “/media/FreeAgent Drive”, ugh, that sucks. So, I did a little digging and came across this awesome article that covers the many different ways to label your drive. It was interesting that it all basically comes down to your file system, but this article has most everything covered. Check it out …
Description and Problem:
Google Gears is a plug-in that extends your browser to create a richer platform for web applications. There are many Web applications that currently make use of Google Gears. Some of these include Google Docs, Google Reader, MySpace, Picasa, Zoho and (the reason for this post) now even WordPress. Google Gears, or simply just Gears as it is now known, not only enables offline browsing of supported sites, but it can also greatly improve the performance of these sites and web applications like WordPress. This makes working with supported web applications much nicer.
Now, my problem (and many others of you out there) has been that I am running 64-bit Ubuntu (8.04 Hardy Heron) and Google has not made a 64-bit version of their Gears software. They cite lack of time and testing resources, but my guess is it’s not that important to them since there probably aren’t too many 64-bit users out there. Luckilly for us, Gears is an open source project. This is now a prime example of the beauty of open source software, in that some really smart people created an “unofficial” patch that allows you to install and run Gears on 64-bit Linux in Firefox. In my case it’s Ubuntu and Firefox 3.x, but I have read folk that have had success with SuSE and others as well. It only took me about five minutes once I found the patch.
Here are the steps I took to get this installed, up and running:
Grab the latest version of the Gears binary that has been patched for 64bit at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~swolchok/gears/, I used this command:
wget http://www-personal.umich.edu/~swolchok/gears/gears-linux-opt-0.4.9.0.xpi
Open Firefox and choose File->Open File and browse to where you saved the file you just downloaded. It should open an install window, you want to press the “Install Now” button to start the install.
Once the install is complete, press the “Restart Firefox” button to restart Firefox and complete the installation.
Summary:
For me, upon the initial restart, I got an error about this addon not being compatible with my architecture. Despite that it seems to work fine, and I haven’t gotten any more errors since then, so I would suggest you simply ignore that error.
Lastly, go to a site that is supported, add it to Gears and enjoy! If you have any questions or comments, post ‘em below.
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