Ubuntu 11.04 introduced a new, cleaner user interface called Unity. I’m not a huge desktop GUI guy, doing a large majority of my work in the command line, but I do like to try and stay current on the latest greatest interfaces.

I’m not overwhelmed with Unity. It’s OK but not really earth shattering. You have the option to switch back to the “classic” Gnome interface if you wanted to but I haven’t done that.

One huge annoyance I’ve noticed about the new Unity interface was a lack of a true “system tray”. Many application in Ubuntu (or Linux in general) leverage a similar approach Windows machine do and allow applications to run in a System Tray, cleaning up any task bars you might have. In Unity, there were a couple applications that were visible, like Dropbox, the clock and Volume but several others were not such as Skype and Truecrypt.

This became a big problem for Truecrypt because once I closed the Truecrypt interface I couldn’t figure out how to get back to it. If I tried to launch the application again the system would report that it the application was already running, which it was. In the past I would get back to the interface through the icon in the system tray but this icon would not display in Unity, at least not until I found a posting on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=6723083591&topic=17003

This simple command in a terminal window corrected my problem and life is good again

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['all']"

As you can see I got all my system tray icons back and I am now a little happier with Unity.

Posted via email from shocm

There is a dirty little secret the Mac hides from you when you are using it but becomes a glaring eyesore when you move to another OS. Some file clean up needs to happen because OSX creates these hidden files that start with a ._ which contains some extended information about the file that no other system reads so they aren’t terrible useful when moving files to these systems. This post from a person working for Splunk, outlines how to tar up files on a OSX machine that is targeted for other systems and exclude the ._ files from the tarring process. Original article can be found here

————— POST ———————-

When building Splunk applications, I’m often working on a Mac. There
are files that begin with ._ that are resource files, which contain
extended attribute information about the files for the OS. This is
great and all but I don’t want to include these files when I package up
an application and upload it to SplunkBase.

If you don’t have deep OSX knowledge, then keeping these files out
of your tarball is harder than it looks. One of our OSX gurus pointed
me toward the answer, and I was so excited (yes, I am a geek) that I
just had to share.

To build a tarball in Leopard that doesn’t contain the ._ files, use:

COPYFILE_DISABLE=true tar cvzf filename.tar.gz dirtotar

In Tiger, use:

COPY_EXTENDED_ATTRIBUTES_DISABLE=true tar czvf filename.tar.gz dirtotar

This is definitely going in my .bashrc so I don’t have to fuss with it again:

export COPYFILE_DISABLE=true

————— PEND OF POST ———————-

Hope you find this tip useful.

Playing with mysqldump

If you have either a shell or telnet access to your database server, you can backup the database using mysqldump. By default, the output of the command will dump the contents of the database in SQL statements to your console. This output can then be piped or redirected to any location you want. If you plan to backup your database, you can pipe the output to a sql file, which will contain the SQL statements to recreate and populate the database tables when you wish to restore your database. There are more adventurous ways to use the output of mysqldump.

A Simple Database Backup:

You can use mysqldump to create a simple backup of your database using the following syntax.

mysqldump -u [username] -p [password] [databasename]> [backupfile.sql]

[username] – this is your database username
[password] – this is the password for your database
[databasename] – the name of your database
[backupfile.sql] – the file to which the backup should be written.

The resultant dump file will contain all the SQL statements needed to create the table and populate the table in a new database server. To backup your database ‘Customers’ with the username ‘sadmin’ and password ‘pass21′ to a file custback.sql, you would issue the command:

mysqldump -u sadmin -p pass21 Customers> custback.sql

You can also ask mysqldump to add a drop table command before every create command by using the option –add-drop-table. This option is useful if you would like to create a backup file which can rewrite an existing database without having to delete the older database manually first.

mysqldump –add-drop-table -u sadmin -p pass21 Customers> custback.sql

Backing up only specified tables

If you’d like restrict the backup to only certain tables of your database, you can also specify the tables you want to backup. Let’s say that you want to backup only customer_master & customer_details from the Customers database, you do that by issuing

mysqldump –add-drop-table -u sadmin -p pass21 Customers customer_master customer_details> custback.sql

So the syntax for the command to issue is:

mysqldump -u [username] -p [password] [databasename] [table1 table2 ....]

[tables] – This is a list of tables to backup. Each table is separated by a space.

If you are a database administrator who has to look after multiple databases, you’ll need to back up more than one database at a time. Here’s how you can backup multiple databases in one shot.

If you want to specify the databases to backup, you can use the –databases parameter followed by the list of databases you would like to backup. Each database name has to be separated by at least one space when you type in the command. So if you have to backup 3 databases, let say Customers, Orders and Comments, you can issue the following command to back them up. Make sure the username you specify has permissions to access the databases you would like to backup.

mysqldump -u root -p pass21 –databases Customers Orders Comments> multibackup.sql

This is okay if you have a small set of databases you want to backup. Now how about backing up all the databases in the server? That’s an easy one, just use the –all-databases parameter to backup all the databases in the server in one step.

mysqldump –all-databases> alldatabases.sql

First, get your web administrator to enable your use of .htaccess files. This requires a stanza in ServerRoot/conf/access.conf like this:

AllowOverride AuthConfig

where /home/webber is replaced by your home directory. Without this, the usual default is AllowOverride None, which means that .htaccess files are ignored. The above stanza allows .htaccess control in all subdirectories of the specified Directory.

Set up a reasonably secure directory for the password (and optionally the group) files. This directory should not be in the web document tree! If it is, someone who can learn or guess the URL of the password file can fetch it and try to crack the passwords. (This refers to visitors from elsewhere on the Internet. There is no simple way to prevent users with accounts on the web server host itself from snooping in the password file, so we will have to settle for security by obscurity and trust them not to try too hard.)
Let us name this directory http-etc by analogy to the Unix /etc directory where the system passwd and group files reside. Place it in your home directory (not in public_html) so that it is outside URL space. Give it permission 701 = rwx—–x meaning you the owner can do anything, and the web server, running as the ordinary user apache, can access the directory but cannot list it (so it must know the file names in advance).1

In the http-etc directory, create the password file. It can have any name. A usual choice is htpasswd. Give it permission 644 = rw-r–r–. This file can be created empty by the touch command, or created with one initial entry by using the -c option when you run the htpasswd command the first time.

Add users to the password file using the htpasswd command. From your home directory, the command would be something like:
htpasswd http-etc/htpasswd guest

In this example, the htpasswd program will prompt you for the password for user guest. After you type the password, you will have to re-type it for verification. The format of the password file is like this:

guest:IA22a/FU48faw
janeuser:kyxFwALyFbsPw
joeuser:rjyJsqbtXCvXo

The gibberish after each user’s name is the encrypted password. The plaintext passwords are not stored, for obvious security reasons. You cannot edit this file to change the passwords, unless you are the kind of person the NSA is very interested in hiring. The only way to update it is with the htpasswd program.

If you want to organize your users into groups, create a groups file, in the same directory as the password file. Its usual name is htgroup. Give it the same permissions as the password file. It contains a list of group names, with each group name followed by the user names belonging to the group. Create it using any text editor. The format is like:
guest: guest
users: janeuser joeuser

In any directory in your web page area that is to be protected, create a file named .htaccess, with contents like this:
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Restricted Directory”
AuthUserFile /home/webber/http-etc/htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /home/webber/http-etc/htgroup
Require group users guest

Alternatively the require directive can say:
Require user guest joeuser

or
Require valid-user