Technical Solution

Generating SSH keys and using them for connecting to SSH servers is a straightforward process on Linux. But for Windows users, Windows does not provide any support for the SSH protocol by default. There is no SSH client that comes by default on Windows. Let alone generating keys.

Unlike proprietary operating systems that comes up with a rudimentary set of applications, Ubuntu and GNU/Linux in general has thousands of freely available Free Software applications available for installation directly from the Internet. These applications are usually available from software archives referred to as repositories. The official Ubuntu repositories contain more than 30000 applications. Having the Ubuntu repositories on DVD can be useful for those users who don't have access to the Internet or has only limited connectivity from the machine where they have their Ubuntu installed but have access from somewhere else to download the repository. Here is a step by step instruction on how to download the complete Ubuntu repositories and build your own set of Ubuntu Repository DVDs. For those who would like to get it done the easy way you can buy a set of Ubuntu Repository DVDs via our RequestCD program

The find command available in GNU/Linux shells is a versatile tool for finding files matching the given conditions in a folder and performing a specific action on the files found. The following command will find all files greater than 1M size in your current folder and ask you if you would like to delete the file find . -size +1M -exec rm -i {} \;

Ubuntu 12.04 comes with a bug that it will not mount the cdrom on proper path and that prevents installation of applications from the Ubuntu Repositories even if you add the repositories via apt-cdrom successfully. Whenever you try to install applications you'll get an error message like E: Unable to stat the mount point /media/cdrom/ - stat (2: No such file or directory) Here is how to fix this problem:

Apache allows you to protect contents of specific directories in your website or the whole website from unauthorized access using a mechanism called httpd password protection. During development of new sites the partially built sites are protected from unauthorized access using httpd authentication. This could sometimes interfere with testing of integration with third party services that might expect some of your URLs to be accessible without authentication. Here is how you can exclude a given file or directory from httpd authentication

We were trying to create a new theme for our Drupal site and we came across an issue. How to create div "left" to be the same height as div "right" which can be smaller or bigger? Is it possible to have the "left" div height adjusts automatically according to the "right" div height? Here is what saved us:

Nmap is a Free Software tool that can be used for a variety of network network exploration tasks and security auditing. Nmap ("Network Mapper") scans IP packets to determine a lot of different aspects about hosts available on the network and also about services these hosts are offering. It can help you find a lot of information about these hosts including reverse DNS names, operating system guesses, device types, and MAC addresses.

We use a VPS server hosted on the web as our shared projects folder to share files between our team members in a safe and secure way. This is set up in such a way that users can mount a folder on the VPS on to their local machines via SSHFS and access contents on the shared folder. The permissions in the folder is managed via a script that is running on the server. The script and its configuration is being managed using an automatic deployment process using git. In the following article we have described how you can set up your own secure shared folder on the web.

We get frequent requests to rebuild existing sites using Drupal. When we get such a request it would help to have a copy of the full site on our local server to make it easier for themers and developers to reuse whatever existing components that can be salvaged from the original site. Wget is a powerful tool that can help mirror websites locally or on any web servers. The command for doing this using wget is really simple.

A web developer’s life becomes much saner if he/she has easy access to all page header information. Firefox offers you PLUGIN-NAME that helps you inspect headers. Here is something for the terminally inclined ones among you - wget. To view the http headers give the following command in gnome terminal : wget -S --spider www.example.com