A poor man’s https, using ssh to secure web traffic
Sometimes you get a web-hosting environment that only serves non-ssl (http) content. If you need to do any type of management through tools like phpMyAdmin, then you can see the problem with this. All it would take is someone on your network or on the Internet to sniff the traffic and retrieve your username and password, then they too can do a bit of “management” on your site.
If you also have secure shell (SSH) access, then there is a way to manage your site securely by using SSH’s venerable port forwarding (SOCKS). The trick is to tell your management tools to only listen or respond to connections coming in over SSH instead of normal traffic.
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Build environments using chroot
The need was simple enough: make deb packages from source for multiple architectures on the same system. This needed to be done without the overhead of a virtual machine and without using something like launchpad.
I’ve used chroot in the past and it seemed like a perfect fit for the problem. The idea is to have at least two chroot-able directories with the bare essentials from Ubuntu Natty (10.04) to compile and build deb packages.
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Skype on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)
If you upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 on a 64-bit platform and try to run skype then you will likely get this error:
skype: error while loading shared libraries: libXss.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
This is because libxss1 and a few other libraries have been removed from ia32-libs package.
You will need to enable multiarch and install the extra 32 bit libraries by hand:
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Ubuntu 11.04 Natty with fglrx and 2.6.39
Natty (11.04) users can finally get fglrx playing nicely together with X.org 1.10. We can also make the latest driver work well with the 2.6.39 kernel.
Custom build procedure:
- Install the latest 2.6.39 kernel revision from Ubuntu Mainline or install the PPA.
- Download 64-bit 11.4.
- Extract the files from the package:
sh ./ati-driver-installer-11-4-x86.x86_64.run --extract ati - For 2.6.39 support, download this extra patch: 2.6.39_bkl.patch
- Check for Big Kernel Lock usage:
cat /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/.config | grep -c CONFIG_BKL=y
If the result of this command is 0, then download no_bkl.patch as well. - then apply them:
cd ati; for i in ../*.patch; do patch -p1 < $i; done - Build your new ati/fglrx deb packages:
./ati-installer.sh 8.841 --buildpkg Ubuntu/natty - Install our newly created deb packages:
sudo dpkg -i ../fglrx*.deb - If your /etc/X11/xorg.conf is missing you will need to run:
sudo aticonfig --initial
and then reboot.
That newly created package should work for the entire 2.6.39 series.
Ubuntu 2.6.39 kernel and fglrx 8.831
For those 10.10 Maverick users with 2.6.38 or 2.6.39 (64-bit) kernels, you can get fglrx playing nicely together with X.org 1.9.
Unfortunately this new driver does not support X.org 1.10 and that leaves 11.4 users to use the open-source drivers.
Custom build procedure:
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