I was looking around and stumbled across an article about the LPI exams, which are generally considered the best of the many certs out there. That's to say, they are the toughest.

This is a collection of articles about system administration of Windows, Unix/Linux/BSD, and Macintosh computers and networks.

This seems to happen a lot - and it took several searches and many pages of reading to find the solution. This page will try to even the odds a little more.

This is a rough watchdog script to restart apache on the local machine when the website gets slow. If a GET to the url fails, or takes longer than 60 seconds, the local web server is restarted.

Having failed at using Unity, I decided to try the Gnome Shell.

Ugh. It's just as bad. And I just found out it's the future of Gnome.

Conclusion is that I've installed KDE, then ended up loading xubuntu on top of that. So it starts up with kdm, and logs me into xfce4. The themes are simple, and the design (or lack of) is restrained. They're not trying to copy Apple, or Microsoft. It looks like a cross between Mac OS 9 and Windows XP, without the obnoxious colors and toned-down gradients.

Most of the information in this post is derived from http://www.tech-faq.com/convert-word-to-pdf.html. It's posted as a service, because the code there needs some editing.

Also, a useful thread about executing OOo macros is at http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=2619.

Here's the code to automate the opening and saving of a file as PDF, using Open Office. Paste this into your standard macros.

I got hacked (more than once) and they installed a backdoor php shell. It sucked (and I must suck for allowing it to happen...

Here's a script based on the information at http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/shell-root-user-check-script.html.

It erases your history, and then tries to alter /etc/profile to stop recording history for everyone. Run it as a user and as root for the full effect.

After upgrading to a new kernel my USB keyboard stopped working. Arrgh, not again. I plugged in my spare PS/2 keyboard and started troubleshooting.

Some themes add a copyright notice using a technique also seen in hack scripts. They take the PHP code, and the base64 encode it, and gzip it.

I got a message to run modprobe vboxdrv, but didn't seem to have the vboxdrv driver.

The following command will run the script, and then keep running the script after you log out.

nohup ./somescript.sh &

For some legal reasons, Ubuntu does not ship with some important features in ffmpeg enabled. It appears that support for faac AAC encoding is stripped.

Setting up ProFTPd with MySQL isn't "hard" per-se, but the most popular tutorial at Khoosys is kind of complex.

http://www.khoosys.net/single.htm?ipg=848

It has users, groups, quotas, and a lot of accounting.  So the tables are numerous and there are a lot of queries involved.