Internet Services from KKoncepts

If you are running an IPCop firewall (or similar firewall - Debian and Ubuntu you can install this program) and need to check who is taking up all your bandwidth, there is a command line utility in IPCop that will do this for you - iftop

Log into ipcop using ssh as root and run iftop - It is shows the ip address that uses the greatest bandwidth at the moment and since it started. There is no man page in ipcop - you can try this Iftop manual page

The other day - when I was starting up my Kubuntu machine - It reach the Kubuntu logo and starting flashing and not booting. After several reboots, I discovered the problem - I had a key (numeric pad 5) stuck in down position and it was causing the flashing and the inability to boot. Unsticking the key solve the problem.

Ubuntu Lucid comes with Thunderbird 3.0.4 which has to use a beta version of lightning 1.0. lightning 1.0 is not available in the Lucid repository. You have to download the extension from the Thunderbird site:

One of the things I do quite often is make a clone of a Ubuntu server vdi image that I made in the past so that I can do some testing on a fully setup Ubuntu server image. When the testing is over, I would normally delete this image. Using this clone image, I make a new Virtual Box machine with a bridge network - as I would normally want to access the server from my host machine as a server.

KNetworkManger currently has a lot of problems in Kubuntu Jaunty. As a result, I prefer to use Network Manager (nm-applet) than the KDE equivalent. One problem is that nm-applet uses the gnome keyring which is not run automatically by KDE. This means that I get asked for my login password twice - once by kdm and secondly by the gnome keyring when nm-applet runs.

I needed to run a script on my Ubuntu machine daily. Since the machine is used as a desktop and  I turn it off when not in use, cron is not suitable as the machine may not be on at the specified time. So I decided to use anacron instead. The advantage of anacron is that you do not specify a fixed time but instead specify vague times - hourly, daily, weekly or monthly.Anacron will run the script when the time is due  - or if the computer is off - the next time the computer is turn on.

I had an interesting remote case today. The machine concern had a DVD drive that Windows did not see.
I first tried the solutions found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060:

Today I had an interesting case. Somebody was sending 7 pdf attachments from his Thunderbird email client to his finance office. The finance office uses Outlook 2007. When they received the email with the 7 pdf attachments, the attachments were shown in-line within the email and there was no way for him to save the attachments. This is not a problem if the attachments are short but these were long with many pages (all together 36) and so ithe person receiving it had problems. The same email was received by me correctly when he sent me the email together with a "help".

Recently I needed to change the look of an in-house Mediawiki site to look more like the theme of the rest of the local intranet. The instructions on the mediawiki site were not that clear. But in the end I discovered that it is quite easy to do:

It is actually quite easy to move a Thunderbird profile to a new machine. All you have to do is:

1. Copy the profile folder (together with all sub-folders) over to the new machine.
2. Tell Thunderbird on the new machine where the copied profile is

Thunderbird is now setup on the new machine.But there are problems.