Category: tip

  • Cleaning up Google AppEngine Mapreduce Jobs

    Do you use the Google MapReduce library on AppEngine? And do you have a lot of completed tasks which clutter your dashboard? Use the JS below by pasting it into your developer console to clean them up! (use it at your own risk, no warranty is provided :-)) schedule = function() { window.setTimeout(function() { var…

  • Setting the maximum number of opened files under Ubuntu (for JProfiler)

    As I found out “on my own skin”, setting fs.file-max in /etc/sysctl.conf is a BAD idea. It can render your system useless in one step. Please don’t do it! If you did it, use the recovery mode to roll back the change. Also, currently I would only recommend doubling the limit (ie going from 1024…

  • How to save/restore iptables rules on Ubuntu?

    This might be an obvious thing to old Linux-heads out there, but it sure caught me off-guard, so there might be some use in spelling it out: iptables-save and iptables-restore do not actually save/load the iptables rules to/from an external file. You are responsible for redirecting the output of iptables-save to a file and modifying…

  • If you can’t access Windows shares…

    A small Windows tip: if your computer is part of a domain and all of the sudden you can’t access resources over the network (like shares, printers, etc), try changing your password. I observed this in several networks, and although I’m not entirely sure about the reason – I suspect that it has something to…

  • A few tips for pshtoolkit

    pshtoolkit is short for Pass The Hash Toolkit, and is a program (or rather a small collection of programs) written and released as OSS by CORE. Its basic use is to authenticate to Windows systems by passing the hash of the password – hence the name – rather than the password. Here are a couple…

  • Short tip

    PsExec doesn’t seem to work with “Simple File Sharing” under Windows XP, so you might want to try to turn it off if it fails on you.

  • (Re-)dial your connection automatically with Windows (XP)

    Currently I’m on a quest of finding configuration options to make computers easier to use. One of my recent problems was how to make sure that internet connections “just work”, especially in a dial-up kind of situation (where there are usernames and passwords involved). Here is the method that I developed for Windows XP (probably…

  • Booting FreeDOS with GRUB

    To toy around, I decided to install FreeDOS on a real system running Ubuntu. This post will document the process of adding an entry to the GRUB menu loader to boot it. Some small notes: Resizing partitions with GPartEd is somewhat funky (no global progress bar) and can take some serious time (if you are…

  • Disabling the Zoom plugin for Compiz

    I was playing around with a 8.10 Ubuntu install and I must have pressed a key combination, because the screen magnification was turned on. It was all nice and smooth, the only problem was that I didn’t want it! (BTW, almost the first thing I turn off after a fresh WinXP install is the accessibility…

  • Installing Avira (AntiVir)

    After a tutorial on installing Avast and one for AVG 8 I decided to write up a tutorial on installing Avira (the former AntiVir). Download the install kit from their website (warning! there is some upselling going on) Install the software Done! Unfortunately there aren’t any options to make the program more silent or transparent…