Rob’s Random’s

For various reasons, when I needed to VPN together a few peers/networks, I chose to use OpenVPN. It’s simple and very powerful.
The other day I had the need to revoke a VPN key, so I set out to work out how to achieve this. OpenVPN documentation here I come!
Running through the OpenVPN documentation, [...]

From time to time, you may have needed or wanted a package that wasn’t in the Debian repositories. Well, no need to worry. Here is a simple way to create a Debian Package from the Source files.
Firstly we need a package called ‘checkinstall’:
# sudo aptitude install checkinstall
Then we extract the source and do [...]

Yesterday I had this problem, a problem where multiple users were sharing files, and when creating files the group permissions did not have a w flag set on the files.
Now I’m sure there is a better way to resolve this problem, maybe with ACL’s, but for this problem I used umask to change the default [...]

I’ve had an issue with my eeepc of late with Debian Lenny where it will not boot when running without the AC. This is due to a kernel bug, which will be in one of the latest kernels. But for now we need a work around.
As I searched around today, I found a [...]

Executing a mysql query form a shell script is as easy as:
# mysql -u root select * from table;
> EOF
Which returns the following:
id name
1 Rob
2 Jim
3 Bob

So today I had the need for PHP 5.2 on a RHEL5 System. RHEL5 comes with 5.1. So I did some googling, and I came across someone who has been building a few packages for Centos and RHEL4/5.
These can be found at http://www.jasonlitka.com/ and click on Yum Repository.
Edit: Beware if you are using [...]

This morning I wanted to play around with a rails applications, one that required an older version of rails. I have rails 2.1.1 installed for a project that I will be working on. So what I needed to do was freeze a specific version of rails for use with that applications. Here’s [...]

So this week I start a rails project with a mate. I have been playing around with it for a while now, but really need to start using it properly (ie doing some proper dev). I will also be playing with Puppet some more, creating some templates for use with a few boxes manage as [...]

The other day I installed an MMS Application called (yeap, you guessed it) SwirlyMMS.
This application gives you MMS capabilities on your iPhone, which it natively does not support *shakes fist at apple*
If you have an iPhone and want MMS capabilities, install SwitlyMMS, and here are the Australia Carrier Settings for it (taken from the Swirly [...]

In a project that I’m currently working on, we have the need for custom checkboxes and radiobuttons. We used one called crir which worked until we needed support for Safari.
So today, we moved over to a neat little prototype extension called Protocheck. This works great, but we needed a few extra mods to [...]