(apple)mac geek

I helped out with sound and multimedia on Saturday at Sista2Sista but unfortunately the main speaker’s Windows laptop locked her out after 3 incorrect login attempts. Luckily I found this useful utility which let us make a bootable flash drive (works on cds too) and blanks the (98/XP/2000/Vista) password (just make sure the user isn’t using the Windows encryption facility to encrypt their hard drive, otherwise resetting the password will permanently lock them out of their files…yet another reason to keep on using Windows!).

Technorati Tags: windows, password

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Here’s a list of useful dns servers:

New SAIX DNS’s are as follows:

Hetzner’s DNS servers

A useful IP to remember is:

It’s an open recursive name server for all to use, regardless of your service provider. Always up, always accessible, always works (Thanks, Carl)

To check a dns server for a specific address:
dig @198.6.1.1 macgeek.co.za

That’s how, a few weeks ago, I found out that any mail sent via mail.tomorrowtoday.biz (a Hetzner server) was being routed to their old servers, instead of being pointed to the new servers (I’d transferred the hosting of a few domains to Media Temple). Of course, the mail wasn’t being bounced and it wasn’t being delivered (to where it should be).

revealed that Hetzner hadn’t removed their dns zones for the applicable servers. A request to them to do this worked, an elicited an apology – but didn’t do much to placate angry clients. *sigh*

Technorati Tags: hetzner, dns

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I have around 600 mb’s of html/php files I need to copy from one server to another. I can either download all of them and then re-upload, or figure out how to get the two servers to talk directly to each other. ftp doesnt offer recursive copying of subdirectories, but if my destination server supports ssh and my source server ftp, I could use this script (which needs the Korn shell). Luckily both servers have rsync installed (thank you linux!) and allow me ssh access so I ran this command on the destination server:

rsync is a very useful utility which functions excellently when used for backup. It uses an algorithm to determine what parts of a file have changed, and only sends the changed parts across (optionally compressed) which is a great bandwidth saver.

I also could have created a tar archive and copied that across (using ftp or rsync):

ftpsync is a perl script which syncronises a local directory tree with a remote one.
At some point I’ll probably get around to automating full site backups using rsync.

Technorati Tags: rsync

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