Articles

When I installed Open SuSE 11.4 yesterday I thought that the fonts used in GTK applications like Firefox and Thunderbird were really ugly. In my KDE settings I have specified that I want it to use my KDE fonts in GTK applications but this setting seems to have no effect. To fix this I installed gnome-control-center from the repository and changed the fonts to 8 point Liberation Sans and Liberation Mono. Now the GTK applications look just as good as the KDE ones.

The excellent BitNami LAMP stack contains its own MySQL, which is started automatically and used by PHP. If you for some reason want to use the MySQL that is installed in your host system you can do the following changes to your stack configuration:

Step 1 - Prevent the stack control script from starting MySQL

Edit the file ctlscript.sh in your LAMP stack root directory. and change the line

MYSQL_SCRIPT=$INSTALLDIR/mysql/scripts/ctl.sh

to

Since I couldn't get the KeyMan utility that came with my Cherry keyboard to work with SuSE 10.3 I had problems getting the Cut, Copy and Paste keys to work. I tried using the KDE KHotKey service instead, and by defining input actions that map these keys to Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V I could use them in most applications.

Starting with Java 1.6 though, this isn't enough. Seems like Java can't handle mappings made for KHotKeys. To get the keys to work with Java applications I had to do two things:

When you define a JDBC connection pool in Glassfish (AKA Sun Java System Application Server 9) and JDBC resources for it, you usually include a user name and password as pool properties.  You may think that this information is available only to deployed applications, but in fact anyone with IP access to the servers ORB port (3700 by default) can fetch the entire datasource definition using a simple JNDI lookup. If the database server is also accessible, then you have a security problem.

If you have a QNAP you may want to run some scripts regularly. Editing the crontab seems to work but your changes don't survive a reboot. There is however a fairly simple solution:

During boot, the QNAP will mount the partition /dev/mtdblock5 in /tmp/config and execute the file autorun.sh in this directory, if it exists. The following steps show you how to create the file with the commands necessary to add a crontab entry:

First, mount the partition, cd into the config directory and edit or create the autorun.sh file:

Boiling an egg is easy. Boiling the perfect egg however, requires extensive research. After many months of boiling, testing and statistics gathering I've concluded the following:

OK, you have created a great web application and now you want to expose it to the world, or perhaps a limited subset of it. You probably don't want to allow full access to your application server so you need a proxy.

The apache proxy module (mod_proxy) can be used with a simple configuration like below:

<IfModule mod_proxy.c>