Panayola – Read. Learn. Do.

Posted on February 1, 2012 - Wednesday by undan


I am working with Panayola nowadays as a content writer. It is a website for technical articles and the content is regularly updated by a team of techies.

Feel free to read your favorite topics and discuss. ;)

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RHCSA& RHCE

Posted on July 22, 2011 - Friday by undan

                


I completed both certifications in one shot today. Scored 100% in both. What could be better than that?

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HTTPS in RHEL and PHP in less than 5 minutes !

Posted on June 30, 2011 - Thursday by undan

Enabling HTTPS will give your application an added layer of security. The SSL layer will encrypt all communication that happens between the customer’s browser and your application. In this article, I am not describing things in detail about each security option. This is good enough to get started in most of the cases.

Login to Redhat Linux as user root and run the below commands to install apache ( with ssl support ) and PHP version 5. 

#yum install httpd mod_ssl openssl php5
#service httpd restart

You should be able access your server via HTTPS now using the browser like https://yourservername.domain/application/login.php . You are now using a self signed certificate for the server. Your browsers might warn you about this , but it is safe to accept it and continue.

If your server was using HTTP only and you recently upgraded it to HTTPS, Here’s a quick and dirty method in PHP to detect if your users are still using HTTP and redirect them to HTTPS. All you need to do is include this code in the start of your php file.

< ?php
$loginURL="https://yourserver/application/login.php" ;
if($_SERVER['HTTPS']){
echo <<<REDIRECT
Redirecting to ... $loginURL
<script>
window.location($loginURL);
</script>
REDIRECT;
}
?>

As you see, a little time spent can go great lengths towards securing your website and applications. Feel free to comment. :)

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Weekend Project with OpenSource

Posted on June 13, 2011 - Monday by undan

Here’s another story about how open source helped me.

I have a USB disk at home where I store all my photos, videos, movies, songs etc.  The disk is connected to a desktop computer at home and shared across the network. Making it available on network helped me to backup my laptop data also to the disk using wireless connection. So far so good.

But what about watching movies or listening to songs or viewing pictures? I can do it from my laptop, but it will be only me. What’s the fun in that? I wanted to enjoy them with family and friends in my TV in the living room. Here’s how I did it.

In old Laptop, I installed PinGuy Linux (http://pinguy-os.sourceforge.net/ ) . I also updated all softwares to the latest version.

Now the problem is that I have a CRT TV. It supports only RCA input. My laptop had a  S-Video output. I bought a S-Video to RCA Cable and connected the laptop. It did not work !. Then I bought a VGA to RCA cable , that also failed. I did some research and ended up buying a VGA to RCA Converter box from the local electronics market. It gives 640×480 resolution that is probably the maximum my TV can do, anyways.. it worked.  :)

Here’s the box.

So now, My TV shows only a part of the laptop screen because laptop is running at 1024x768 and TV can do only 640x480. Then I started XBMC , the Media Center Application. It gives a nice GUI to configure settings and also to manage the Media. I configured it to run in Window mode and dragged and re-sized the window to 640x480 resolution and placed it on the corner of the screen so that it covers fully what is shown on my TV.

Rest of the operation was simple, connected to my USB disk over network, added those files to XBMC. I also configured XBMC to show weather information and play Youtube videos.

I am now able to watch all my photos, videos and listen to songs in my USB disk via my TV. Hurray !

Wishlist :Infrared Remote for Laptop. Also a HD capable TV in future :)

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Firefox 4 Released

Posted on March 23, 2011 - Wednesday by undan

Firefox 4 is now available for download. Click here to see what’s new.

I installed it on my laptop. It has improved a lot. Specially the way tabs are organized and the visual layout overall has been totally streamlined. It is also loading webpages faster. Unlike the previous versions, Firefox 4 is using less RAM on my system.

So what are you waiting for? Give it a try. :)

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