I’ve just been tweaking with SSH. One of the common things that I have to do is reconfigure my SSH tunnels while I’m working remotely to gain access to desktops and the like.

In this situation, the cumbersome but easiest way always seemed to be to disconnect and change the command line. However, having used Putty I was fairly sure that there must be an easier way.

AND THERE IS!

Changing the port forwarding in ssh is as easy, if not easier, than in Putty.

While you’re connected to the host, type a tilde (~) and an uppercase C.This will open the ssh shell. Just type in your port forwarding command like you would when you are typing in the command line option. eg:

-L 3389:localhost:3389

to tunnel an RDP socket to the machine that you are connected to.

And that’s it! If you’re stuck, type a question mark (?) and press ‘Enter’. This will show you the options available.

I had a shocking error of judgement this morning when I accidentally deleted some of my son’s photos from his toy digital camera. They were sitting on my desktop, and I was on a cleanup… These were a casualty of my cleanup-fest and obsession with the shift key.

Thinking on a Windows vein – I thought that I should be able to backup the files easily and seamlessly. But I don’t want too much aggravation. A quick scoot around the Ubuntu forums, and I found TimeVault.

TimeVault is the equivalent project to Windows’ Shadow Copy service or Apple’s Time Machine. Basically it’s a completely transparent backup that allows you to recover files easily on the system you are working on.

I’ve downloaded the .DEB and forced the installation (there’s no binary x64 version at the moment). I’ll see how it all goes and report back!

When you’re setting up a Windows Vista system on your network for the first time, you might find that adding printers becomes an issue because the UAC prompt appears.

Unfortunately, if you do this with a logon script – then the logon will hang until the script timeout expires. Worse still, if you’re using Group Policy Preferences to set up the printer it will cause the logon to hang indefinitely.

If you’re experiencing this problem – then you need to make sure that the Trusted Printer settings are either configured correctly, or disabled so that printer installation behaves as it would in previous versions of Windows such as 2000 and XP.

Firstly, you’ll need to open the Group Policy Management console, and navigate to the OU which contains the user accounts that are likely to add printers and edit the policy.

Open User Settings >Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Printers.

To prevent Vista from ever prompting to install the printer drivers, simply disable the Point and Print Restrictions setting. If you need to control where printers can be installed from then you need to edit the Approved Servers setting instead.

If you’ve used group policy preferences, make sure that you’ve set the Run in logged-on user’s security context option.

Once configured, you should be able to log on with a user account that automatically adds the printer without a hitch.

Once you have your domain and group policies set up, it can become frustrating to constantly have to remember to move a new computer into the correct OU.

Luckily in Windows 2003 and above, you can set a default OU:

redircmp ou=ComputersOU,dc=mydomain,dc=com

Remember to replace the path with your own domain’s OU path. Also, your domain has to be running in at least Windows Server 2003 native mode – otherwise you will receive an error:

Error, unable to modify the wellKnownObjects attribute. Verify that the domain functional level of the domain is at least Windows Server 2003:
Unwilling To Perform
Redirection was NOT successful.

To change this:

• On the server go to Administrative Tools > Active Directory Domains and Trusts.
• Right-click on your domain name, and click on Raise Domain Functional Level.
• Set the domain level to at least 2003

Now you should be ready to go!

Today, I was looking at my printer queue and realised that Claire had tried to print something from the internet to my work printer. This meant that unless I went to the office – it would not print. A problem.

Because Claire had decided to use my laptop rather than one of the desktops, I was set up for Linux and believed that I could solve this problem someone in a very tekky way.

A quick squint at the internet found Linux Commando’s How to move print jobs from one printer queue to another.

Perfect!

So, to break it down – here’s what you do. Let’s say that you’ve printed to printer B, but you meant to print to printer A, this is what we do.

Step 1

Find the print job number in the queue. The easiest way is at the command prompt

lpq -P printerB

This will show a list of jobs:

printerB is ready and printing
Rank    Owner   Job     File(s)                         Total Size
active  john    180     12 Steps to a Success with Your 182272 bytes

Now we can see that your print job is 180. Great.

Step 2

So I want to move that job to printerA:

sudo lpmove printerB-180 printerA

That’s it. Now if you check the queue for printer A:

lpq -P printerA

You will see the print job printing out. Hurrah!

I’ve set up a Wordpress site for a client and have had no end of troubles trying to get the site to behave – however there seems to be a constant problem of Wordpress hanging.

Looking further into it – I discovered that the feeds in the Dashboard were making the browser and site hang. There is likely to be an issue tied into the host / browser / Javascript.

Anyway, if you find that you are having the same problem, follow these directions:

1. Restart your web browser (if it isn’t already closed)
2. Beofre visiting your blog, open up the settings and disable javascript. (IE / Firefox / Opera Instructions)
3. Open up your blog site and log on in the normal way.
4. On the Dashboard panel, you’ll see that there are now a number of panels that state they require Javascript – great!
   
5. On each widget – click on the configure link. Delete the contents of the RSS feed URL and then click on Submit
6. Once done, you can turn Javascript back on in the broswer settings. You’ll see the widgets appear with errors on them.
   
7. Now just go to the top of the page and click on Screen Options. Disable the widgets that show an error message and all will be right with the world once again!

It’s a bit of a pain, and I haven’t managed to get to the bottom of the problem as I am never in charge of hosts where the problems lie.

However, this workaround will at least get you going with your blog without any more hassle!