Dee Double Dub

This week Linux Journal magazine has been running a contest and the prize is a one year free subscription to the digital edition of their magazine.

All you have to do to enter is head over to Linux Journal and watch this week’s series of Tech Tip Videos (the ones marked “This is Tech Tip Video Contest Week (March 9 – 13) at LinuxJournal.com!”). Throughout those videos they sprinkled secret letters. You just have to find the secret letters over the course of the week and unscramble them to produce a linux related phrase. Once you have unscrambled the letters, head over to the contest submission form and submit it to win a free subscription.

Hurry! The contest ends at 11:59:59PM EDT, Friday, March 13 2009. That’s tonight!

Here’s the official contest announcement from Monday.

Here is a step by step walkthrough that I developed recently for setting up the Nagios NRPE plugin to monitor remote hosts. This setup was performed on a host running Ubuntu Server 8.04.1. This walkthrough is based on the official nagios documentation and will result in a NRPE plugin installed from source since the latest version of nagios and its plugins are not available in the Ubuntu 8.04 repositories.

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Occasionally when I am setting up a web server I want all interaction to occur in a secure channel encrypted with SSL. I like to leave standard HTTP access available so that the standard http:// url still brings you to the proper site, so I redirect HTTP traffic on port 80 to an HTTPS session on port 443. Since I only do this once in a while, I always have to go searching for the proper method to do it, so I’m posting it here for a quick reference and to share it around.

The way to direct HTTP traffic to HTTPS is with the mod_rewrite URL Rewriting Engine module in Apache. Here is the process that I used earlier today on an Ubuntu 8.04 Server with Apache2. read more »