How to enable USB support in VirtualBox on a linux host

There is a common problem to get USB support running in VirtualBox on a debian or ubuntu linux host system. If there is a Windows XP (maybe also other system) installed as the guest system, the USB devices will be shown in the VirtualBox menue – but they are disabled. The devices are recognized but [...]

Mounting an ISO image with linux

By using linux, you are able to mount an ISO image by the loop network device, which is quite easy. You can do this only as user root. Follow the steps below:
Change to user root:

# su

Mounting the ISO image to a directory or your choice, for example /mnt

# mount -o loop disk1.iso /mnt

How to uninstall VMWare from a Linux System

To uninstall the VMWare Software from a Linux System is quite easy. VMWware comes with a pearl script for this. Just open a console and change to user root.

localhost:/# su
localhost:/# vmware-uninstall.pl

Make your linux prompt more colorful

Changing the color of your linux prompt is a quite easy thing. Different prompt colors may be useful to distinguish different machines more easy, or just for fun.

export PS1=’\e[0;32m\u\e[0;32m@\h:\e[0;0m\w\e[0;0m$\e[0m ‘

Just put the lines above in your /etc/profile and in the ~/.bashrc

Free webhosting control panels

If you’re going to become a webhoster – the control panel will be one of most important decisions. If the control panel doesn’t work reasonable, you will loose your customers.
So, it’s not easy to choose an apropriate system. In this article I will present a few free webhosting control panels, which runs on linux. [...]

ProFTPd authentification with MySQL

It’s very helpful to use the mysql authentification for proftpd. Especially if you manage a quite number of users. So you’re able to use a central database which manages the accounts.

Editing “message of the day” – motd

The message of the day is a nice thing to show informations to a user, who is connecting via console. You can put funny ascii figures there, or important informations and how-to’s.
The message will be shown prompltly after authentification:

Changing ssh port to improve security

For security reasons, it’s advisable to change the ssh standard port 22 into something else. So you will get less attacks to sshd. This improves the security for your server. Furthermore, you should block root from connecting via ssh.
Open your /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Changing the port:

# This is the sshd server system-wide configuration file. See sshd(8)
# for [...]

Scripting a firewall with iptables

IPTables is a text based frontend for the ipchains kernel module. The ipchains support is compiled into most kernels of todays distributions. With iptables you don’t have to use a graphical tool. So it’s very suitable for scritpting.
First thing to do is installing neccessary packages, for Ubuntu / Debian:
apt-get update
apt-get install iptables
When the package is [...]