Paul’s Linux Blog

I thought I would share a site I found the other day called Mailinator. http://www.mailinator.com/index.jsp

The site advertises it can:

Protect your privacy and avoid spam.
Use Mailinator!
No Registration!
No Sign-up!

And it does this by allowing anyone to create an email address something@mailinator.com that spam can be sent to rather than your usual email address.

This is great for those sites that insist on an email address before going any further. It does not have a password so security is not great but it does allow a mail alias so if you create paulsliunxblog@mailinaotr.com it lets you know you can use Xccds3@mailinator.com instead then use the full name one to check your mail.

You can even emnbed the app in your own html pages.

I love it when I find a gem of a site I knew nothing about.

I know it's been a while, I have not found much to write about and have been busy at work, sounds like a lame excuses and you're probably right, howeverI have just found a new command I have never heard of before and needed to share it. I am not sure how I have missed this one in my circles, but at last we have been connected.

There have been countless times where I have needed to know the UID of disks or the file type, device name etc and spend my time typing in long commnads and looking through /dev/disk/by-xxx then I read I only needed to type one magic command and all my little one liners are no longer required.

What is the magic command well, it's a simple as:

# blkid

output:

[root@unix ~]# blkid
/dev/hda1: LABEL="/boot" UUID="662aaf16-9ec7-44e3-9161-43a0813559bb" SEC_TYPE="ext3" TYPE="ext2"
/dev/hda2: LABEL="/" UUID="0d9be1c1-3daf-4736-8224-deaea3601f1d" SEC_TYPE="ext3" TYPE="ext2"
/dev/hda3: LABEL="/extra" UUID="d63697eb-4a6e-41d0-b0ca-83a199296430" SEC_TYPE="ext3" TYPE="ext2"
/dev/hda4: UUID="7dfe75fc-9939-4210-b873-a85099703c3b" SEC_TYPE="ext3" TYPE="ext2"
/dev/hda5: LABEL="/shared" UUID="4c626dda-4614-48c2-b98c-0e74bed81ec8" SEC_TYPE="ext3" TYPE="ext2"

Thought I'd share so someone else may have there life enlightened by this knowledge.

One little niggle I have is my sound is always muted, in someways this is good but I wish it was not always the case, well it's not anymore here's the fix.

Simple fix:

As root not sudo as it did not work that way.

run:

/sbin/alsactl store

WOW, I can't believe I could not think of anything to post for so long, I have been so busy at work I neglected my blog.

Well I wish I had something of great importance to tell you but I do not, unless you count the fact that the White House website now runs on Drupal? I met the Drupal guys once at a linux exhibit, nice guys good software wish I had time to play with software like that, but unless I get rich I will not have the time to learn it, I will say though I use joomla for a while and that was good, but it has not got the stamp of approval from the president.

I have decided enough is enough and ditched the useless nm-applet manager that was always greyed out and never worked since my first update after I installed Crunchbang.

I used nm-applet on Fedora and Ubuntu but recently since I moved to crunchbang it just never worked for me. this was sad as I used to rely on VPN in the manager for my connection to work, after this broke I was left trying to figure out how to connect to my work, I ended up installing kvpn which did the job but latter moved on to a great script that automates the setup and configuration that just works for me, so well I can even browse the web and work at the same time as the routing is good too, anyway if you want to know more about VPN see my other post.

Extract of wicd man page:

Wicd is designed to give the user as much control over behavior of net-
work connections as possible.  Every network, both wired and  wireless,
has  its  own profile with its own configuration options and connection
behavior.  Wicd will try to automatically connect only to networks  the
user  specifies  it should try, with a preference first to a wired net-
work, then to wireless.

For wired connections, users have many  options  for  determining  what
network  settings  to use.  Wicd allows creation of an unlimited number
of wired profiles, each of which has its own unique settings.  The user
can  choose  to  automatically  connect  to a selected default profile,
choose a profile from a pop-up window every time wicd connects, or have
wicd automatically choose the last profile used to manually connect.

For  wireless connections, users can select any number of wireless net-
works to automatically connect; wicd will choose the one with the high-
est signal strength to try to connect.

I decided to ditch the applet manager and install wicd as follows.

Exmaple of wicd Manager.

Install WICD Manager

1) install the manaager

# apt-get install wicd

2) Configure the autostart of the manager

# cp  $HOME/.config/openbox/autostart.sh $HOME/.config/openbox/autostart.sh.bak

# vi $HOME/.config/openbox/autostart.sh

find the line that say's

# Launch network manager applet
#(sleep 1s && nm-applet) &

Comment it out and add the following lines after it

# Launch wicd network manager applet
(sleep 1s && wicd-client) &

You may wish to check the wicd demon runs as a service.

To do this you need to use a service manager such as BootUpManager aka 'bum'

or install a cmd tool like chkconfig.

I will use chkconfig for this example.

# chkconfig --list |grep wicd

To ensure wicd starts at boot up use:

# chkconfig wicd o

When you next log on you should find the new applet in your tool bar if not you can open it manually by typing:

# wicd-client.