Doug Jaworski

I recently performed a clean install of OS X Snow Leopard on my PowerMac Pro and ran into issues when trying to connect to my companies SSL VPN. While there are numerous posts found on the web, none seem to pertain to a clean install of Snow Leopard. After debugging the issue furtherI found that Network Connect was still having permission issues when trying to connect via the Network Connect client.

Here is what I did to resolve the problem:

Install NetworkConnect.dmg with the version that your Juniper SSL VPN device supports. In my case, it was 6.1

Open up Terminal and type the following commands followed by enter after each line. As you will be using sudo, you may be prompted for your password as well:

sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/juniper/nc/6.1.0/
sudo mkdir '/Applications/Network Connect.app/Contents/Frameworks'

I original found the above steps at various sites including the Juniper support forums but I was still running into permission issues. After digging further into the log files I found this and determined that there must be some sort of elevated root permission that needs to update some network settings that can only be done as a super user.

ncproxyd[19016] ncproxyd.info ncproxyd exiting status 1 (ncproxyd.cpp:92)
ncproxyd[19054] ncproxyd.error Failed to gain root privileges: Operation not permitted

To fix this you must modify the permissions of ncproxyd

chmod 4711 /usr/local/juniper/nc/6.3.0/ncproxyd

How to Install MySQL Server on RHEL 5.3

sudo yum install mysql-server mysql
sudo chkconfig –add mysqld
sudo chkconfig –level 2 mysqld
sudo chkconfig –level 3 mysqld
sudo chkconfig –level 4 mysqld

How to Set the MySQL Root User Password

mysql -u root
mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR ‘root’@'localhost’ = PASSWORD(‘yourpassword’);
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> exit

How to Create a Database

mysql -u root -pyourpassword
mysql> CREATE DATABASE yourdatabase;

Creating a User With Access to New Database

mysql -u root -pyourpassword
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON yourdatabase.* TO ‘yourusername’@'localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘yourpassword’ WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> exit

To Create a User With Fewer Privileges Limited to New Database

mysql -u root -pyourpassword
mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES ON yourdatabase.* TO ‘yourusername’@'localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘yourpassword’;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> exit

To Create a User With Access to New Database From any Host

mysql -u root -pyourpassword
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON yourdatabase.* TO ‘yourusername’@'localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘yourpassword’ WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> exit

To Create a User With Access to database from any host

mysql -u root -pyourpassword
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON yourdatabase.* TO ‘yourusername’@'%’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘yourpassword’ WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> exit

How to Backup a Database Instance From mysqldump Command

/bin/mysqldump -u username -ppassword –databases databasename >/tmp/databasename.sql

How to Restore a Database Instance From Command Line

mysql -u username -ppassword databasename < /tmp/databasename.sql

Ubuntu 9.04 Juanty has added the Ext4 filesystem. While not part of the default install, it is rather easy to get up and running, even for the novice user.

Why Ext4? Simply put, it far outperforms that of the older and very stable Ext3.

In this HowTo, I will describe how to setup the root file system with Ext4. While it is very possible to use Ext4 for /boot, i choose to leave it as Ext2.

Start the installer as you normally would by inserting the Install CD or installation method of your choice. In this aproach, we skip booting into the live CD method and go straight to the install (why take the extra time and steps).

Go through and setup as follows

On the “Prepare disk space” window, you want to select “Specify partitions manually (advanced)” and then forward.

Select the disk you want to format, on our example we have a single disk mounted as /dev/sda.

Right Click on the disk and select “New partition table” and then select Forward.

You then will have “free space”, simply click on “free space” and select “New Partition. In this method we will create our /boot partition using Ext2.

/boot does not need to be a very large partition since it basically just holds the boot configurations such as Grub.

We then need to create a “swap area” by clicking on “free space” and selecting “New partition”.

And now we create the root partition, also known as /. We will select Ext4 as our filesystem. Note, you can add as many filesystem as your system will allow, for example /var, /home, /usr, etc.. however for the sake of simplicty I choose to keep this rather simple.

And this is the end product…

Continue on with your installation as normal.

There you have it. A fresh install of Ubuntu 9.04 with an Ext4 root file system.

If you are unfortunate enough to have to use the Microsoft Live Communicator 2005 client in an enterprise (work) and you have a Microsoft Vista Desktop I found this to be a work around to the Desktop Sharing Flaw

Problem: Windows Vista does not include NetMetting and it is required for Microsoft Live Communicator to enable the Desktop sharing function.

Solution: Microsoft has release a hotfix that can be downloaded here.

More information can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927853

I found this great video developed by Jonathan Jarvis that describes in 11 minutes current credit crisis. I hope you find this as enlightening as I did.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.