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This article is incomplete and was first written in December 2006
for the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/351).

This is a small written note on the Firefox extensions that are practically very useful in our business and that should not be forgotten. Web Developer Very good extension adding a lot of testing features to your browser Firebug JavaScript console/debugger Snapper Allows you to take screenshots of what's going on in your browser Selenium IDE Allows you to capture a

This article is incomplete and was first written in September 2006
for the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/343).

An example on how to activate NAT on a Debian box (on Etch and up). First, activate IP forwarding in /etc/sysctl.conf. Then, you need to activate NAT itself in /etc/network/interfaces:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 192.168.1.254
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        network 192.168.1.255
        up iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o $IFACE -j MASQUERADE

There you are.

This article is incomplete and was first written in July 2006
for the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/342).

IPv6 is still not widely accepted and even less used.

This article is incomplete and was first written in July 2006
for the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/341).

To do a slideshow among virtual desktops 0 to 6 with FVWM:

for i in `seq 0 6`; do `FvwmCommand "GotoDesk 0 $i"; sleep 2`; done

This article is incomplete and was first written in June 2006
for the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/339).

On Debian, an infrastructure is in place in directories /etc/cron.* to extend and improve the crontabs.

Why ?

Usually, crontabs are managed at the user level, which can start crontab -e to edit its own or crontab -l to just list it.

This article is incomplete and was first written in June 2006
for the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/338).

To automatically clean the thumbnails generated by Nautilus, and who never get cleaned by GNOME itself and can really fast occupy a large part of your disk space, I setup a cronjob like this in /etc/cron.d/clean-gnome-thumbnails on my Debian:

#
# Clean GNOME thumbnails files
#
# Every day, at 22h.
0 22    * * *   root    find /home/*/.thumbnails/ -type f -atime +90 -exec rm {} ;

This cronjob would remove thumbnails older than 90

This article is incomplete and was first written in June 2006 
for the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/336).

This is a procedure to upgrade a Debian Sarge GNOME Desktop PC to Debian Etch. First, make sure you are not using devfs. If you are using udev, or no device manager daemon, then you are ready. Also, I did not test upgrade from a 2.4 kernel, only 2.6 to 2.6. Make sure all your packages belong to well-known apt sources, otherwise, you will probably have to fix things by hands later.

This article was first written in May 2006 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/335).

Supported document types

Here is the impressive list of supported document types in the MIRA system.

• e-mails
• Word
• Excel
• PDF
• TIFF
• HTML
• ...

Supported input methods

Here is the impressive list of ways of entering documents into the MIRA system.

• IMAP (selecting which folders to get)
• SMTP
• SMB/CIFS (put or get)
• FTP
• Web URL re

This article is incomplete and was first written in June 2006
for the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/337).

To require authentication of parts of a webserver using PAM and Apache. That way, you can require a user or users of a group to enter a valid username and password to access some parts of your website using PAM, the default authentication infrastructure on most Unices. To do this, you need first to install the appropriate PAM authentication module for Apache.

This article was first written in May 2006 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/334).

Basically, moving a CVS repository itself is not really difficult. Let's assume first that we don't use the pserver mode of CVS, which is known to be weak with respect to security. We use then the SSH transport to access the CVS server, which we strongly recommend. On Debian, the CVS repository is located by default in /var/lib/cvs. At install time, a debconf question asked you where to set it.