Dec 152012
 

Since its initial introduction into the business world in 2005, Google Apps has been available to small business users for free. Even when the premium version was launched in 2007, Google still maintained a free standard version for individuals and small organizations, this was great for small website, they could have their emails managed by the Big G.

But as you can read from the official blog this has come to an end:

For Businesses, instead of two versions, there will be one. Companies of all sizes will sign up for our premium version, Google Apps for Business, which includes 24/7 phone support for any issue, a 25GB inbox, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee with no scheduled downtime. Pricing is still $50 per user, per year.

This is not doable for small websites that have their own domain but don’t need this service for 50$, so a good solution in these cases is to set up on your VPS a postfix server that can forward all the emails to another email.

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Dec 122012
 

spirits

Perhaps someone is old enough to remember the original Lemmings game, a puzzle-platformer video game developed by DMA Design and published by Psygnosis in 1991. Originally developed for the Amiga, Lemmings was one of the most popular video games of its era, the basic objective of the game is to guide a group of humanoid lemmings through a number of obstacles to a designated exit. In order to save the required number of lemmings to win, one must determine how to assign a limited number of eight different skills to specific lemmings that allow the selected lemming to alter the landscape, to affect the behavior of other lemmings, or to clear obstacles in order to create a safe passage for the rest of the lemmings.

This gameplay has been reused by many games in these years and today I want to present you the last heir of this big family : Spirits

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Dec 122012
 

Only recently I’ve started to work with Git, don’t blame me I’m mainly a system administrator not a developer, and one of the things I’ve been asked to setup is a way to have a cloned Git project shared over SSH to a particular group of person that share the same linux group.

The issue is this setting are the permissions that must be properly set so you and the others don’t end up stomping on each other when pushing changes, so let’s see how to achieve this goal quickly.

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Dec 032012
 

In a GNU/Linux system every file or folder has some access permissions. There are three types of permissions (what allowed to do with a file of any kind, directory included):

(r)read access
(w)write access
(e)execute access

There are also other “special” permissions, but for this article the basic permissions will be enough to illustrate how umask works, and the permissions are defined for three types of users:

(U) the owner of the file
(G) the group that the owner belongs to
(O) All the other users

umask (user mask) is a command and a function in POSIX environments that sets the file mode creation mask of the current process which limits the permission modes for files and directories created by the process. A process may change the file mode creation mask with umask and the new value is inherited by child processes.

In practice with umask you can define the permissions of the new files that your process will create.
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Nov 252012
 

Terminal
In the past I’ve posted an article regarding the basic usage of grep, one of the commands that I use daily at work to search a text within multiple files, or a text string in the list of running process of a Linux server, but I’ve forgot to show you a small and useful option : How to colour the output that you get from grep to highlight the text you were searching for in a long line.

This is a small option of this powerful command but can save your eyes when searching for a particular property of a Java process that is 4 or 5 lines long.

To be honest I’ve realised this thanks to an article of Alessio, posted recently on his nice blog: http://dark-linux.net and so the following is the translation by me of his article in Italian with some small addition in examples and explanations.

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