Shami's Blog

Sysadmin, Because Even Developers Need Heroes

Ubuntu 10.04

2010-05-02 by Mohammad H. Al-Shami

When Ubuntu 9.10 came out I was very eager to try it, but sadly I was very disappointed. So when I was downloading 10.04 I wasn’t really expecting anything. I’m glad I was wrong.

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Delete All Messages From A POP3 Account

2010-04-21 by Mohammad H. Al-Shami

Here at the office, we host a few domains with Verio. Not my choice, and I’m not happy with it. We also host some mailboxes for one of those domains with Verio. I got a message from Verio support saying the mailboxes for that domain are occupying around 1GB of space, and that we need to delete some of them.

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My Experience With The Motorola CPEo 400 Wimax CPE

2009-11-10 by Mohammad H. Al-Shami

Where I live we have no proper DSL (512Kbps max), GSM signals are weak. Sometimes I have to stick my head out of the window just to be able to make a call. Even when I got my Wimax account the indoor CPE kept disconnecting every few minutes. I finally managed to get my hands on an outdoor CPE which made things much better. Typical for someone living at the edge of the world (West Amman).

The Motorola CPEs act as network gateways, they connect to the Wimax network and do NATing for you. That’s nice for a home network, less stuff to configure and less clutter.

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VMware Remote Console Firefox Plug-in And Arrow Keys

2009-06-30 by Mohammad H. Al-Shami

VMware remote console was working properly for me when I was using Ubuntu Hardy. After upgrading to Jaunty the arrow keys stopped working inside the remote console. Seems some people face this problem even under windows.

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Lighttpd, Joomla, And Clean URLs

2009-06-22 by Mohammad H. Al-Shami

So I’m working on a new web server but I don’t want to use Apache since it’s a virtual machine. Had some trouble with the rewirte rules but I think I got them

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Google Chrome On Ubuntu

2008-09-05 by Mohammad H. Al-Shami

I came across this guide about installing Google Chrome under Ubuntu. It is somewhat slow, slower than Windows and much slower than Firefox but it still works, well, kinda. You have a few problems with fonts, as well as sites that don’t work properly with Chrome yet. I’m sticking with Firefox for the time being, but at least I have an option for those sites that aren’t compatible with it.

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Slow Browsing Under Ubuntu

2008-08-23 by Mohammad H. Al-Shami

EDIT: This post only covers IPv6, please check the update post which covers IPv6 and Firefox

Today when I rebooted to my Windows installation which I very rarely do, I noticed that browsing under Windows feels much faster than under Ubuntu. After booting back to Ubuntu I noticed the “looking up domain.tld” part was taking a lot of time, which seemed a little odd.

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Microsoft Keyboard Function Key Fix

2008-07-14 by Mohammad H. Al-Shami

I’ve owned a Microsoft MultiMedia Keyboard 1.0A for years now. It’s a well belt keyboard to say the least. Only one problem though, the “F Lock” key. As a Linux user I have no use for the “Special” keys Microsoft added to the keyboard, and the button always starts turned off, no way to fix it.

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FreeBSD, Postfix, Dovecot, and Active Directory

2008-05-25 by Mohammad H. Al-Shami

A while back one of my clients had an unpatched qmail server configured with local system users, it was set up in a collocation long before I took over. After having to listen to a lot of complaints about slow internet connectivity I found out that 40-50MB attachments were very common. Another thing I didn’t like about this set-up is the fact I had to maintain 2 password databases; An Active Directory for local user login and a shadow file for mail. So a local set-up with Active Directory as a back end was needed.

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Surround Sound Under Ubuntu Hardy Heron

2008-04-27 by Mohammad H. Al-Shami

Been using Ubuntu Hardy Heron for about a month now, and I have to say it rocks, the best Desktop Linux so far.

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About Me

Dev gone Ops gone DevOps. Any views expressed on this blog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.