Dave’s Ramblings

An easy method to create an expanding list using javascript. I've incorporated the code into some server status pages to show or hide tables. Effective and clean looking.

Borrowed from http://www.cs.wcupa.edu/~rkline/Web/JavaScriptExamples.html

Having multiple servers to entertain me and for website and application development, I found that entering passwords continually while switching from machine to machine very tiring. This enables cron jobs to run backups, and a mryiad of other automated tasks via an encrypted connection, thus not exposing my passwords over the network, some of which crosses wireless segments using such thigns as FTP, instead scp keeps things nice and garbled for anyone thinking to listen in.

This is not only for Linux, but all Unix type boxes and even Windows! Yes, I said windows! I'll publish another article to explain how to accomplish this one a windows machine.

Here's a quick and dirty tutorial of how to set up shared SSH keyss to authenticate to each server automagically, no more entering passphrases!

Login to the first server (harry in this example) and create your key

Now scp the rsa key to the destination server (case):

and presto.... you are done, now ssh to case

root is instantly authenticated from harry because of the shared key.

Now continue to replicate the process for each server/workstation/user that you wish. This can make life much easier for you however there is one drawback, see the note below.

NOTE: once setting this up even changing root's password will not resecure they connection or change the 'key' nor will it stop access from any machine with a shared user and key. In simpler terms much the same way giving away a key to your house, the one who posesses the address and key to the hosue may enter at any time, the only way to disallow access is to change the lock or destroy the key (in our world, the authorized_keys file).

Happy hacking.

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While optimizing my databases and such I noticed that I had been making a fatal mistake with my WordPress database; marking comments as 'spam' through the comments moderation panel. This only marks the comment_approved feild in the row for that comment in the wp_comments table from '0' to 'spam'.

In over a year I'd accumilated over 12K rows just for spam that needed to be parsed each time a particular post/page was to be displayed, and dragging down the performance of my blog. Instead of marking spam as such, deleting them completely seems to be the route to take.

A quick query to run against your database in a utility such as phpMyAdmin follows to purge the tables of those entries for you;

Some tweaking may be needed far your particular setup, I'll be submitting this as a feature request to the kind folks at WordPress or if time permits creating a quick and dirty plugin.

Quick and dirty - How to create a "tarball".

By now everyone has seen the wonderfull myproject.tar.gz, I say wonderful as to extract the 'project' or whatever is contained in the tarball can be accomplished with a single command and viola, all the files are extracted with all of thier subdirectories and files in tact, complete with unix permissions.

So you'd like to backup your website or project for distribution, easy enough

tar everything up
[server]$ tar -cf myproject.tar myprojectdir myotherprojectdir
and gzip it
[server]$ gzip myproject.tar
the result is will net you myproject.tar.gz all ready to do as you will with.

Explaination the -cf switch is simply create file, if you like you can use -vcf to display a verbose listing as tar moves along to ensure you are getting the intended files and directories.
myprojectdir myotherprojectdir are just the directories you which to include, this list can be one, two, or more diectories.

gzip will compress your .tar file and leave you with the resulting .gz, so of you want to retain a copy of the .tar be sure to make a copy before gzip.

As mentioned earlier, to extract your shiny new tarball once you have it in the desired directory, you can do this with one command,
[system]$ tar -xzvf myproject.tar.gz

Easy

How to create a DHTML expandable lists.

Try the following example: