Ugo's Blog

At work we have been using Borland's Starteam for a while for our SCMS (Source Code Management System).  I don't know it is good or bad, as we have simple team, but when I asked for additionnal licences, I found out that their prices are very high: 1 Named user: 750$, 1 Concurrent user: 3900 (discounted by 50% at the moment I asked for a quote).  And add to that 22% yearly maintenance cost. As we already started using Subversion for other projects, we decided to move from Starteam to Subversion for all of our projects, but our concern was of course how to import all the project versions from Starteam to Subversion.  Thanks to a nice company named Polarion, it is possible with their svnimporter tool http://www.polarion.com/downloads/svn.php .  This tool is available to migrate from other SCMS to Subversion with support for CVS, PVCS, VSS, ClearCase, MKS and Starteam. It took me some time to figure out how to run the tool (which is java-based).  At first I jus...

Very nice tool for database queries: http://dbeaver.jkiss.org/ .   Freeware Multi-platform Supports any database having a JDBC driver No install needed (java-based)

During the week-end, the server on which I'm hosted at nosupportlinuxhosting has been compromised using a known security issue with Cpanel.  The staff at nosupportlinuxhosting reinstalled all the software from scratch, which is good.  However, all data was deleted in the process, including the backups.  The staff told me that in such an exploit would have compromised the backups anyway.  They told me to have local backups, saying that we should not rely on server-side backups and to take a backup of my site every time it changes using the cpanel interface.  But... when you're hosting a forum, the site changes everytime someone add or edits a post. So I though that I would give up trying to make them give me a solution to automate the backup process.  It was quite easy because rsync is available in the shell they provide.  And SSH.  So what I did is to create a cronjob in the cpanel' interface that looks like this: /usr/bin/rsync --include="...

We did a lot of research to get Joomla! CMS to work behind an Apache httpd reverse proxy.  It looks like Joomla! needs to know how you called the site in your browser's address bar, so this directive must be used: ProxyPreserveHost On There might be othe tweaks that I can't think of that were necessary, but I do remember that this one gave us a lot of headaches.

My laptop will celebrate his 7th birthday in a few days (Dell D800).  It is not very powerfull, but has been quite reliable (I change the hard drive once, that's it).  I've always used Kaspersky to protect this computer, but I knew it was expensive on resources.  Since this laptop is limited in cpu power, and, especially, memory (1 GB RAM), every upgrade made it worse.  And I recently updated Kaspersky Internet Security to the 2012 version and it killed my laptop.  Well, not totally, but made it almost unusable.  And I had a few problems in the upgrade.  I think I had problems with all my Kaspersky upgrades.  This time, it cut my network connection (Wow, now it's secure, but useless!), so I had to uninstall it and reinstall.  Once this problem solved, my laptop started hanging for no reason.  So one night I had enough and decided to uninstall it and try Microsoft Security Essentials.  I don't like Microsoft that much, but this solve...

I just started using No Support Linux Hosting .  It is cheap, but you must have a minimum of knowledge to be able to use this hoster.  Since I don't need hi-performance, redundant servers or super support staff, I thought I'd give it a go.  It looks nice up to now.  Here are the details: It is 1$ a month and that gives you access to the cpanel control panel One domain name hosting (you have to register it, though) 1 GB of disk space 10 GB of monthly bandwidth transfer 25 mail accounts 1 mailing list 6 sub-domains 3 MySQL databases Daily backups DNS management 2 easy-install packages: phpBB and Wordpress Shell access via SSH! Just for the shell access, it is worth it for me, as I often have to do some http or smtp testing from "outside".  I'll probably post again in a few weeks or month to comment on this hoster.

Plutôt comique... Je viens de recevoir un appel d'une personne anglophone (# Privé), qui voulait me parler de mon ordinateur Microsoft Windows. Elle voulait parler au propriétaire de l'ordinateur, disant que son entreprise est certifiée en tant que techniciens professionnels par Microsoft. Après quelques questions, elle commence son processus (qu'elle lisait, évidemment): Saviez-vous que votre ordinateur pourrait être infecté par des virus, des trojans, et d'autres programmes malicieux qui ne sont pas détectés par des anti-virus conventionnels, blablabla...? L'ordinateur en question est-il allumé? Oui Je vais vous fournir des directives que vous pourrez faire avec moi qui vous permettra de vérifier l'état de votre ordinateur et constater à quel point il est infecté. Ahhh, là ça commence à être intéressant. Je décide d'inverser les roles... cette dame n'est pas tombée sur le bon gars cette fois-ci: D'où appelez-vous? Elle a marmonné le nom...

Very funny... I just got a call from someone (Unknown #) who was interested about our Microsoft Windows computer. She wanted to talk to the owner, saying that they were certified Microsoft Technicians. After a few questions, she entered in her process (that she was obviously reading): Did you know that your computer could be intected with malware, virus, that can be undetected by conventionnal anti-virus... blablabla , then a series of questions/answer: Is the computer on at the moment? Yes I'll give you directives to scan your computer and you'll see how infected your computer is Ahhh, now, it's getting interesting! At this moment, I decided to switch roles: Where are you calling from? She mumbled the name of the company, I could't understand even after two repetitions What is your phone number? We don't have one, we operate on the internet Well, you're talking on a phone, you must have a phone number right? Our phone number is for our technicians on...

I got my results for both RHCSA and RHCE exams: pass! I've done the RH300 training earlier this months and it was a great experience.

Have you ever wondered "I want to do this command on an BrandX switch, but I can only remember the BrandY way". Since I've been playing with switches from these 3 manufacturers, I was glad to find this document .