This morning, I've read many posts about passwords that are stored in our browsers. Commonly, people tend to use these stuff because first, it's easy to use, and second its defaulted to any browsers.

I use these features too. I did not have time to search for flaws and things like anyone can remotely access your saved passwords but who knows? it might be saved as plaintxt or not, it's still not formal to save passwords in the browser.

Just this morning, I spoke to one of my close friend this morning and I ask for few tips about password management and he recommended and used PasswordSafe (http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/).

It's actually easy to use and it's open-sourced. GUI is free and you can find a precompiled version of it in sourceforge.

Let me share some screenshots on things to start with...

Note: To create a new database, you will be prompted at first start of the app. Make sure you click the button "New Dabatase"

and then choose where you want to save it.

When opening your PSafe data, start PSafe and select the dropdown box, if it's not listed there then click the select button.

Also, it's safe to use the virtual keyboard. But then if you got keyloggers already swarming your system then it's recommended to do something for it.

You can also choose to view the file as Read-only.

Often, you will see a popup box "File In Use" and you have to choose Read-Only or Read-Write. Just make sure that you don't have any PSafe running in the background. You can also check this in the right-bottom side of your screen near the system time.

To add entries, you can find it in Edit > Add Entry...

Hope these few screens will help you get started. Now, I don't need to worry for keeping my password safe and secure other than trusting the browser's "Remeber password" feature which is also suffer from attacks (and the browser itself) every day.

As I review the app, all you need is there, auto-generate passwords and most of the thing you need is there. So go check the software out. If you want to find more details on this project, you may refer to this: http://www.schneier.com/passsafe.html

Cheers,

...

You might encounter an error in your /etc/apache2/error.log stating:

[Tue Feb 01 00:57:02 2011] [alert] [client 192.168.1.102] /home/cliper/lampen/.htaccess: 

Invalid command 'Header', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

This is because mod_rewrite is not loaded. In my case, I suspected that mod_headers was not enabled.

So in terminal I did

a2enmod headers

and restart apache2

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

For hosted sites, you might contact your system administrator or in your cpanel.

System: Debian

Apache ver: 2.2.9 (Debian)

...

Late yesterday, we're working on something we don't expect in magento. Looking into the problem is very frustrating because we really don't have any clue what just happened until we found out that its just a persmission problem.

This might occur to you when you want to move a magento site to other existing instance (site) of magento. If you've been to magento, you know this already. In our case, we manually copied the media folder under the root directory of magento to the target instance of magento. Now, the previous media dir has "cache" folder already since it has been running for a long time now.

This cache folder is created on-the-fly when we tried to visit product information so that when you get back, it will reuse the same pictures together with your active session in the server-side.

Now, what just happened when we transferred the pictures in the target instance using "cp -r" in linux is that it resets the permissions of the folder. So eventually, the web-server and php can't right in it.

So our quick solution is we chowned the folder to its same user of the target folder. in the example it is "user" and a group "www-data". We also chowned the folder to 777 since its not that visible to public and for us to really make sure it is writable for any users.

> chown -R user:www-data cache/
> chmod -R 777 cache/

Anytime you can adjust the permissions like change to 775 or 755. And for this problem, it works and it solved our 24 horurs problem.

...

Sometimes we want to have a dump of all our databases in mysql and restore it later to somewhere else or in the same server. here’s how...

In your terminal:

Backup database...

mysqldump -uuser -ppassword database_name>database_name.sql

where user is your mysql db user, and password. Note: No spaces should be inserted after -u and -p. Specially in -p for password.

To restore database...

mysql -uuser -ppassword database_name<database_name.sql

while we can do the above command for restoring. We can also do it safely by using the source keyword in mysql.

In terminal, do:

mysql -uuser -ppassword

When in mysql console, execute:

USE database_name;
SOURCE database_name.sql;

Make sure you change to the path of the file database_name.sql where it resides. Otherwise, you will get an error similar to: Failed to open file 'database_name.sql', error: 2

Also, we can back-up a table instead of the whole db.. you can do:

mysqldump -uuser -ppassword database_name table_name>database_name.sql

and should be able to restore it too.

Excluding files/folders using tar is very straight forward.

Assuming we have a directory tree similar to this in Linux

-/home/cliper/
            |--- folder/
                     |--- file1
                     |--- file2
                     |--- folder

and we want to exclude file2 and folder to the archive, then command would be like:

tar –czpf filename.tgz --exclude=/home/cliper/folder/file2 --exclude=/home/cliper/folder/folder