kuch nai

Black Magic/Charm on pitch by Sri Lanka Sadhu before the CWC match betwe...

2011-02-26T12:21:00.000-08:00

Mein Tenu Samjhawan

2011-02-01T13:21:00.000-08:00

Free Conference Call service privders

2010-02-14T01:26:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Free Conference Call Service Providers

After discussing Low Cost Conference Callsand Video Conference Calls last week, as promised we today present Free Conference Call Services which will save you huge amount of money on conferencing services.

This post is mainly for SOHO or small business or Individual users who do not like to spend $$$ on Conference Call Services. If you are a professional business users with more than 50-100 employees, we strongly suggest you use one of the Low Cost Conference Calls services.

With the advent of Web 2.0, Conference calling has become virtually FREE. Easy Access number availablity, IP Networks and SIP based telephony has made it easier than ever.

Lets look at conference calling companies which offer free conference calls services. This list has web and non-web based services.

1) FreeConferenceCalls.com: A leading free conference call provider from USA. They offer hassle-free conference calls.

Features:
a) 6 hours per conference, including recording, and there is no limit on how many hours you wish to conference each month.
b)Offer is on continous basis. No deadline for free conference calls.
c) You can record your conference calls.
d) Service available anywhere in the world as long as you can dial their conference bridge number based in USA.

2) CalliFlower (iotum): This is one awesome Free Conference Call service. Developed by fellow blogger, Alec Saunders. It works via Facebook App or calling their conference bridge numbers.

Features:
a) Your phone number is the personal PIN that seamlessly connects you to every call from anywhere in the world.
b) Conference Bridge numbers avilable in USA and France.
c) Powered by reliable Truphone network.
d) Record your conference calls.

3) Rondee: We discovered Rondee when they were not even ready with their free conference calls service. However it seems now their free conference call service is going on well. Its web based free conference service.

Features:
a) Upto 100 participants can use free conference call service.
b) Works via Conference Bridge number and personal PIN (issued when you create a new conference call).
d) Ability to set up a conference call on future dates.

4) OoVoo: Oovoo is a video conference and free conference call service however you need to download their application. We found OoVoo has clean interface and can beat many similar conference call softwares at ease.

Features:
a) Multi people conference
b) Works on Windows and Mac

5) Foonz: Foonz is a basically a group conference call service. When you start a group call, foonz instantly “invites” people to join your call by sending a text message to their cell phones. Every participant gets a Foonz number which they need to dial in order to get connected to the free conference call.

Features:
a) Easy to use
b) Works via Mobile/Landline
c) Connect as many participant as you can.

6) Other Free Conference Call Services: The good old Skype still does great conference calling. You can also use Paltalk or WebEx Free Trial to make conference calls. WebEx has many more features.

If you know any free conference calls service not discussed here but worth making to the above list, do let us know.

Voip predictive dialer-Build your call center

2010-02-14T01:24:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Voip Predictive Dialer - Build your Call Center

Today, I will be discussing about Call centers and how small businesses can run a call center with voip predictive dialer. I have always been fascinated by how VOIP can empower some of the industries, especially the upcoming call center and BPO industry which relies heavily on "Making and receiving calls". A fraction of delay or missed call can cost some $$ to the industry. The Industry is no more in the seed stage and it has grown faster than industry analyst expected.

Although call centers are still costly to maintain, operate or even outsource. Big companies can afford to pay the price but the small companies are often stuck with in-house calling facilities. The in-house call facilities are however not up-to the mark. However with Voip Predictive dialer the picture might be different in near future. People can build their own call center with a easy to use Voip predictive dialer.

Now you must be wondering What is a Predictive dialing? Predictive dialing is simply automating the outbound dialing process to effectively manage your calls with little or no manual intervention. Voip predictive dialer basically does the same thing with VOIP technology as backbone.

some of the common Features in Voip predictive dialer:

Multiple campaigns can be run simultenously.
Auto-Transfer calls between agents (based on availability)
Auto-dialing to customers
Auto-Scanning Voice Mail system and auto-dialing the missed call numbers
Call Logging, recording and management
On top of this, the predictive system can be easily integrated with your exisiting CRM system making it easier to control and store data related to your customers. There are many providers who also offer predictive dialing bundled with their CRM products . Although if you buy a standard Voip Predictive dialer, it will cost you anything from $300 ++, which isn't really a great cost considering you will be able to manage your customers more effectively and data mining could be more relevant.

Most predictive dialers provide most robust, feature-rich, and innovative predictive dialer on the market today. Built on the latest technologies, this cutting-edge call center solution combines sophisticated VoIP predictive dialing capabilities with a comprehensive lead management system. So, call centers of all sizes can achieve immediate value – operating more efficiently and cost-effectively, while boosting sales, market share, and profits.

Imagine running your business with your own call center like only Cisco or Nortel can think of. You can do it yourself.

In my next series of this article, I will be comparing voip predictive dialer available in the market based on their cost and features.

Tringme voip wins most innovating startup of 2009

2010-02-14T01:18:00.001-08:00

Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Tringme VOIP wins most innovating startup of 2009 at NASSCOM

At NASSCOM, Tringme once again proved that they are the most happening VOIP startups in India by winning a prestigious most innovative startup of 2009 award.

Tringme as you all know is one of the first Indian VOIP Provider to launch a web based VOIP service and a Flash VOIP softphone. Tringme has also been a great friend of VOIP Guide besides me being friends with Tringme Founder. Tringme now handles over a million calls per day across Business and personal users using Tringme technology platforms such as Flash VOIP platform and VoicePHP, a framework for IVR.

We would like to congratulate Tringme for the award and this really means we now have strong expectations from Tringme in 2010. Hopefully we will see more innovation from Tringme in the VOIP space especially in India.

1-800-Free international calls come to an end?

2010-02-14T01:17:00.001-08:00

Friday, February 5, 2010
1-800-FREE-411 Free International calls come to an end?

A Lot of people have emailed and commented that 1-800-FREE-411, the ultimate Free International Calls service is not working since today.

If you have been using 1-800-FREE-411, then do let us know if you can still connect or they blocked specific countries to call from their network. I would again like to remind people that abusing a free international calls service is totally wrong. You should respect the VOIP Provider and should only call within the limits like say 5-10 mins each day. This would ensure that the VOIP Provider is able to monetize the cost incurred for the free international calls service.

I request everyone to test the service today and report your feedback. I really hope 1-800-FREE-411 is alive and will continue to offer free international calls coz it was one of the best out there with high quality.

MetroPCS voip service review and how to call india

2010-02-14T01:14:00.003-08:00

Tuesday, February 9, 2010
MetroPCS VOIP Service Review and How to Call Indian Numbers

Those of you using MetroPCS Unlimited Calls Service in USA, are mostly satisfied with their service. However we received complaints from users that they can't all specific Indian numbers. Our Reader, Kunal has sent some tricks to make all India numbers work again!.

If you are using MetroPCS, then you must read this. Kunal, a VOIP Guide reader in USA reports that he has been using MetroPCS since last 2 months from Atlanta GA.

He is quite statisfied with the service as it connects unlimited to any landline in india including Airtel, Reliance and Tata Indicom, being BSNL by deafult :)

Now those of you complaining that MetroPCS can't connect to Mobile numbers. Read this ultimate trick used by Kunal to bypass that block.

You can dial India mobile number using the following pattern:

1. New Airtel Numbers starting with 900.....
2. Reliance GSM starting with 90....
3. Tata docomo

Basically you can dial any Indian number for free where 2nd digit is "0" like 90xxx 12345, 80xxx 12345 as MetroPCS treats these numbers as landline and connects:). This more of loophole in their system.

Do let us know if that works and we all have Kunal to thank for finding this out and sharing with VOIP Guide.

Enjoy!

display dd progress during dd in ubuntu

2010-02-10T00:31:00.001-08:00

Display dd progress during dd in ubuntu linux
with 2 comments

Started a dd but wondering what the progress is? I haven’t found a way to do a verbose mode for dd, but this command seems to do the trick.

Lets start off by creating a dd of /dev/sda1

mnk0@tree:~# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=my-dd.img

We’ll need to find the process number of our dd which can easily be done with the following command.

ps -ef | grep dd

we’ll get something like this

root 31733 31268 54 10:44 pts/0 00:01:55 dd of my-dd.img

Now we can run our command to find the status of this dd. Open another terminal session.

kill -SIGUSR1 31733

and looking back at our dd page we should see dd dump out a status of its current progress.

mnk0@tree:~# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=my-dd.img
12574781+40555 records in
12601304+0 records out
6451867648 bytes (6.5 GB) copied, 224.634 s, 28.7 MB/s

disk imaging with netcat and dd with ubuntu linux

2010-02-10T00:29:00.000-08:00

Disk imaging with netcat and dd with ubuntu linux
with 3 comments

Want to create a disk image of a system but write it on another hard disk? This can easily be done with the help of netcat and dd.
For this example you will need two computers connected on the same network, and enough room on one machine to hold your disk image

Destination Machine
So we’ll start off this example by preparing our destination machine to listen on tcp port 4444 via netcat. The port is arbitrary so you can really pick any port that is not being used. Just have to make sure that its the same on both ends.

root@tree:~# netcat -l -p 4444 | dd of=remote-machine.img

Source Machine
Next we’ll start a dd on the source machine and pipe it to netcat on port 4444

root@leaf:~# dd if=/dev/sda1 | netcat destination-machine-ip 4444

Now sit back and wait for your image to be done, when it’s finished dd will print out its status something like

NOTE: you will have to push CTRL+C to cancel out after this is completed, as the netcat session will still be active.
root@leaf:~#
30820468+71926 records in
30867456+0 records out
15804137472 bytes (16 GB) copied, 739.395 s, 21.4 MB/s
^C

If you want to find out the status of dd during the copy theres a couple of ways to do this, open up the system monitor in Ubuntu Linux, and it should tell you the transfer rate. Launch iostat or ifstat through a terminal. Invoke a command from terminal to get dd to display the current progress .

Viola, we’ll now have a dd image of our disk or partition. I like to verify the exact size of the file matches the size output from fdisk.

Destination Machine
root@root:~# ls -la remote-machine.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15804137472 2010-02-04 10:53 remote-machine.img

Source Machine
root@leaf:~# fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 15.8 GB, 15804137472 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1921 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

change Time zone

2010-02-03T09:55:00.001-08:00

How To Change Time Zone Of Linux System
Well, system administrators who work on remote Linux servers find it hard to change the time zone for the server. Yeah, you read it right, not time but time zone. I came upon the problem yesterday and figured out simple way to cope the problem. Here are easy steps to change time zone of the Linux based machine.

/etc/localtime file contains the information about time and time zone. First of all rename this file by running the following command :

mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime-ori

Once you have renamed this file, now go to /usr/share/zoneinfo directory. This directory contains the list of all time zones and every zone has a folder here. Now create a symbolic link from the appropriate timezone to /etc/localtime. Example I changed the time zone of my machine to the Candadian by creating the symbolic link of the zone.

ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Canada/Central /etc/localtime

Okay, now run the following command to synchronize the hardware clock of your system.

/sbin/hwclocl –systohc

Thats all, Cheers!

using a swapfile to increase the swap space on your system

2010-02-03T09:53:00.000-08:00

Using a swapfile to increase the swap space on your system
with one comment

This can be a very handy function if we want to use a file, instead of a partition, and with modern filesystems the performance is almost on par with using a dedicated partition for your swap area.

1. Using dd lets make a zero’d file for the swap
dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1048576 count=1000

This example would create a swapfile of 1 gig using a blocksize of a megabyte (1048576).

2. Make file as a swapfile
mkswp /swapfile

3. Activate swapfile
swapon /swapfile

4. Verify that our swapfile has been activated
swapon -s

We should see something like this in the list ..

Filename Type Size Used Priority
/swapfile file 9999992 0 -2

If you want to have this a permanent solution, then adding the entry to fstab would probally be a better idea,
open up /etc/fstab in your favourite editor and add the following line.

/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

Data recovery the quick and easy way

2010-02-03T09:49:00.000-08:00

Data recovery the quick and easy way with ubuntu desktop linux 9.04
without comments

Ever had a failing disk? Using some hard drive recovery tools we can make salvaging our valueble data something possible.
Using dd_rescue we are going to make an image of the hard drive onto a reliable storage area, then we can run whatever filesystem recovery utilities we want.

The beauty of ddrescue is that it is fully automated and will rescue all the blocks that it can read successfully on the first pass, and with any bad blocks it will come back and retry as much as possible.

Install ddrescue tools
sudo apt-get install ddrescue

Connect the failed disk to your system
By either plugging the drive directly into system, or using one of those usb enclosure or slotted drive device you’ll need to have your failing hard disk connected and unmounted before we can begin.

sudo dd_rescue /dev/sdb disk-image.img

mnk0@earth:~$ sudo dd_rescue /dev/sdb disk-image.img
[sudo] password for mnk0:
Summary for /dev/sdb -> disk-image.img:r: 0.0k, succxfer: 228352.0k
dd_rescue: (info): ipos: 229376.0k, opos: 229376.0k, xferd: 229376.0k
errs: 0, errxfer: 0.0k, succxfer: 229376.0k
+curr.rate: 26249kB/s, avg.rate: 28391kB/s, avg.load: 13.5%

We can now mount this image on our system and take a look at the files.

mount -t ext3 -o loop disk-image.img /mnt/tmp

Using Cisco Vpn client with ubuntu

2010-02-03T09:44:00.000-08:00

Using Cisco vpn client with Ubuntu Linux Desktop
with 5 comments

Configuration
Download and install the Cisco vpn Client. im using vpnclient-linux-x86_64-4.8.02.0030-k9 at the time of this article.
(if u need it send me an email). unpack, and install in my installation i opted out of the option for starting as a daemon so i start it manually everytime.

mnk0@tree:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/vpnclient_init start

Using my PROFILE.pcf file
Then we can copy our Cisco VPN Profile over to the profile directory.

mnk0@tree:~$ cp PROFILE.pcf /etc/opt/cisco-vpnclient/Profiles/

Now we are ready to connect to our connection. Note we dont add the .pcf extension to the profile we’re going to use

mnk0@tree:~$ /etc/opt/cisco-vpnclient connect PROFILE
Initializing the VPN connection.
Contacting the gateway at 4.23.45.21
Contacting the gateway at 4.23.45.21 (balancing)
User Authentication for PROFILE...
The server has requested the following information to complete the user authentication:
Username [mnk0]:
Passcode []:
Authenticating user.
Negotiating security policies.
Securing communication channel.
Your VPN connection is secure.
VPN tunnel information.
Client address: 10.10.10.46
Server address: 4.23.45.21
Encryption: 256-bit AES
Authentication: HMAC-SHA
IP Compression: None
NAT passthrough is active on port UDP 4500
Local LAN Access is disabled

Exiting
When we are ready to exit, just hit CTRL+C on your terminal session, and shutdown the daemon.

mnk0@tree:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/vpnclient_init stop
mnk0@tree:~$ Done

LogRotate – A Great Built-In Linux Utility To Handle Large Log Files

2010-02-01T12:20:00.001-08:00

LogRotate – A Great Built-In Linux Utility To Handle Large Log Files
Logrotate is the linux’s utility which lets you rotate or remove the large log file. If you monitor log files of mailserver or system logs then you might have noticed that after some particular time, old log file is renamed and compressed to something like .old etc. This is because most of the server level logs are configured to be compressed via logrotate utility.

‘The configuration file for logroate is located in /ect/logrotate.conf. Here you will find the files which should be rotated on the particular. Most of the logs are rorated on weekely or monthly basis. But if your system generates too many logs then you can change the configuration of the logs in this file to be roated daily.

Okay, let me show you standard contents of logrotate.conf file to clarify the concept.

———

# see “man logrotate” for details
# rotate log files weekly
weekly

# keep 4 weeks worth of backlogs
rotate 4

# create new (empty) log files after rotating old ones
create

# uncomment this if you want your log files compressed
#compress

# RPM packages drop log rotation information into this directory
include /etc/logrotate.d

# no packages own wtmp — we’ll rotate them here
/var/log/wtmp {
monthly
minsize 1M
create 0664 root utmp
rotate 1
}

# system-specific logs may be also be configured here.

———

Now the above mentioned contents are rotating /var/log/wtmp, file only. Now if you wish the system to rotate /var/log/messages file on weekely basis then add the following lines to /etc/logrotate.conf file.

——

/var/log/messages {
weekely
minsize 1M
create 0664 root utmp
rotate 1
}

————

Lets be more clear: the weekely means, system will rotate logs of /var/log/messages file on each week, minsize means that system will rotate logs if the size of the file is greater than this. Other parameters are default one, leave them as it is.Cheers!

ubuntu Ibex 8.10 with ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT

2010-01-29T23:48:00.001-08:00

Ubuntu Ibex 8.10 with ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT
with 19 comments

So, I finally decided to crack out the new Ubuntu release, and the installer seemed to be successfull and it was time to reboot the machine which is where things went terribly wrong. My login screen was a blank screen.

So I then pushed CTRL+ALT+F1 to get to a shell, and noticed that by default the ati opensource video driver in xorg.conf wasnt happy at all.

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "vesa"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
Device "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

So after googling a bit, i discoverd that support for this Radeon Series of cards was updated in later releases of the fglrx driver. Which can be enabled in 5 easy steps.

1. Remove all references to the older fglrx driver.
sudo apt-get remove xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx-kernel-source

2.Update the sources list
sudo apt-get update

3. Reinstall the newer drivers
sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx-kernel-source jockey-gtk xserver-xorg-video-radeon

4. Enable the fglrx drivers
sudo aticonfig --initial

5. Restart gdm
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

We can now verify that we have the right driver installed by using fglrxinfo.
osamad@root:~$ fglrxinfo
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT
OpenGL version string: 2.1.8087 Release

And voila, I then was able to launch the ATI Catalyst Control Center from the menu system Applications > Accessories
> ATI Catalyst Control Center , and used that to enable my dual monitors.

After that I enabled the desktop effects and installed the compizconfig-settings-manager
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

System > Preferences > Compiz Config Settings Manager to enable my desktop cube! And now am a happy camper!

using find to search files in your system

2010-01-29T14:10:00.003-08:00

Using find to search files on your system
without comments

Looking for something? Find has all the power you’ll need to locate any file or directory on your system, as long as you know the name of what you’re trying to find.

First you’ll need to launch a terminal session, and then we’ll dive into this by typing the following command.

find / -name 'my-file.txt' 2>/dev/null

Breaking down our ‘ find ‘ command

‘ / ‘ - is our search location, since we’re using / it’ll search everything on our root partition
‘ -name ‘ - says we’re gonna search by name, and we can type anything in here (* wildcard)
‘ 2>/dev/null ‘ - will tell the shell to pipe all errors to dev/null meaning they wont be displayed

access a microsoft windows share from the bash in linux desktop

2010-01-29T14:05:00.001-08:00

Access a microsoft windows share from the bash terminal in Ubuntu Linux Desktop
without comments

Setup
Ever want to access a windows share from your terminal? Well using ‘ mount ‘ and cifs/samba this is a snap.

Make sure you have smbfs/cifs support, on ubuntu linux distributions you can simply type
apt-get install smbfs

Now we need to make a directory on our hard disk where we can mount our windows share.
mkdir /mnt/location
Mounting Windows Share
Now we\’re ready to mount the filesystem on our newly created directory (/mnt/location).

Mount with cifs
mount -t cifs //server-ip-or-name/share /mnt/location -o username=user,password=pass,domain=DOMAIN

Mount with smbfs
mount -t smbfs //server-ip-or-name/share /mnt/location -o username=user,password=pass,domain=DOMAIN

Clean Up
When finished with our windows mount, we should exit the directory, or close any windows that are accessing it, and then unmount the Microsoft Windows NTFS share by using the following series of commands.

cd /; umount /mnt/location

bypass firewalls using aah an tunneling

2010-01-29T13:32:00.001-08:00

Bypass firewalls using ssh and tunnelling.
with 2 comments

Ever wanted to access a service behind a firewall that has port 22 open for ssh connections? This is a common setup known as using a jump-box for security access and to be successful at this we your firewall must allow port 22 traffic to your ssh jump-box. We can test our if port 22 is open by typing the following line.

telnet ssh-jump-box 22

If all is good then we should see something like
Trying 192.168.1.200...
Connected to ssh-jump-box.
Escape character is '^]'.
SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_4.7p1 Debian-8ubuntu1.2

In this example we’re going to create a tunnel for port 3389 windows rdekstop and we’ll begin by creating a local loopback port 3390 that ssh will tunnel from myMachine to myFireWalledMachine on port 3389

ssh -L 3390:server-behindFirewall:3389 user@ssh-jumpbox -N

Now we can access the service on port 3389 that was previously inaccessible through the firewall by pointing our connection to the local loopback port we just created through ssh. In this case we\’ll use rdesktop to hit that port as we are trying to remote desktop to a firewalled machine.

rdesktop localhost:3390

reset the mysql password

2010-01-29T00:34:00.001-08:00

Reset The Forgotten MySQL Password
If you already know the mysql password, then it is not a big deal to set a new password. Simply run the following commands in sequence and these will change your mysql password.

use mysql;
update user set password=PASSWORD("") where User='root';
flush privileges;
But what if you have forgotten your mysql root password, here are the simple steps to retrieve it.

service mysql restart
First of all stop the mysql service by running the following command :

Now Run the following command and it will start the mysql in the background without any previlliges.

/usr/bin/mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables &
Now you will be able to login into mysql without any password. Once logged in, set your new mysql password. Cheers!

2010-01-28T10:35:00.001-08:00

How to check and monitor cpu core temperatures in Ubuntu
without comments

Ok, so this weekend i decided to take the plunge and get myself a nice new box! I decided to go with Intel Core 2 Duo e5200 , and an Asus P5QL-E mother board, so anyways got everything mounted up and just installed Ubuntu Ibex 8.10 .. so now i wanna see what the temperature ratings are, and this is a snap with Ubuntu.

Open up a terminal and type
sudo apt-get install lm-sensors sensord

After installation of those packages we have to setup our sensors with our cpu
sudo sensors-detect

you’ll have to actually type Yes for all the next part, which is just asking about loading modules and drivers, for your cpu

So after all that we’ll have a little bit of editing to do, sensors will come up and tell you that you need to make some changes to /etc/modules, and will give you a snippet to paste into the file

sudo gedit /etc/modules

and then paste the code into the bottom of the file, for example this is what mine said

# Chip drivers
coretemp
#

Reboot and your all set, open up a terminal and type sensors to see your core temps! if you want to be real slick type watch sensors .. so you can watch the updates in the core temps every 2s .

2010-01-28T10:33:00.001-08:00

play mp3 in ubuntu

2010-01-28T10:31:00.001-08:00

Using linux like a pro with mplayer, find & play mp3 files from command line in Ubuntu Linux 9.04 Jaunty
with 3 comments

Save precious CPU and memory by using mplayer to play mp3s, also keep your playlist file up to date with all your mp3 media files.

First and foremost we need to have mplayer installed, if your on a ubuntu-debian based system use the following command
to install mplayer, if not then you can download the appropriate packages and install them.

apt-get install mplayer

Lets make a home for our script file, and set the appropiate permissions

mkdir ~/scripts; touch ~/scripts/playme.sh; chmod +x ~/scripts/playme.sh; gedit ~/scripts/playme.sh

Paste the following code into your new script file, if you keep your Music files in a different location then change the variable musdir to match your setup.

#/bin/bash
# VARS ##########################################
tmpdir='/tmp'
musdir='/home/osamad/Music'
filename='playlist.m3u'
# CODE ##########################################
find $musdir -name '*.mp3' -o -name '*.ogg' 2>/dev/null >> $tmpdir/$filename
mplayer -playlist $tmpdir/$filename -shuffle -loop 0 -radio volume=80

Using find we build a list of all our mp3s, in this case we have multiple types of media files we want to play so we can specify that by adding the -o -name flags and add them in.

-playlist ;flag we set the playlist file we just created
-shuffle ; enables shuffle mode
-loop 0 ; enables loop 0=forever
-radio volume=80 ; set the default volume to 80% (use * or / to adjust when playing)
RunTime
Push ALT+F2 or launch from a terminal

./scripts/playme.sh

MORE
To find out more information, or to customize your mplayer settings

man mplayer

Create a custom launcher and run your script from the gnome-panel

2010-01-28T10:29:00.001-08:00

ubuntu monitor settings...

2010-01-28T10:27:00.001-08:00

Was having the issue of not being able to save my dual monitor configuration with a default installation of 9.10. The xorg.conf seems to be unable to be parsed by nvidia-settings tool, so to get around this we can run nvidia-xconfig to reset the config file to something that it can work with.

sudo nvidia-xconfig

after that

gksudo nvidia-settings

and we can save to xorg.conf successfully.

Create VPN In Linux Using PPTP (PoPToP)

2010-01-24T13:13:00.001-08:00

Create VPN In Linux Using PPTP (PoPToP)
VPN (Vitual Private Network) is very much in the market now. VPN is fix to many problems with respect to network and many IT professionals are using it to overcome various issues. Lets see how we can create our own VPN in Linux using PoPTop (pptp) Protocol.

PoPTop is a utility which creates VPN. Simply run the following command to install poptop (pptp) on Linux based system:

yum install pptp

Once the installation is over, you will find its configuration files located in the /etc directory. There are four configurations which we need to take care in order to work with pptp. Here are they:

/etc/modules.conf
/etc/pptp.conf
/etc/ppp/options.pptp
/etc/ppp/chap-secrets
Lets see what each file contains and what settings are required in these configuration files.

/etc/pptp.conf

It contains the default configurations of the pptp, like the executable name ctc. The default settings of this file work and no change is required except any exceptional situation.

/etc/modules.conf

It contains the list of the installed modules w.r.t to poptop. So the default configurations of this file should be kept untouched.

/etc/ppp/chap-secrets

This is the one file which should be changed, here you actually create the users for accessing this VPN. Here you specify the username and password and then these username and password can be used to connect to this VPN. Here is my chap-secrets file. I have created one user with name aun and raza12 and here are contents of my chap-secrets file:

——————-

# Secrets for authentication using CHAP
# client server secret IP addresses
raza * raza123 *

—————————–

Once done with chaneges, run the pptp service by following command:

service pptp restart

That’s it. You are done with creating Linux VPN. Connect to it by using the main IP of the server and with username and password you created in the chap-secrets file as instructed above. Enjoy!

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Posted in All about Linux.

Tagged with Linux VPN, Poptop, pptp, VPN.

3 comments
By aun – December 12, 2009