In Windows XP, the Show Desktop shortcut by default is installed to the quick launch bar. If the Show Desktop icon is missing from the Quick Launch bar, how? How do i restore the icon?

Here is a simple method to recreate the Show Desktop shortcut

• Go to Start -> Run
• type in notepad
• Copy the following contents to Notepad

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

• On the File menu, click Save As, and then save the file to C:\Documents and Setting\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\  as “Show desktop.scf”. TheShow desktop icon is created on your desktop. (Note: Your actual user account name goes to where it said “username”)
• Now the Show Desktop icon should reappear on Quick Launch

I realize that emptying the trash in OS X can be a long process, especially If you have lots of items in your trash . Below is the screen shoot the status of empty trash after 30 minutes.

Is it any faster way to empty the trash? Since Mac OS X is Unix-based graphical interface operating systems, i decided to empty trash from command line. After i list down the list of available files and folder in home folder via command line, i found that there is a folder .Trash . I decided to remove the .Trash folder. It took around 15 seconds to remove it. After that, i try to check back the trash on Dock. I realize the Trash already empty.

Below are the steps to empty trash via command line:-

• Launch your terminal by double click  /Applications/Utilities/Terminal
• Enter following command to empty trash

$ sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash/*

Please take noted that this command won’t delete files that appear in your Trash from external hard drives, other partitions, etc.

Those files are stored at /Volumes/NAME_OF_DEVICE/.Trashes/USER_ID where USER_ID is your user ID. (Usually 501 on a single user system)

To remove that, you need to below command

$ sudo rm -rf /Volumes/*/.Trashes/501/*

If you have any others way to empty trash faster in Mac OS X, please share with me

Customer called in complain that he fail to create desired email address using Parallels Plesk Panel. He keep on getting below error message:-

“Unable to update the mail account properties:mailmng failed: MEAOPO.Mailbox.AddMailbox failed for name=youremail  and domain yourdomain.com [yourdomain]

According to him, he able to create any others names except that one.

This error can happen when a mailbox of the same is already created  or the e-mail address that was once an alias to another mailbox, but was removed.

To fix this you need to log in remotely to your windows server where the Plesk is installed, and browse to “C:\Program Files\Parallel\Plesk\Mail Servers\Mail Enable\Config\Postoffices\<your domain>\”.

You’ll find 3 files there, called “default.mai“, “mailbox.sav” and “mailbox.tab“. Open each one with notepad or wordpad, or another text editor, and find every line that says “info@domain.com” (this is the alias you once created, but are now trying to remove completely, in order to create the mailbox).

Besides, you also need to open the auth.tab file from the Mail Enable ‘config’ directory (C:\Program Files\Parallels\Plesk\Mail Servers\Mail Enable\Config\)  to find the email address that you wish to create and delete it from the auth.tab file.

Final step that you need to do is delete the mailbox from the server. To do that, just go to the mailbox directory (C:\Program Files\Parallels\Plesk\Mail Servers\Mail Enable\Postoffices\[yourdomain]\MAILROOT\). You will see the list of mailbox in this folder. Try to find the mailbox with the email name that you wish to create and delete it.

Once deleted you can re-add the mailbox through plesk Panel web interface. Now you should be able to create the email address that your wish to create without any error.

If you have any others way to solve this problem, please share with me.

Recently i do Server patching on my Centos Server. When i perform yum list updates, i found that there are few packages which i do not want patch. Eg, php version. So, in these situations it is useful to force yum to exclude certain packages from being updated under CentOS.

To do that, just edit configuration file at /etc/yum.conf. After that, you need to define list of package that you wish to exclude from update or install.

Note: This should be a space separated list. (Shell globs using wildcards * and ?) are allowed).

Below are the steps:-

• Open /etc/yum.conf file, enter:

vi /etc/yum.conf

• Append the following line under [main] section, enter:

exclude=php* perl*

• Below is the example of my /etc/yum.conf

[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum/$basearch/$releasever
keepcache=0
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
exactarch=1
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=1
plugins=1
installonly_limit=3
exclude=php* perl*

#  This is the default, if you make this bigger yum won’t see if the metadata
# is newer on the remote and so you’ll “gain” the bandwidth of not having to
# download the new metadata and “pay” for it by yum not having correct
# information.
#  It is esp. important, to have correct metadata, for distributions like
# Fedora which don’t keep old packages around. If you don’t like this checking
# interupting your command line usage, it’s much better to have something
# manually check the metadata once an hour (yum-updatesd will do this).
# metadata_expire=90m

# PUT YOUR REPOS HERE OR IN separate files named file.repo
# in /etc/yum.repos.d

• Save and close the file. You can now use the yum command as usual but certain package will not install

One of our customer forgot his Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 server root password. He request us to reset his root password. Below are the few simple steps that i did to reset the root password.

• First thing i have to do is to reboot the server and enter to the single user mode. Once you reboot the server and wait until the GRUB menu screen come out.Select the desired kernel you want.

• Press the ‘e‘ key to edit that entry.

• Use the arrow keys to navigate to the kernel line (for example: kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.x-x ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quite)

• Add the argument ‘single‘ to the end of the line and then press ENTER. (for example: kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.x-x ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quite single)

• Press the ‘b‘ key to boot in to single user mode.

• You will then be presented with a shell prompt similar to the following:

                           sh-2.05#

• To change the root password, just  type passwd root

• You just enter the new password twice

•  After change the password, you just reboot your server.

• Now you should be able to login to your RedHat Enterprise Linux server with the new root password.

Below are the list of commands needed when using Ubuntu:

Command privileges.

sudo command – run command as root
sudo su – root shell open
sudo su user – open shell as a user
sudo -k – forget your password sudo
gksudo command – sudo visual dialog (GNOME)
kdesudo command – sudo visual dialog (KDE)
sudo visudo – edit / etc / sudoers
gksudo nautilus – root file manager (GNOME)
kdesudo konqueror – root file manager (KDE)
passwd – change your password

Command Network

ifconfig – displays information network
iwconfig – displays information from wireless
sudo iwlist scan – scan wireless networks
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart – reset the network
(file) /etc/network/interfaces – manual configuration
ifup interface – bring online interface
ifdown interface – disable interface

Commands Display

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart – reset X (Gnome)
sudo /etc/init.d/kdm restart – reset X (KDE)
(file) /etc/X11/xorg.conf – show Configuration
sudo dpkg-reconfigure – reconfigure xserver-xorg-phigh – reset configuration X
Ctrl+Alt+Bksp – X display reset if frozen
Ctrl+Alt+FN – switch to tty N
Ctrl+Alt+F7 – switch back to X display

Commands for Service

start service – service to start work (Upstart)
stop service – service to stop working (Upstart)
status service – check if service is running (Upstart)
/etc/init.d/service start – start service (SysV)
/etc/init.d/service stop – stop service (SysV)
/etc/init.d/service status – check service (SysV)
/etc/init.d/service restart – reset service (SysV)
runlevel – get current runlevel

Commands for Firewall.

ufw enable – turn on the firewall
ufw disable – turn off the firewall
ufw default allow – allow all connections by default
ufw default deny – drop all connections by default
ufw status – current rules and
ufw allow port – to allow traffic on port
ufw deny port – port block
ufw deny from ip – ip block

Command for get System information.

lsb_release -a – get the version of Ubuntu
uname -r – get kernel version
uname -a – get all the information kernel
df -h – displays filesystem disk space usage for all partitions (in Megabytes(M) & gigabytes(G))
free -m – displays the amount of free and used memory in the system in megabytes.
top – command displays information on your GNU/Linux system, running processes and system resources, including CPU, RAM & swap usage and total number of tasks being run.

Password protecting your Excel Worksheet can prevent others open your works with your permission. To allow only authorized users to view or modify your data, you can help secure your entire workbook file with a password.

To do it, just follow below steps:-

• Open your Excel workbook, on the File menu, click Save As.

• On the Tools menu, click General Options.

• Do either or both of the following:

• If you want users to enter a password before they can view the workbook, type a password in the Password to open box, and then click OK.
• If you want users to enter a password before they can save changes to the workbook, type a password in the Password to modify box.

•  Click OK.
• When prompted, retype your passwords to confirm them.
• Click Save.
• If prompted, click Yes to replace the existing workbook.

If you have any other method to protect Excel Spreadsheet, please share with me.

Recently when i launch Internet Explorer on my Windows XP machine, it keep on pop up an error message “The requested lookup key was not found in any active activation context”. I tried to perform Windows update, the Internet Explorer also prompt the same error message. I tried to ignore the error message, but the Internet Explorer will quit automatically.

So, i tried to do research on Internet regarding this problem. Actually a lot of Windows users facing the same problem. The problem is come from the IE 7/ IE8.  To solve this problem, you have to reinstall the IE7/IE8.

Below are the steps:

• Enter Add/Remove Programs (Start > Settings > Control Panel)
• Find Internet Explorer 7 or Internet Explorer 8
• Click Uninstall
• Reboot your Windows
• Re-Launch Internet Explorer (now back to 6)
• Run Windows Update again to upgrade to latest version on Internet Explorer

I think this kind of problem only happen on Microsoft product. So, don’t expect too much on Microsoft product…hahaha.

If you have any others tips and tricks to solve this problem, please share with me.

By default, you can watching YouTube videos on iOS devices.  But you unable to download it and watch later.

There is an apple app called MXTube that allows you to download YouTube video for offline viewing. Besides, it also allow you to stream the youtube video. But this cool apps is not available in apple store. This free apps only available in Cydia store. So, you will need to jailbreak your iOS devices in order to install MxTube from Cydia store.

To install MxTube

• launch Cydia store

• Search for MxTube

• After that, press on Install button to install it

Download Movies with MXTube

• It is very easy to use it. First you just Search for YouTube videos inside MXTube application.

• After that, just click on the video you want to download and select the quality.

If you have any others cool apps, please share with me

Recently i just deploy OCS Inventory NG (Open Computers and Software Inventory Next Generation) to track my IT assets. OCS-NG collects information about the hardware and software of network machines that running the OCS client program (“OCS Inventory Agent”).

In my network environment, i have machine that run on Windows and Mac OS X.

In this tutorial, i just show how to install OCS Inventory agent on Mac OS X machine. You can download the latest OCS Inventory agent installer from OCS Inventory official website. I did try to install the latest version of OCS inventory agent for Mac but it doesn’t work. So, i decided to use the older version of OCS inventory agent which is version 1.1. This version work fine for me in Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.6.

Let’s start with installation of a Mac OS X agent. Download the Mac OS X agent from here and unzip the file. Once the file has been extracted, double-click on Agent_MacOSX_1.1.pkg to start the installation. During the installation, you just follow instruction from installation wizard and click continue to move forward.

Once the installation finished, now you have to configure your Mac OS X machine to communicate with OCS Inventory Server. To communicate with OCS inventory server, you have to point your OCS inventory agent point to the OCS inventory server ip address or domain name.

Here are the steps:-

• launch your terminal
• edit OCS inventory agent configuration files by enter following command

 sudo nano /etc/ocsinventory-agent/ocsinventory-agent.cfg

• Change the default server name ocsinventory-ng to your server ip address or domain name

server=192.168.0.2
logfile=/var/log/ocsng.log
delaytime=30

• After change, just save the file.

Now the final step that you have to do is to force the OCS inventory agent run. To do it, just enter the following command in your terminal.

sudo /Applications/OCSNG.app/Contents/Resources/ocsinventory-agent

Now you can login to your OCS inventory server web GUI. You should be able to see your Mac machine information appear on the web GUI.

If you have any others tips and trick on deploying OCS Inventory agent on Mac OS X, please share with me by leave your comment here. I will really appreciate it.

P/S: Thank you to those who have developed OCS! This is an excellent tool!