AcetoneISO, is a feature-rich and complete software application to manage CD/DVD images. Thanks to powerful open source tools such as fuseiso, AcetoneISO will let You mount typical proprietary images formats of the Windows world such as ISO BIN NRG MDF IMG and do plenty of other things.

- From AcetoneISO Homepage

The use of AcetoneISO is pretty easy and much similar to DAEMON Tools. Just give AcetoneISO a try, and save time of burning a CD/DVD

P/S: By the way, you can find some interesting information of how to mount a ISO file at UbuntuForums.

Today, my task is configuring a MySQL server to allow connections from remote computers. The problem I has met is that although port 3306 on the router was already opened, users from internet still could not connect to my MySQL Server. Here is my error message:

tuyent@local:~$ mysql -u tuyent -p -h remote-computer
Enter password: 
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'tuyent'@'local' (using password: YES)

Well, here is my solution:
- Step 1: Double check that the port 3306 is already opened.
- Step 2: Open MySQL configuration file (/etc/mysql/my.cnf), comment the line

# bind-address            = 127.0.0.1

- Step 3: Restart the MySQL server

$ sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart

- Step 4: Go to mysql command line and grant permission for user

mysql> grant all on *.* to 'tuyent'@'%' identified by 'password';
mysql> grant all on *.* to 'tuyent'@'localhost' identified by 'password';
mysql> flush privileges;

Note: Remember to grant permission on both from localhost and from anywhere (’%’ indicator), and flush all privileges.

Works fine for me

Do you need to change your web host or switch your database server? This is probably the only time when you really think of backing up your MySQL data. If you’ve got a website with a database or your custom database running for your applications, it is imperative that you make regular backups of the database.

The easiest way to backup your database would be to telnet to the your database server machine and use the mysqldump command to dump your whole database to a backup file.

Playing with mysqldump

If you have either a shell or telnet access to your database server, you can backup the database using mysqldump. By default, the output of the command will dump the contents of the database in SQL statements to your console. This output can then be piped or redirected to any location you want. If you plan to backup your database, you can pipe the output to a sql file, which will contain the SQL statements to recreate and populate the database tables when you wish to restore your database. There are more adventurous ways to use the output of mysqldump.

A Simple Database Backup:

You can use mysqldump to create a simple backup of your database using the following syntax.

mysqldump -u [username] -p [password] [databasename] > [backupfile.sql]

• [username] – this is your database username
• [password] – this is the password for your database
• [databasename] – the name of your database
• [backupfile.sql] – the file to which the backup should be written.

The resultant dump file will contain all the SQL statements needed to create the table and populate the table in a new database server. To backup your database ‘Customers’ with the username ’sadmin’ and password ‘pass21′ to a file custback.sql, you would issue the command:

mysqldump -u sadmin -p pass21 Customers > custback.sql

You can also ask mysqldump to add a drop table command before every create command by using the option –add-drop-table. This option is useful if you would like to create a backup file which can rewrite an existing database without having to delete the older database manually first.

mysqldump --add-drop-table -u sadmin -p pass21 Customers > custback.sql

Backing up only specified tables

If you’d like restrict the backup to only certain tables of your database, you can also specify the tables you want to backup. Let’s say that you want to backup only customer_master & customer_details from the Customers database, you do that by issuing

mysqldump --add-drop-table -u sadmin -p pass21 Customers customer_master customer_details > custback.sql

So the syntax for the command to issue is:

mysqldump -u [username] -p [password] [databasename] [table1 table2 ....]

• [tables] – This is a list of tables to backup. Each table is separated by a space.

What about Multiple Databases?

If you are a database administrator who has to look after multiple databases, you’ll need to back up more than one database at a time. Here’s how you can backup multiple databases in one shot.

If you want to specify the databases to backup, you can use the –databases parameter followed by the list of databases you would like to backup. Each database name has to be separated by at least one space when you type in the command. So if you have to backup 3 databases, let say Customers, Orders and Comments, you can issue the following command to back them up. Make sure the username you specify has permissions to access the databases you would like to backup.

mysqldump -u root -p pass21 --databases Customers Orders Comments > multibackup.sql

This is okay if you have a small set of databases you want to backup. Now how about backing up all the databases in the server? That’s an easy one, just use the –all-databases parameter to backup all the databases in the server in one step.

mysqldump --all-databases > alldatabases.sql

Backing up only the Database Structure

Most developers need to backup only the database structure to while they are developing their applications. You can backup only the database structure by telling mysqldump not to back up the data. You can do this by using the –no-data parameter when you call mysqldump.

mysqldump --no-data --databases Customers Orders Comments > structurebackup.sql

Compressing your Backup file on the Fly

Backups of databases take up a lot of space. You can compress the output of mysqldump to save valuable space while you’re backing up your databases. Since mysqldump sends its output to the console, we can pipe the output through gzip or bzip2 and send the compressed dump to the backup file. Here’s how you would do that with bzip2 and gzip respectively.

mysqldump --all-databases | bzip2 -c > databasebackup.sql.bz2
mysqldump --all-databases | gzip > databasebackup.sql.gz

A Shell Script for Automating Backups?

You can automate the backup process by making a small shell script which will create a daily backup file. How do you get cron to back up your database without overwriting the older backup? You can use a tiny shell script to add the date to your backup file. An example of a shell script you could use is shown below.

#!/bin/sh
date=`date -I`
mysqldump --all-databases | gzip > /var/backup/backup-$date.sql.gz

Restore using mysql

If you have to re-build your database from scratch, you can easily restore the mysqldump file by using the mysql command. This method is usually used to recreate or rebuild the database from scratch.

Here’s how you would restore your custback.sql file to the Customers database.

mysql -u sadmin -p pass21 Customers < custback.sql

Easy isn’t it ? Here’s the general format you would follow:

mysql -u [username] -p [password] [database_to_restore] < [backupfile]

Now how about those zipped files? You can restore your zipped backup files by first uncompressing its contents and then sending it to mysql.

gunzip < custback.sql.sql.gz | mysql -u sadmin -p pass21 Customers

You can also combine two or more backup files to restore at the same time, using the cat command. Here’s how you can do that.

cat backup1.sql backup.sql | mysql -u sadmin -p pass21

Moving Data Directly Between Databases

How would you like to replicate your present database to a new location? When you are shifting web hosts or database servers, you can directly copy data to the new database without having to create a database backup on your machine and restoring the same on the new server. mysql allows you to connect to a remote database server to run sql commands. Using this feature, we can pipe the output from mysqldump and ask mysql to connect to the remote database server to populate the new database. Let’s say we want to recreate the Customers database on a new database server located at 202.32.12.32, we can run the following set of commands to replicate the present database at the new server.

mysqldump -u sadmin -p pass21 Customers | mysql --host=202.32.12.32 -C Customers

Since I have Debain Linux at home, I needed a way to login into Microsoft windows desktop from Linux OS. Many of us working at tech support use rdesktop to connect to customers’ windows XP box.

Especially it is very useful to configure Outlook or something else when customers do not understand how to configure or troubleshoot problem. This is the best way to fix a problem.

Fortunately, Linux has rdesktop utility. It is a client for remote desktop protocol (RDP), used in a number of Microsoft products including Windows NT Terminal Server, Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server. You do not need to install VNC server. All you need is rdesktop client on Linux or BSD workstation.

Install rdesktop

$ sudo apt-get install rdesktop

Connect to MS Windows 2000/2003 server from Linux, type the following command at a shell prompt (connect to Windows server called mw2sn100.mycorp.com)

$ rdesktop mw2sn100.mycorp.com

Or connect to windows XP/Vista workstation having IP 192.168.1.17:

$ rdesktop 192.168.1.17

Please note that you must first enable remote desktop connection under Windows Server/XP.

* Go to Windows XP Desktop
* Right Click on My Computer
* Select properties
* Select Remote tab
* Enable Remote desktop.
* Save the changes.

Make sure enterprise firewall allows incoming connection on TCP port 3389. rdesktop supports many other options, see man page of rdesktop or visit main website of rdesktop for more information.

Original Post from: cyberciti.biz

You can use the “-D” flag of openssh to create a SOCKS proxy.

The command first:

$ ssh -D 9999 username@ip-address-of-ssh-server

This of course connects you to the server specified by “ip-address-of-ssh-server”. Needless to say, you (username) must have an ssh account on the server. In addition, this will create a SOCKS proxy on port “9999″ of your computer. This is a tunnel to the server. Now all you have to do is set the preference in Firefox to use a SOCKS proxy. The proxy is, of course, “localhost”, with the port 9999.

Now when you browse, all the connections you make to websites will seem to originate from the server to which you SSH-ed. In addition, all outgoing and incoming data for the browsing session will be encrypted since it passes through the SSH connection.

Source: Ubuntu Blog

Step 1: Edit hosts file to add fake names

• Open file “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts” by your favourite text processor. Remember that only Administrator have the right to edit this file. You can choose “Run as Administrator” when running text processor if you log in to the other users rather than Administrator.
• Go to the last line of “hosts” file and insert this line:
  127.0.0.1 yourdomain.com


• Test the hosts file by going to cmd and ping yourdomain.com. If the reply is from loopback address, you have done this step.
  

Step 2: IIS 7 Configuration

• Create new Web Site with these following parameters:
  

Step 3: Configure your domain’s DNS

• Point @ address to your server’s IP.

Step 4: Congratulations, enjoy your website