Streaming to shoutcast with libshout

After setting up a shoutcast server I tried to find a way to stream my music through it. When I was a windows user winamp with the shoutcast DSP plugin was a nice solution. But now I wanted to stream music that resides on my linux home server. The Shoutcast Transcoder that can be used for this purpose requires a paid license for mp3 streaming. So libshout from Icecast with a perl binding comes to rescue!

sharing a folder with samba as RO to guests and RW to admin

I had a folder on my linux machine that I would like it to be shared as RO to any guest without password requirement but as RW to myself so that (by providing a user/pass) I would be able to alter its contents

windows live on your website!

It is easy to add windows live chat to your website between yourself and your visitors. First you have to go here and select the option that says “Allow anyone on the web to see my presence and send me messages.” and click Save. Now your website visitors will be able to chat with you. Then you select “Create HTML” and choose one of the 3 options available for either displaying a chat window or just an online/offline image that when clicked will direct your visitor to a dedicated chat window.

If you want to hack the code a little bit here are some examples:

ACER DX900 WiFi in Europe

My Acer DX900 is a Windows Mobile phone with WiFi. When I tried to connect to a channel 13 AP  the AP could not be discovered! After some googling i found out that the wifi (Marvel GSPI 8686) was setup for USA and not Europe!

Message Threads in Thunderbird 3

By default, Thunderbird 3 uses strict threading which means that threading by subject is disabled. There are two settings that control this behaviour though: mail.strict_threading and mail.thread_without_re. The first setting enables/disables threading by subject while the second allows subject-threading even if “Re:” isn’t present. There is also a setting new to the 3.x branch called mail.correct_threading which threads correctly regardless of the order messages are added to a folder.

install Windows Live Messenger 2009 in odd OSes

If you try to install Windows Live Messenger on Windows XP 64 bit or on Windows Server 2003 using the default MS installer you get an error stating that all Windows Live Essentials are not compatible with the running OS. This is not entirely true. What is not compatible is the live installer and not the programs themselves!! So this is the procedure to get the standalone installer for Windows Live Messenger 2009 so that you can install it to any windows OS (I have managed to install it on Win 2K3!)

VMware ESXi

VMware ESXi is a bare-metal hypervisor. That means that you install it as you would install any other OS and on top of it run your virtual machines. You could ask why not use a VMware server on top of a linux installation. Well it’s because you would have to administer one more linux box with every problem that this would cause (updates that brake stuff, etc). Also ESXi uses minimal resources compared to a VMware server on top of another OS.

The best  news is that ESXi is FREE! You just need to register to the VMware website in order to obtain your free license key (as was the case with VMware server). After that you install it on your server, make some configuration changes (IP address and root password specifically). Then you can connect with your browser to your new ESXi server and download the Infrastructure Client through which you can administer the virtual machines and the ESXi server.

Some tips to get you started can be found here.

Good luck!

(Summary) report in plesk 9.x

In Plesk 8.x you can find a very useful report about space used by each section of a domain (page, mail, logs, etc) by clicking the icon seen in picture 1 below. In plesk 9.x this kind of report is a little hidden. You have to click on the “Statistics” label of the domain and then a drop down menu will reveal this option as seen in picture 2.

How to run .cgi and .pl scripts outside of the cgi-bin dir in plesk

This procedure has been tested in Plesk 9 but should work for all versions of plesk as well as apache in general.

First of all do not forget to enable CGI through the plesk control panel for the specific domain!

Retrieve clear text email passwords in plesk

I will start my blog with some useful info i found today about the plesk hosting control panel. There is a way to retrieve email passwords in clear text thus not having to reset them if they are lost. This was tested and worked in plesk 8.4 and pleks 9.2. Inspiration came from this page but as my SQL knowledge is not that good i used the phpmyadmin feature of plesk to gain access to the database.

So to open up phpmyadmin you follow this route on the control panel

in plesk 8.4 : Server -> Database Servers -> Local MySQL server -> Databases -> DB WebAdmin

in plesk 9.2 : Home -> Database Servers -> Local MySQL server -> Databases -> WebAdmin

From (Databases) on the left you select “psa” database and then on the new menu on the left you select the “domains” table, click browse and find the id of the domain whose account you are looking for. Then you select the “mail” table, click browse again and find the dom_id (last column) that matches the id you found earlier. Then you can see the mail accounts of the domain and their respective account_ids and you can find the account_id of the email that interests you. So now you select the “accounts” table, click browse, find the proper id (obtained from the previous step) and edit that row (the pencil icon) to see the account password in clear text.

I also tried changing this value in an attempt to change the specific password. It didn’t work because i could still login with the old password so don’t mind trying this.