I’ve recently been testing out a VPN service, and normally while running the VPN, all internet traffic goes over the VPN interface. This isn’t really ideal, as I only want traffic from specific applications to use the VPN. IPTables doesn’t seem to have the option to filter specific processes, but it can filter based on …

I have logrotate running on my virtual servers ( both local and Amazon EC2 based ) and configured to send myself all log files by email daily. They are all running virtually the same configuration, and this makes it difficult to work out which log file is tied to which machine. The simplest way to fix this, is to …

After publishing my previous post on Setting up a HP LaserJet P1102w Printer on Gentoo , I’ve noticed that I seem to be getting a lot of visitors searching for how to setup the same printer under Ubuntu, so decided to write a guide specific to Ubuntu. First, plug in the printer via USB, then install hplip ( most users …

Due to the increase in processing power available, the use of SSL has become more widespread. This is obviously a good thing, especially with UK ISPs spying on ( and annoyingly, replaying ) web traffic recently, however this can be a showstopper when trying to debug a misbehaving application. To get around this, and …

I’ve recently had to create a lot of custom Gentoo ebuilds, and distribute them out to separate machines. Luckily Gentoo has the layman system for adding experimental overlays, so we can use this to add our own custom one, hosted on Amazon S3. Setting up the repository is a two part process – creating the actual …

Google have recently released their Google Cloud Print service . It is currently built into Google Chrome on Windows and Mac, but unfortunately it is not yet available officially for Linux. Fortunately there is an unofficial open source project on Github, called cloudprint . It is fairly new, so isn’t yet in the Gentoo …

Recently I’ve been experimenting with the Amazon Free Tier micro instances (one is running this blog). After running an instance for a few days I noticed that the clock seems to drift quite heavily ( more than 10 minutes over 24 hours ). The most obvious fix to any clock drift is to install and configure ntp – however …

Looking For an Ubuntu specific guide? Try here . Today I finally replaced my aging Inkjet printer with a new Laser one. I eventually decided upon the HP LaserJet Pro P1102w printer, as from scouring forums it seems to have good support to Linux, in addition to being a relatively cheap WiFi laser printer. Setting it up …

I’ve decided to try out Netbeans, as it had been recommended to me as a good IDE for PHP development, but while attempting to emerge it under Gentoo, I was greeted by this error: Can't connect to X11 window server using ':0' as the value of the DISPLAY variable. The problem seemed to be that I was using sudo to run the …

A lot of people ask me why I prefer to use Linux instead of Microsoft Windows. I use Linux for both desktop and server roles, and I’ve often seen other blog posts mention reasons for preferring Linux over Windows, but they never seem to list the same reasons I think of when asked. I’ve decided to make my own list, and …