Sorry to anyone who has tried posting a comment and it failed.

Every single time you login to facebook, or post something about yourself or on someone elses wall, a timestamp will be created in the database that contains all the data facebook displays. This timestamp not only confirms when you last did something with your account, it also displays this on your news feed, ie. “so and so said this about an hour ago”. Any decent database design will have time stamping as a priority.

If facebook wishes to delete accounts older than 2 weeks they DO NOT need you to post anything, they can see that your account is active or not by querying said database.

Besides all this, it’s just bullshit marketing to keep people using facebook. Facebook is only interested in the money it can earn from adverts that facebook shows you. The more people log in and click these adverts, the more money it makes.

Come on people, use your heads and stop posting useless bollocks. It’s as bad as spam and those stupid fucking chain letter emails everyone sends out.

And we all hate spam right?

</dev/urandom tr -dc A-Za-z0-9_ | head -c8

Note that the ‘tr’ strips out everything except characters in the ranges (alphanumeric, mixed case and underscores). This is a nice approach as piping to head means the minimum number of bytes required to generate a password of appropriate length are taken from /dev/urandom vs other methods which take more than you should need but still have a chance of not having obtained enough random data to generate a password of the required length. You can change the parameter to head to get passwords of any length.

NOTE: I have only run this command on Ubuntu, its possible it works on other Linux systems but I have not checked.

tar xvpzf filename.tgz -C /

the mkdir options are mandatory, and you will notice that they are the directories that are excluded from the backup. this is fine, but the folders do need to be replaced BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING AFTER THE RESTORE

mkdir proc
mkdir lost+found
mkdir mnt
mkdir sys
mkdir media
mkdir cdrom
mkdir home

now reboot

everything should now be cushdy

I had to rebuild the system. I saved off all my personal data and reinstalled everything.

Once I was back at my desktop, after configuring my dual screen setup on an Nvidia card and getting my email and browser back the way I like them I decided it was time to make some changes.

The /home folder needed to be moved from the OS drive, (that’s the next post) and I needed a way to back everything up, and I mean everything. Because of the way Linux structures its OS it is geniusly easy to backup the system. You cannot do this on windows without expensive software to ghost the drive.

What we are going to do here is use TAR to compress and zip up the entire root structure, with a few exclusions.

NOTE
I run the command as sudo from my own account. I am pretty sure it would be benneficial to quit all X sessions and drop to the command prompt rather than run from a live session. I have no evidence to suggest that doing this from the desktop will cause any problems. If you have a suggestion on this please comment below.

I will show you how I backed up my root directory and then I will supply a generic command that will suffice for most people. My command is slightly different as I moved my /home folder onto a seperate hard drive. I will cover my reasoning for this in my next post.

This is the command I use to backup my OS

sudo tar cvpzf /media/500/000_Backups/System/system_backup-$(date +%d-%m-%Y).tgz –exclude=/proc –exclude=lost+found –exclude=/mnt –exclude=/media –exclude=/cdrom –exclude=/home –exclude=/old_home /

As you can see I have excluded the /home directory in my backups as it is on a seperate partition. Now, lets break this down into its component parts so you can better understand how this works.

“tar” is obvious. this is the application we will be using to create the archived backup. Make sure you have tar installed. It should be by default but just incase you will need to run this command in the Terminal

sudo apt-get install tar

or, click <a href=”apt:tar”>here</a>

the tar parameters “cvpzf” are as follows.
c – this tells tar that we are creating an archive
v – verbose mode, this command outputs each file being archived into the terminal window
p – retain all file permissions as is
z – compress as gzip – use j for bzip2 but make sure you change the file extension to tar.bz2
f – filename follows this parameter.

system_backup-$(date +%d-%m-%Y).tgz – this is the filename followed by the date of the day the backup is made, in the format dd/mm/yyyy

I chose to date it as I will have incremental backups running via cron. This is a little out of the scope of this post, but happy to help those if you post a comment and ask.

–exclude=/ – we are going to exclude some folders that are not required in the backup. proc, lost+found and cdrom are not required in the backup, and if you do not want to backup any drives, dvds or cdroms that are mounted inside mnt or media, make sure you exclude those as well or the backup could become extremely large.

/ – this is the folder we are backing up. and as we are backing up the whole system we need to backup from the root directory which is /

Now we have our backup command explained you are ready to get down to running your own. Obvioulsy please dont use the one above as it is for my machine, below is the generic code that should suffice 99% of people.

NOTE
please change the “pathtofolder” to a location you would like to save the file once it is completed.
this will take a while once you execute the command, so don’t be tempted to cancel the operation.

sudo tar cvpzf /pathtofolder/system_backup-$(date +%d-%m-%Y).tgz –exclude=/proc –exclude=lost+found –exclude=/mnt –exclude=/media –exclude=/cdrom /

Now that you have your backup, you are going to need to restore it someday. Below are simple instructions on how to extract and restore your data

sudo tar xvpzf system_backup-dd-mm-yyy.tgz -C /

the mkdir options below are mandatory, and you will notice that they are the directories that are excluded from the backup. this is fine, but the folders do need to be replaced BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING AFTER THE RESTORE

mkdir proc
mkdir lost+found
mkdir mnt
mkdir media
mkdir cdrom

Now reboot your PC and your data will be restored. This includes all applications, mail and broswer settings, everything, except the folders you did not backup.

This is the full error that I get

This Windows SharePoint Services virtual server has not been configured for use with ASP.NET 2.0.50727.3603. For more information, please refer to Knowledge Base article 894903 at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=42660.

The article the link refers to is a good starting point, but it fails to actually tell you where the stsadm file is, and running the command as microsoft have put it will just result in a file not found error. I had to go hunting for the file myself, and as the search function failed it was a manual hunt.

I finally found the file, so here is the command that actually works

“c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\BIN\stsadm” -o upgrade -forceupgrade -url http://companyweb

That command obviously depends on the virtual sharepoint site actually being called companyweb. If you have changed it you will need to amend the end of the command.

Once it finished running I was asked to login to the sharepoint service on the server itself. After trying multiple combinations of usernames/domains and passwords it failed. I jumped onto my desktop and logged into sharepoint without issue and all is now working again. My guess (as I have not fully investigated it and won’t be on my home system as it’s not really needed) is that the DNS is either out or logging into sharepoint on the server itself is just not cricket.

Developer Comments: This extension is an enhancement for the basic tab controls provided in Firefox 1.0. It replaces the existing user interface with a new, more visible user interface, and also includes UI for other hidden features that are part of the browser, as well as features provided explicitly by the extension.

Tabbrowser Prefs is not currently available for Firefox 3 on Windows or Linux, which left me feeling frustrated. I would love to have felt annoyed, but can you really be annoyed when the info to build your very own plugin is out there?

I decided I had to do something. I had to have my tab bar on the bottom of the window at least. So, I went off and researched it.

After about 5 minutes I found out that the main interface to Firefox is controlled entirely by CSS. This is perfect. I located the CSS style sheet, googl’d some more and found the CSS variables needed to modify the interface settings. So now I am going to share it with everyone of you.

Open up nautilus and show hidden files. then navigate to:

1. /home/.mozilla/firefox/your.profile/chrome

By default userChrome.css fie does not exist, so you need to create it before you can start adding your preferences. There’s actually an example file that exists by default, called userChrome-example.css. You can just rename that file by removing the -example part. Then open this file in leaf/mouse pad or any other text editor and add the following code and save it.

1. /* Display the tabbar at the bottom */ #content > tabbox { -moz-box-direction: reverse; }

Open up My Computer or File Explorer and show hidden files. then navigate to:

1. C:\Documents andSettings\[UserName]\ApplicationData\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\your.proifile\chrome

By default userChrome.css fie does not exist, so you need to create it before you can start adding your preferences. There’s actually an example file that exists by default, called userChrome-example.css. You can just rename that file by removing the -example part. Then open this file in notepad or any other text editor and add the following code and save it.

1. /* Display the tabbar at the bottom */ #content > tabbox { -moz-box-direction: reverse; }

Now, as you IE uses can see, there are some glaring mistakes. I am fixing them. Expect the ammendment to be made sometime over the weekend.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

EDIT: I did not get chance over the weekend to sort out the IE problems, I was busy getting rid of windows and putting Ubuntu Dapper on my system. (Thats Linux for those who don’t know.)

Also added some Eye Candy too. Scroll down to number ten and watch the video.

I am all set-up and running, so I am working on the IE problem right now.