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Default Port Numbers for Port Forwarding in SSH

September 22, 2010 in Operating Systems | No comments

If you tunnel into your servers using SSH and are in need of setting port forwarding to your servers, you will need the default port numbers on which the servers are listening.

I have compiled a list of services and their default port numbers for quick reference. Unless your administrator has changed the ports, you could use the same.

MySQL - 3306
RDP - 3389
SVN - 3690
SQL Server - 1433

I will add more to the list (yeah, I know, big list :-) ) as and when I can.

And if you are looking for decent programs that will help you create SSH tunnels and setup server side port forwarding, I can recommend a couple. For windows you could try Bitvise Tunnelier. For Ubuntu give gSTM a shot. You can install gSTM from within Synaptic.

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TortoiseSVN equivalent on Ubuntu? Get RabbitVCS!

September 14, 2010 in Operating Systems, Programming | No comments

Have you guys been wondering about moving to Ubuntu and have been held back because of a good GUI based shell extension like TortoiseSVN.

Well you don’t have to anymore. I was just doing some googling to figure out an Ubuntu equivalent of TortoiseSVN and I stumbled upon RabbitVCS.

I’m going to be using it over time and will let you folks know how this works out for me. Please feel free to give it a shot and let me know if this was a useful tool.

Here are the installation instructions for Karmic and Lucid. For other versions/distros please visit their site.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rabbitvcs/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rabbitvcs-cli rabbitvcs-gedit rabbitvcs-core rabbitvcs-nautilus rabbitvcs-thunar

Here are a few screenshots:

Nautilus Integration
Nautilus Integration

Commit Dialog
Commit Dialog

Show Log
Show Log

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Symbolic Link /var/www and your workspace folder in Ubuntu

October 24, 2009 in Operating Systems, Programming | 4 comments

I’m not sure if my post’s heading puts across exactly what I want to convey. Anyway, I stumbled upon a neat trick which I wanted to share with you folks.

When you usually do PHP development on Ubuntu, you will have to put your files into /var/www or whichever is your document root configured for Apache for the application to be able to run. The downside here is that, you will not always have root permission and every time you either want to add, change or remove a file, you need to do so using ‘sudo’. So what you can do is map any folder (in this case, a folder in your workspace when you use an IDE like Eclipse) to the /var/www (or your document root folder). That way your files will be visible under the /var/www folder and you can execute your files or even debug them without much hassle.

Here is what I did:

1. Go into /var folder and remove the existing www folder

cd /var
sudo rm -rf www/

2. Create a folder which you would use as your workspace

cd /home/username/
mkdir workspace/www/

I have set it up this way, so that my Java project go into workspace and all my PHP development goes into workspace/www/ folder
3. Now go back to /var folder and create the mapping

cd /var
sudo ln -s /home/username/workspace/www/

That’s it! Now you are all set. Any file you drop into /home/username/workspace/www will be automatically visible in your Apache and you can click on it to run the web application.

Please do let me know if I have done something wrong or if there is anyway to do this better.

PS: Just make sure you don’t have an index.html or something like that inside /www/. If that is there, instead of getting a folder listing you will directly be taken to that page. I think there is a configuration change in Apache that will prevent this from happening. Well, what you would like to do is up to you.

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Uber Cool Desktop FX – Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron

October 10, 2009 in Operating Systems | 3 comments

Ubuntu has some real cool desktop effects which are aslo deeply practical. And the best part is they work flawlessly on an ordinary laptop with the built-in graphics accelerator.

To give you an example, check out the desktop cube:

CubeEffect

CubeEffect

Just follow these easy steps for a super cool looking UI:

  1. Open the Synaptics Package Manager from System/Administration/Synaptics Package Manager
  2. Use the search feature and search for the following two packages: emerald & compizconfig-settings-manager
  3. Mark them for installation and also agree to install all their dependencies
  4. Upon successful installation, open the settings manager via System/Preferences/Advanced Desktop Effects Settings

Tweak away to your satisfaction and get a really cool looking and extremely functional desktop!

Peace out :-)

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Ubuntu 8.04 LTS – Firefox & External USB Sound Problems

October 10, 2009 in Operating Systems | 1 comment

Hello folks!

I would like to shed some insight into a problem I ran into and which I think many of you would have or eventually run into.

I setup Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on my HP Compaq NX7300 laptop. I have always wanted to try out linux and I liked Ubuntu a lot. The installation was a breeze and after I setup my system, the update manager kicked in and updated my system. I plug in my Creative 24bit Live External USB sound card, Ubuntu automatically installs the drivers and I was all set. At least thats what I thought!

The sound plays brilliantly well via my Bose Companion system while I use applications such as Rythmbox or Totem. But in Firfeox, all the sound from flash sites like Youtube or Imeem was playing via the laptop speakers which was annoying. So I go to System/Preferences/Sound to look up the settings. It looked correct and the tests ran fine. I then started doing what anyone else would do – google this problem up!

I came across an excellent resource here: Simple guide to Sound Solutions for Hardy,Intrepid and Jaunty Jackalope Users

To make it easier for you folks, let me reproduce the content here:

1. Open the terminal and type the following command

sudo apt-get install asoundconf-gtk alsa-oss libasound2 libasound2-plugins padevchooser gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio ubuntu-restricted-extras

2. Close any application that may be trying to use sound and do the following:

Go to System/Preferences/Sound and set all the preferences from automatic to PulseAudio except Default Mixer Tracks which you should set to your sound card.

Go to System/Preferences/Default Sound Card and choose pulseaudio. Next, right click on the little speaker on the top panel, that is the Panel Volume Control. Click Open Volume Control and make sure it is set to the same thing as the Default Mixer Tracks in the previous step

Click on Preferences and make sure that Master and PCM and whatever else you want to control are selected. Make sure that any boxes labeled SPDIF or IEC958 are not checked. Close the Preferences box.

Push up the sliders in the volume control and make sure the little speakers do not have little red mute marks on them. Go to Applications/Sound and Video/GNOME ALSA Mixer and see if there is anything you missed because sometimes, for some cards, not all the
options are in the Panel Volume Control.

Go to Applications/Sound and Video and select Pulse Audio Device Chooser. This will put a little icon on the panel near the Panel Volume Control.

Click on the new icon and choose Volume Control. This will open the Pulse Audio Volume Control. Go to Output devices and see if your sound card is there, it will be listed as ALSA PCM on front:…(ALC8 via DMA or whatever your sound card is. If you have a usb device it will be listed as ALSA PCM on front:…(USB Audio) via DMA or something like that. Make sure the sliders are up and the device is not muted.

If any of the above is giving you problems, try rebooting.

3. Now, open Rythmbox and play something. If you have nothing handy just play one of the radio stations, you should hear something. In the Pulse Audio Volume Control/Playback you should see something like this Rythmbox: Playback Stream and some Volume sliders that you can adjust.

That did it for me. The sound now rocks! If you have more than one device and would like to configure sound to play on all devices, I would recommend you to follow the above link and get the procedure there.

Credits to the original author for creating an excellent tutorial. Hope that helps you all out.

Have fun!

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