I was working with a coworker today to setup a new Redmine server running on top of Ubunut 12.04 and one of the steps we completed in the process was setting up LDAP authentication in Redmine. Setting up LDAP authentication in Redmine requires the server running Redmine to be joined to the Windows Active Directory domain so I needed a quick way to auth Linux on Active Directory. I have used Centrify in the past and remember it being really easy to setup authentication from any form of Linux to a Windows domain and again it did not disappoint. Follow the directions below to join a Linux server to Active Directory using Centrify.

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When creating cron tasks on Linux many people do not realize that the output from the cron will logged and without redirection will sent to the user running the cron task’s email. In many cases this is the root user or if an alias has been set in /etc/aliases then the email will be sent to the user configured to receive roots email in the aliases file. Specifically on Backtrack Linux the root users email is redirected to bt5 by default and that user does not exist so the email will simply bounce. Below we describe a better way to redirect the cron tasks output into a log file which could be useful down the road.

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Some tools in Backtrack Linux version 5 R3 were written for older versions of Python so if you are interested in using some of these tools in can be beneficial to install older versions of Python such as Python 2.4. Below I describe how to easily install Python 2.4 without causing issues with the Python 2.6 that is installed by default on Backtrack Linux 5 R3 or Ubuntu 10.04.

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Earlier when upgrading a WordPress site that is running on a CentOS Linux server I needed to quickly backup the entire site to then perform an upgrade of the core WordPress installation. There are multiple directories located beneath the primary site folder that I didn’t need to backup including some caching directories as well as a database backup directory since all of those directories are not required to restore the site in case of an issue during the WP upgrade. Use the information below to create a tar archive while excluding multiple sub directories.

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If you are running a Backtrack VM via VMware Player on Windows 7 then you will want to make sure that VMware Tools is installed. This will allow your host OS to communicate properly with the guest Operating System which in this case is Backtrack 5 release 2. The VMware Tools description page also lists the below items as enhancements when VMware Tools is installed on the guest operating system.

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