Earlier I was working on a clients Mac OSX laptop and needed to login remotely without the hassle of setting a password and then removing it when I was done. The article below will describe not only how to enable SSH from a terminal window on the Macintosh laptop itself but also how to configure SSH so it will allow remote login via SSH without a password.

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Yesterday afternoon a friend dropped his computer by so I could make it go a bit faster which I initially thought must just be some application using up a ton of resources or something. The issue ended up being that the computer was an older PowerPC G4 running Mac OSX 10.3 that didn’t have a lot of RAM and hadn’t been updated in a long time. I happened to have PC133 RAM to stick in it so I added 512MB of RAM and then attempted to begin the software updates which requested his administrator password which I did not have. Turns out that he didn’t have the password either so below are directions on reseting the administrator password on a Mac running OSX. The process take a little while as you are required to boot into single user mode, go back through setup, modify the admin, and then delete the temporary admin account.

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Yesterday a friend contacted me about moving his site for Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting to another location. This typically can be challenging, regardless of web host, because of having to deal with someone else who has set this up and more than likely is not doing what they are supposed to be doing which is why the person wants to move the site in the first place. I was provided the Yahoo login information to the web and honestly had no idea how Yahoo Small Business has FTP set up. After logging in and searching around a bit I found the information I thought I needed and attempted to create an FTP user to login. After creating the FTP user I attempted to use the Yahoo FTP credentials in FileZilla to login but I continued to receive a “Critical Error” from the Yahoo FTP server. Below I describe the FTP error returned by Yahoo along with how I was able to work around the error.

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Setting up Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections to your office is becoming more common as work from home jobs expand. Typically the IT guy at your work should be able to provide you the necessary information needed to connect to your office securely such as IP address to connect to, username, password, and possibly domain. Once you make the VPN connection it will be as if you are working on a computer at the office so you can use things at the office such as network printers, file servers, etc.

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I wrote an article a couple weeks ago regarding a shell script to run that would provide a postgres user read only access to every table in a specific database. Tonight I was updating a over a dozen databases and needed to provide read only access to all of them to a specific user so I decided to update the bash script from a couple of weeks ago to take a couple variables from the shell so you could specify database and user. The new script along with instructions on how to use it are below.

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