If you’re an experienced administrator, you’ve probably used SSH to remotely access a troublesome box or your personal computer. For those who don’t know: SSH it’s a great way to fiddle with a computer from miles away as if you were sitting at its keyboard, but it’s also just about the simplest and most secure way to configure your computer to let you access its files from anywhere.

For me there is nothing quite as relaxing as the sounds of the beach. The slow crashing of waves and the gentle lapping of water in the tide pools really helps me find my inner calm. Of course, I could do without the smell of rotting fish carcasses, the constantly screeching gulls and the looming threat of melanoma.

Last year (2007) we setup up a computer with internet access, in the breakfast room for guests to use. To help keep costs down and to reduce maintenance we installed the Ubuntu 7.04 operating system - which comes with Firefox 2, Open Office etc. It has been a great success with guests commenting regularly about how useful it is to have quick and easy internet access while staying with us.

SafeSquid - Content Filtering Internet Proxy, has many content filtering features that can be used to decide who is allowed what, when and how much on the net. In this tutorial I will describe how to create user profiles, and give them access to specific websites only, while blocking access to all other websites.

We’re sure that many of you have been away from our home computers at a time when we needed access to a certain file or desktop program. Many companies have proprietary solutions (like GoToMyPC) that allow you to remotely access files on your home computer while you are away from it.

A good password has the problem of being difficult to remember. And sometimes you might need to get in to a system where the root password is long forgotten (or left with the system administrator before you).

Requiring system accessibility via the Internet poses several problems for system administrators. One problem is allowing access by authorized users with the least amount of complexity on the client computer while keeping the system and its services safe from intruders.

One of the cool things about today Internet is how we can use several computers in different locations as if we were our single home computer (...) The solution I recently found was to create a free account at hasfiles.com. They give you 100Mb for free and let you access those files via webdav. Using davfs2, I can mount it as a partition on my system.

Today I needed to reset a password on an Ubuntu system. While doing this, I was reminded of just how simple it is to get root access on a default install of Ubuntu. I wanted to share these steps on this blog to remind people that if someone has physical access to your Ubuntu system, they can get root access in just a few seconds.