Google Chrome is by default set to directly connect to the Internet. You can configure it to connect through a proxy by following these steps;

1. Open Chrome‘s Setting page by going to chrome://settings from the URL bar
   
2. Go to the bottom of the page and click Advanced
   
3. Scroll down till you come to the System section and click on Open proxy settings to configure your proxy
   

   Proxy management browser plugins such as FoxyProxy will be listed in the section if installed

4. This will open your system’s proxy configuration page and is different between operating systems. Below are examples for macOS and GNOME 2 (Linux)
   
   
5. Configure your proxy accordingly.

You will get the below error when logging in to phpMyAdmin without password even if your actual MySQL account itself is passwordless. This is because phpMyAdmin is normally configured to disable passwordless login due to security reasons.

To enable passwordless MySQL login in phpMyAdmin, you’ll need to set AllowNoPassword option in phpMyAdmin‘s configuration to TRUE.

To enable the option, uncomment or add the following line;

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['AllowNoPassword'] = TRUE;

Depending on distributions, there could be multiple occurrences of that particular line. Ubuntu for example has the following 2 lines;

if (!empty($dbname)) {
    // other configuration options
    $cfg['Servers'][$i]['AllowNoPassword'] = TRUE;
    // it should be placed before the following line
    $i++;
}

// other configuration options
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['AllowNoPassword'] = TRUE;

Mplayer is initially a movie player for Linux, but through the many available options, it is capable of doing many other things, including to save, record or dump online music stream to file.

In it’s easiest form, running the following command will dump 1.FM’s Channel X (with more channels available from www.shoutcast.com) to current.mp3

$ mplayer -dumpstream http://64.62.252.130:8070  -dumpfile current.mp3

The following bash script takes this a little bit further by keeping the latest 3 dumps, and delete the older ones.

#!/bin/bash
URL=http://64.62.252.130:8070
WORKDIR=/home/shakir/temp/mplayerdump
MAXDUMP=3
CURRENTDUMP=`ls $WORKDIR | wc -l`
 
mv $WORKDIR/current.mp3 $WORKDIR/`date +%F`.mp3
if [ $CURRENTDUMP -ge $MAXDUMP ] ; then
   for i in `ls $WORKDIR | head -n $[($CURRENTDUMP-$MAXDUMP)+1]`; do
      rm $WORKDIR/$i
   done
fi 
 
mplayer -dumpstream  $URL -dumpfile $WORKDIR/current.mp3

Going a little further is to run the script through cron nightly, for daytime listening probably while being mobile and offline. Crontab entry is editable by the following command;

$ crontab -e

and add the following line (assuming the script is located at /home/shakir/mplayerdump.sh)

0 2 * * * /home/shakir/mplayerdump.sh

Do make sure the script is executable by running the following command:

$ chmod a+x /home/shakir/mplayerdump.sh

The basic steps in accessing a MySQL database is normally to connect, execute statement, fetch result, and then to close the connection. The following is the steps translated into Python codes;

# Import required module
import MySQLdb
 
# Connect
conn = MySQLdb.connect(host="localhost", port=3306, user="root", passwd="root123", db="mysql")
cursor = conn.cursor(  )
 
# Execute statement
stmt = "SELECT * FROM user"
cursor.execute(stmt)
 
# Fetch and output the result
result = cursor.fetchall(  )
print result
 
# Close connection
conn.close(  )

The requirement for this is to install the MySQLdb module for Python which is available from it’s project page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python. The connect function creates a connection to the database based on the supplied parameters, and a cursor object is then created upon the connection object. The above example only show the execute and fetchall methods, and there many other available methods from the cursor object. The conn object calls the close method to close the connection to the MySQL server.

rar is a proprietary file format for file archival and developed by WinRAR. It provides Winrar to extract rar files in Windows and unrar for Linux.

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Dokuwiki by default doesn’t set outgoing links to nofollow, and especially if used as open Wiki, spammers are likely to use the site for their linkbuilding purpose, and the site’s PageRank in the process.

To use Google‘s G Suite for email while your DNS is managed by your cPanel‘s account, you’ll have to configure the MX entry for your domain from within cPanel to point to Google‘s mail servers.

This can be done with these simple steps;

1. From within your cPanel’s main interface, look for Email section and click on MX Entry
   
2. Select the domain that you wish to edit from the list
   
3. Set to Automatically Detect Configuration in the Email Routing menu
   
4. Delete existing MX records
   
5. Start adding MX records for Google mail server
   
6. Continue doing so for all the following mail servers
   

   Priority	Destination
   1	ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
   5	ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
   5	ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
   10	ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM
   10	ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM

Apache normally runs as an unprivileged user without shell access in most platforms. This is for security reason as a poorly written script or configuration if exploited will not escalate and cause much harm to the system.

If you’re running a development environment and know exactly what you’re doing, you can change the user and group that the Apache process runs as with these simple steps;

1. Find User and Group directives in Apache‘s configuration file.

   Apache configuration files

2. Set the user and group that you want Apache process to run as. The following example is to run it as root.

   User root
   Group root

   This could be a big security risk, especially to run it as root.

   Make sure the user and group has appropriate permission to DocumentRoot and related files and folders.

3. Restart Apache.

   How to restart Apache service

4. Check if the changes was successful

   $ ps aux | grep apache2
   root      1188  0.0  0.1 162184  6664 ?        Ss   Mar29   0:02 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
   root  1197  0.0  0.1 162184  5668 ?        S    Mar29   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
   root  1198  0.0  0.1 162184  5916 ?        S    Mar29   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
   root  1200  0.0  0.1 162184  5684 ?        S    Mar29   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
   root  1201  0.0  0.1 162184  5684 ?        S    Mar29   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
   root  1202  0.0  0.1 162184  5684 ?        S    Mar29   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

   In some distributions the Apache binary could be named httpd instead of apache2.

When plugging an iPhone to a Ubuntu machine for few times, the CPU becomes busy with 100% utilization.

This is due to some bugs which causes iphone-set-info and sometimes gvfs-afc-volume-monitor program to misbehave.

To fix this, run the following commands at the terminal

sudo killall -9 iphone-set-info
sudo killall -9 gvfs-afc-volume-monitor

This will only kill the programs, and will not affect the iPhone’s charging.

You’ll not be able to directly access your guest virtual machine in Virtualbox via SSH or RDP if it’s under NAT network. For this you’ll have to configure port forwarding as detailed below;

1. Go to Virtualbox‘s main interface and make sure the virtual machine that you want to configure is powered off.
   
2. Select your virtual machine and click Settings icon on the top toolbar. Alternatively, right click on the virtual machine and click Settings.
3. Click on the Network tab in Settings main interface.
   
4. Look for and click on Advanced text at the bottom of the window.
   
5. Click on Port Forwarding button.
   
6. Click on the + icon on the upper right to add new port forwarding rule in Port Forwarding‘s main interface.
   
7. Some of the fields are automatically filled up as the followings.
   
8. Fill in the fields accordingly.
   

   In this example, port 2202 in the host machine will forward to port 22 of the guest machine whereby 10.0.2.15 is the default IP for guest VM under NAT network.

9. Test the forwarding rule.

   $ ssh -p2022  [email protected]
   Warning: Permanently added '[127.0.0.1]:2022' (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts.
   [email protected]'s password:
   Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-83-generic x86_64)
   
    * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com
    * Management:     https://landscape.canonical.com
    * Support:        https://ubuntu.com/advantage
   
   0 packages can be updated.
   0 updates are security updates.
   
   
   Last login: Fri Jul  7 09:29:30 2017
   user@ubuntu:~$

   SSH is used to test the forwarding rule as SSH is listening on port 22 of the guest VM.