Convert your Windows 7 laptop into Wireless Hotspot

Situation: You have one internet connection via ethernet cable to your laptop but several Wifi mobile devices that need internet connections. Creating/Configuring a WiFi Virtual Miniport adapter: 1. Open cmd window with Admin privilage. 2. Type in "netsh" and then "wlan" 3. set hostednetwork ssid= mode=allow ssid= key= keyUsage=persistent 4. start hostednetwork 5. This will start the "Wireless Network Connection 2" which is your Wifi Mini Virtual port adapter. 6. Then you share your main LAN connection adapter by opening its property and selecting "Share connection..." checkbox in the "Sharing" tab. Also, select the "Wireless Network Connection 2" in the drop down list. You are done. Now, you should be able to connect your wifi enabled devices with the Access point described by , which should be picked up by the devices automatically.

PowerEdge 2950 Access From ANYWHERE

As I have been setting up and fiddling around with my development environment, I had quite a few learning in the due course. Firs thing I wanted to do is to access my home server from office (Yes, behind firewall, proxy, etc etc). To cut long story short, here are the steps taken:
1. Make a note of the ports on which the programs are running that are to be accessed remotely.
2. I got a DynDNS account already and hence got a public DNS name of my server.
3. Change the setting in the home modem router to forward the incoming TCP/UDP port request to this particular machine on the relevant program's ports. For instance:
Rule1: Forward TCP xxxx to Machine abc on TCP port yyyy.
4. Adjust the OS firewall running on the server machine to accept the connections on the port yyyy.

Then the real fun starts. After making all these configuration, I was able to access the programs using my public DNS name. However, I could not connect to the machine from behind my office firewall. Apparently the only outbound ports open from the proxy are: 80 and 443.

To get around this:
1. Run SSH on your machine on a particular port (May be 22 or may be 3456 does not matter).
2. Configure modem router to forward the request coming on to port 80 or 443 to the port configured in step 1.
3. Start an SSH tunnel from the office pointing to the machine on port 80 or 443. Two ways to start it:
3.1 - Dynamic port configuration that will enable to access the any ports on the remote server outside the proxy. Any program can be accessed by RemoteServer:

3.2 - Local to Remote port forwarding - Such as accept the request on localhost at port xx that will end up in the remote server on port yy. So any program can be accessed by localhost:xx.
4. Once you are able to start the above session, you are able to access your favorite programs over the internet.

Setting up SVN and Wiki on the one EC2 instance

As part of one of my own Android projects, I tried to configure an EC2 instance trying to setup both a wiki and subversion. Some interesting points were noted when I was trying to run the SVN standalone with svnserve service on default (Or any) port. After creating a security setting with opening the relevant inbound ports on EC2 (Like 80, 8888, 3690, 22, etc), I noted that:

1. When I was able to connect to subversion on 3690, I could not browse to the default apache hope page as it would give an error 503: "Server Temporarily Unavailable".
2. When I was able to setup the Wiki (From Bitnami), I was not at all able to telnet to the svn port (Even though I was using the SAME security group - that is the same inbound port configs).

In these two cases there were two different EC2 instances involved.

Finally, I decided to go with option 2 and instead of running the svnserve, I hosted it on Apache2 using the httpd.conf configuration file for the authentication, and repo root directory creation.

I am using Bitnami Wiki, which I secured using the LocalSetting.php file on the bitnami installation. No one can view the information at this point of time except for the registered users who are the project members. The registration option is also disabled.

Subversion is configured in Apache2's httpd config and can be accessed over HTTP instead of svn protocol. The biggest advantage is that both can be accessed from behind the proxy/firewall as they all are running on port 80. 

Setting up Ubuntu 11x on Dell PE

So, I thought I will give DynDNS a try and try to access my server from outside world. Once, after installing and updating my Ubuntu server, I took the following actions:

1. Registered with DynDNS and got a hostname.
2. Installed and configured SSH: openssh configuration and able to connect using putty and the external host name.

However, in order to secure the access through certificates, I had to produce the key pair from the client and in order to upload the public key, had to setup the FTP server.
3. Installation and setup the SFTPD server on Ubuntu: Took me very long. Experienced the issues such as:

3.1 sftpd.conf not available: purge the installation through apt-get command and reinstalled it.
3.2 Logging as anonymous user:
3.3 Unable to run with writeable anonymous user's home.

Dell PowerEdge 2950

So, I finally bought this big box from eBay and cost me AUD 1075. I got a Windows server 2003 R2 standard edition along with this big and heavy box. One fine Saturday morning I started installing the OS and failed a couple of times with the error message: "Cannot find the hard drive to install OS on". After Googling for some time, I found that there are some pre-requisite drivers missing that will create logical drives. Got this blog and tried for several hours with this and my USB stick: http://thebackroomtech.com/2008/03/13/a-dell-poweredge-server-windows-2003-x64-and-the-battle-over-sas-raid-drivers/.

Then I found a comment on the blog that said: "Eventually, I had to get a server management CD to get the installation successfully done!". Immediately, got some CDs went to the Dell site and burned it with the software, ran it and it did everything quite smoothly - Prepared for installation step by step and with the thorough GUI, then prompted for the OS CDs.

However, the 2003 R2 Standard Edition would not recognize the memory greater than 4 GB. I tried fiddling with the boot.ini including /PAE in there but no help. Finally wiped out everything and installed the Ubuntu 64 bit edition utilizing the complete hardware resources to the max!