Posts tagged "hacks"

Before we continue with our Home Server Scripting Series, let’s throw in a simple but useful DTrace hack.

One of the most typical uses for a home server is to serve music or videos to home entertainment equipment. In my case, I’m using the Firefly Media Server (no link, fireflymediaserver.org no longer exists) to serve music to my Roku Soundbridge and Mediatomb (no link, page no longer exists) for videos.

The Media Server Update Problem

Whenever I upload new music or videos to my OpenSolaris home server (typically by rsync-ing my laptop home directory), both Firefly and Mediatomb need to be restarted so they detect that new files are sitting in their directories, waiting to be served.

Over the weekend, I redesigned the theme of my blog. I hope you like the result!

While I’m not a web design nor a theming expert, it was still quite easy to find a nice theme, and apply some blog-friendly customizations to it. Here are a few tips to get you started in Drupal theming:

Yesterday, I had two hours in a cafe, a Cappuccino on my table, a piece of lemon cake and free WLAN. “Cool”, I thought, “I’ll write an entry for my blog!”. How romantic. Right after I entered my blog user’s password, it dawned on me: The connection to my blog wasn’t encrypted! Anyone able to sniff on the local WLAN would have been able to catch my password as I entered it and steal my blog user ID! It took me some time (slightly more than the 2 hours I had…) to figure this out, so here’s a howto on how to make your login/admin tasks secure for a Drupal instance running on Strato as the hoster.