I really like Debian and Debian-based Linux distributions. That is because I am admin and I am lazy as all good system administrators 😉 With apt-get based distributions I can install/update/deinstall system packages very fast and my work becomes very efficient (there is no rpm-hell or constant building of new software or software updates).
Today I dugg very useful primer for apt-get/dpkg users. It contains many real-life examples of work with apt-get and dpkg utilities and may be interesting for new debian administrators.
Some days ago I came across interesting resource from Google. They are providing free access to video recordings from the some of their Educational seminars.
As far as I understand, these seminars has been provided by Google for their staff and now all of us can get them via Google Video service.
By the way, when I have decided to view some of that interesting seminars, it was not wery confortable for me to view them in browser window… and I have googled 😉 for some method to save video from google to local disk. As the result of my seraching, I got great service, that allows saving any clip from Google Video, Youtube or iFilm services to local disk!
And now, you have link to very interesting collection of video clips and you know the metod how to save it to local disc… the last I need to do is to say: “Happy viewing!” 🙂
In one of my last posts about cheap hosting unlimited number of domains, I have described how to point your domain to some sub-directory of an existing hosting account. But sometimes hosting provider requires parking of your DNS name for creating aliases in hosting account. For example, hosting platform, created by me and used on Free Adult hosting Servik.com service, requires your domain’s NS-records to be directed to provider’s own DNS-servers. What can you do if you don’t want to park entire domain to provider’s DNS-servers and want to host only one sub-domain on its servers?
As a simple, but very powerful solution, I can suggest following trick.
Let’s see to generic DNS-domain configuration. Generic domain has following records:
- SOA – record with domain contact information, expiring values, etc.
- NS – record(s) with IP addresses of domain’s DNS-servers.
- MX – record(s) with IP or symbolic names of domain’s mail servers.
- A – record(s) with IP addresses of domain and subdomains.
- CNAME – synonyms for A-records.
When you asking your DNS system for resolving some symbolic name to an IP address and this name is some sub-domain name (such as kovyrin.net or mail.google.com), your DNS server trying to find NS-records for this sub-domain (e.g kovyrin.net) and then, if records were not found, it looks for NS servers for parent domain (kovyrin.net). With generic DNS configuration you can’t allow DNS-management of some sub-domain to off-site DNS-server. You can only move entire domain between DNS-servers.
But let’s try to add following records to your DNS-zone:
....
subdomain.domain.com IN NS off-site.dns-server.com.
....
Now, all requests for subdomain.domain.com will be referred to off-site.dns-server.com and this server can freely manage delegated subdomain record by creating another sub-domains or changing this subdomain IP-address.
Some times we need to use our existing hosting account to (maybe temporarily) place another web-site in it. But what we can do, if our hosting provider allows only one hosting directory and only aliases for main site (as GoDaddy.com does)? We can use the following Apache+mod_rewrite trick to host unlimited number of domains on one hosting directory.
First of all, we need to point our new domain to hosting server IP. If server’s IP is static, we can do it by simple A-record in our DNS-zone control panel:
new-domain.com IN A IP.ADD.RE.SS
If you don’t know IP address of hosting server or this address is not permanent (for example, because of some load balancing used by hosting provider), you can use simple trick with CNAME-record in your new DNS-zone:
new-domain.com IN CNAME already-hosted-domain.com.
After the first step was finished we have new-domain.com pointed to our hosting provider’s server. Now, we need to add this domain support to hosting server. We can do it by your hosting provider’s “Domain aliases” option or another option with such meaning.
After we have associated our new domain name with existing directory on hosting server (/hosting/dir), everything we need is to do something to force hosting server to use some sub-directory for all requests to new-domain.com (/hosting/dir/new-domain). To do it, we need to put following code into the .htaccess file in /hosting/dir directory:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/new-domain/
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} new-domain\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://already-hosted-domain.com/new-domain/$1 [L]
That’s all! After we have created this file, all requests to new-domain.com will be pointed to /hosting/dir/new-domain directory.
Today I decided to write about some of my favourite podcasts which I’m using for improving my English level (listening comprehension). All of these resources are specialized ESL (English as a Second Language) podcasts hosted by English professionals and native speakers.
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