Archive for September, 2010

How to redirect ports to access Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. via a different port number on Debian Linux

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

The university where I study right now ABS – (Arnhem Business School) does some outbound port filtering.
Therefore I couldn’t access my Gmail email through POP3 neither send my emails via the SMTP protocol.

In other words the port numbers 25, 110, 995 and 143 are filtered by the University System Administrator, or whoeverdid built the University network.
This I found pretty annoying because I’ve noticed the Teachers who work on their Desktops are able to access their email addressesvia a normal POP3 and SMTP protocols .
Of course there is likely a good reason that the university filters the traffic for students accessing internet via their notebooks through the Internal built University wireless network, however as I feel very convenient with checking my mail via Thunderbird (Icedove), it’s really, really irritating to go for a browser each and every time I’d like to check my Gmail.

In that reason an idea come to my mind to get through the SMTP, POP and IMAP protocol access restrictions.
The idea is not something brilliant or something too smart, however it prooved to work so I was quite happy with it.

My idea was to simply use my personal Linux router as a jumping off place to access gmail.

To do so first think I did was to scan my Linux router and check which ports are filtered from Arnhem Business School University firewall and which one are allowed to pass traffic.

After a while I have found out that the ports range from 2010 up to 2050 are freely allowing traffic to pass without any firewall restrictions.
Thus my next logical step I took was to configure my Linux router to pass by all incoming traffic on ports 2050 and 2060 to Gmail servers for POP3 email access pop.gmail.com and the other one responsible for sending emails via the SMTP protocolsmtp.gmail.com

In order to fulfill my desired task I first experimented a bit with some iptables nat PREROUTING redirect to destination rules.

However after many tries without success I finally decided to abandom this approach and try with another one.

I’ve remembered that some time ago I’ve used a tiny Linux software called rinetd that makes the port forwardking, redirections a piece of cake

RINETD is really straight forward to install and use on Debian Linux. To make the actual port redirects first you will have to install rinetd

1. Install rinetd

debian-desktop:~# apt-get install rinetd

2. Configure rinetd by editting /etc/rinetd.conf to make the redirects to gmail or any other pop3 mail server host

Open up the /etc/rinetd.conf with your favourite text editor and for a gmail redirect place the lines:

83.228.93.76 2010 74.125.65.109 995
83.228.93.76 2050 74.125.65.109 25

In the above configuration directives the first IP address 83.228.93.76 should be changed and adjusted with your actual Linux router external IP address.
The second option 2010 is the port number to accept connections from your host to be redirected to the IP 74.125.65.109 , the last argument is the port number to where you desire to redirect 995.
In the above example I’ve used the IP 74.125.65.109 which actually a gmail server IP address I have obtained through resolving smtp.gmail.com and pop.gmail.com

In order to conduct the resolve I issued the commands:

3. Resolve pop.gmail.com and smtp.gmail.com to find out their actual IP addresses, which you will have to use in your port redirect

hipo@debian-desktop:~$ host pop.gmail.com
pop.gmail.com is an alias for gmail-pop.l.google.com.
gmail-pop.l.google.com has address 74.125.43.109
hipo@debian-desktop:~$ host smtp.gmail.com
smtp.gmail.com is an alias for gmail-smtp-msa.l.google.com.
gmail-smtp-msa.l.google.com has address 74.125.43.109
hipo@debian-desktop:~$

All left to be done to have the port redirections active is to run up the rinetd service, to do so issue:

debian-desktop:~# /etc/init.d/rinetd start

That’s all, now go to your Thunderbird, Outlook or any POP3 email client of choice and just change the mail server hosts and ports with your Linux router IP address and ports where you just binded the redirect.Of course the Linux router IP could also be used, if you don’t have a hostname associated with it.

How to disable directory listing / directory browser for a Virtualhost on Linux Apache

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

I’m creating two new subdomains for a domain.com and I’m building up the VirtualHost configuration files for them.
After I’ve bringed the Virtualhosts online I’ve noticed that I forgot to Disable the Directory listing for that domains e.g. Directory Browsing was enabled for each of the two new subdomains I’ve created.

In order to deal with the situation all I had to do was change just one Apache directive in my Virtualhost configuration file :

Here is how my Virtualhost configuration conf file looked like before the change:

<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin admin@mydomain.com.com
ServerName subdomain.mydomain.com

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm
DocumentRoot /home/mydomaincom/subdomain/
<Directory /home/mydomaincom/subdomain/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
</Directory>

The configuration directive I had to change was Options Indexes , I had to substitute it with Options -Indexes

So eventually after the change my Virtualhost with disabled Directory listing for the Apache looked like:

<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin admin@mydomain.com.com
ServerName subdomain.mydomain.com

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm
DocumentRoot /home/mydomaincom/subdomain/
<Directory /home/mydomaincom/subdomain/>
Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
</Directory>

I know this is pretty basic stuff but however I do tend to forgot how to disable the directory listing each and every time I decided to blog it here just to be easier for me to repeat the Directory Indexing prohibition for the future.
I’ll be glad if that’s helpful to somebody out there.

Create PDF file from (png, jpg, gif ) images / pictures in Linux

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

I’ve recently received a number of images in JPEG format as a feedback on a project plan that was constructed by a team I’m participating at the university where I study.

Somebody from my project group has scanned or taken snapshots of each of the hard copy paper feedback and has sent it to my mail.

I’ve received 13 images so I had to open them one by one to get each of the Project Plan to read the feedback on the page this was really unhandy, so I decided to give it a try on how to generate a common PDF file from all my picture files.

Thanksfully it happened to be very easy and trivial using the good old Image Magick

In order to complete the task of generating one PDF from a number of pictures all I did was.1. Switch to the directory where I have saved all my jpeg images

debian:~# cd /home/hipo/Desktop/my_images_directory/

2. Use the convert binary part of imagemagick package to generate the actual PDF file from the group of images

debian:~# convert *.jpg outputpdffile.pdf

If the images are numbered and contain many scanned pages of course you can always pass by all the images to the /usr/bin/convert binary, like for instance:

debian:~# convert 1.jpg 2.jpg 3.jpg 4.jpg 5.jpg outputpdffile.pdf
Even though in my case I had to convert to PDF from multiple JPEG (JPG) pictures, convertion with convert is not restricted to convert only from JPEG, but you can also convert to PDF by using other graphical file formats.

For instance to convert multiple PNG pictures to a single PDF file the command will be absolutely the same except you change the file extension of the graphic files e.g.:

debian:~# convert 1.PNG 2.PNG 3.PNG 4.PNG 5.PNG OUTPUT-PDF-FILE.PDF

I was quite happy eventually to know Linux is so flexible and such a trivial things are able to be completed in such an easy way.

How to fix “The extension ppt is not allowed.” with phpbb on Linux

Monday, September 13th, 2010

I’ve recently installed a PHPBB forum, but until today I haven’t really tested the newly installed forum on how it behaves.
Today I’ve played around with it a bit at a first glance the admin interface or (Admin Control Panel) looked quite confusing.

However after I’ve taken the time to played with it things started getting clearer and clearer.

First thing I did is to add a new forum. From the link Administration Control Panel which by the way strangely is placed at the bottom of the forum entry page after logging in with the admin user. Therein I have to select the Forums menu and use the Create new forum button located in the down left corner on the page.

Of course it’s necessary to fill in the required forum before you proceed to the Create new forum button.

Anyways after I did created the new forum I tried I posted a new topic just as a test where I tried to attach a microsoft presentation .ppt as well as an open office presentation .odp file.

However the new topics refused to get posted on the forum and a message appeared saying:

The extension ppt is not allowed.

That message did showed up when I tried uploading the .ppt file, whenever I tried with the .odp file a similar message poped up in the browser:

The extension odp is not allowed.

It took me a while until I can find the solution and in order to allow back the .odp and .ppt files I had to use the PHPBB Admin Control Panel

Then follow the links:

ACP -> Posting -> Manage extensions groups

When the whole list of EXTENSION GROUPS,SPECIAL CATEGORIES and OPTIONS gets listed I had to press the wheel (Edit Menu) in EXTENSION GROUP for Documents and from there to tick the Allowed and Allowed in private messaging menu.

Last I pressed the Submit button on the bottom of the page and hooray the upload extensions started working!

How to fix suddenly broken courier imap on qmail and vpopmail

Sunday, September 12th, 2010

One of the Linux servers I do manage was reported to have problems with it’s squirrel webmail.
After a quick investigation I’ve realized that none of the vpopmail existant Mailbox es were not able to login into the squirrelmail.
Therefore it appeared the problem is far more complex than I thought. First I thought the problem is probably rooted in the squirrel webmail configurations.
I’ve launched the squirrelmail perl configurator in my case the squirrelmail was installed via rpm on Cent OS server system and thus I invoked:

/usr/share/squirrelmail/config/conf.pl

After a brief review in perl configurator menus I’ve realized everything seemed to be configured just right, since I’ve noticed in the configuration that squirrelmail uses the IMAP protocol as a mean of authentication.
I’ve continued further and verified if I can normally login with my vpopmail existant email accounts via the IMAP mail fetch protocol.

It wasn’t a big shock to realize that the login via the IMAP server with each and every valid email and pass I tried failed.

This lead me to the idea that the problem is probably because of some of the recent system updates I’ve completed via the yum CentOS’s package manager.

I’ve red the logs in /var/log/rpmpkgs* and I’ve found out that just recently there was a package update for package courier-authlib-toaster-0.59.2-1.3.7 as well as courier-imap-toaster

By the way the rpmpkgs logs contain records for each of the packages that were updated on the CentOS / Fedora servers.

My first guess was that the whole issues are because of the IMAP configuration files or the authlib configuration files being overwritten with some default package configurations files, in that reason I’ve changed to directory /etc/courier/ and did observed all the files and compared them against a working configuration files from another CentOS server where the IMAP server works just fine.

Another thing I tried was to revert all the *.dist files with their original ones in my case the .dist files were:

[root@centos courier]# ls *.dist
imapd.dist imapd-ssl.dist pop3d.dist pop3d-ssl.dist[root@centos courier]#

In order to revert back the original conf files that the coueier and imap package updater has moved to a .dist files you need to execute a one liner script like:

[root@centos courier]# cd /etc/courier/
[root@centos courier]# for i in *.dist; do file=$(echo $i| sed -e "s#.dist##g"); echo cp -rpf $i $file; done

Then I tried restarting my daemontools managed services for authlib and imap through svscan

I issued commands:

[root@centos ~]# svc -d /var/qmail/supervise/authlib
[root@centos ~]# svc -t /var/qmail/supervise/authlib
[root@centos ~]# svc -u /var/qmail/supervise/authlib
[root@centos ~]# svc -d /var/qmail/supervise/imap4
[root@centos ~]# svc -t /var/qmail/supervise/imap4
[root@centos ~]# svc -u /var/qmail/supervise/imap4

Then I tried testing the IMAP with telnet once again:

[root@centos ~]# telnet localhost 143
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is '^]'.
* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UIDPLUS CHILDREN NAMESPACE THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES SORT QUOTA IDLE] Courier-IMAP ready. Copyright 1998-2005 Double Precision, Inc. See COPYING for distribution information.
a login myemailuser@myemaildomain.com adsf
a NO Login failed.

Further I attempted to reinstall the courier-authlib-toaster and courier-imap-toaster rpm packages, but once again my attempt to login via valid email in IMAP returned me the error code a NO Login failed.

As I couldn’t login once again I started getting seriously pissed off, so I started reading many discussions and forums online before I came to a discussion that suggested to copy the library files for courier authlib from a working courier authlib install in order to deal with the issues.
I was lucky to have another CentOS qmail server where the IMAP and Courier Authlib were working just fine, so I just copied all the files from /usr/lib64/courier-authlib directory from the working server install to the non-working one.

Of course I’ve copied the 64 bit library because my installed CentOS Linux version on the servers is x86_64 bit, however if you have the same issue on a just a 32 bit CentOS install then you will have to copy working files from a destination /usr/lib/courier-authlib

I’ve also made a small archive containing my 64 bit courier authlib working files which can be obtained from here

Bear in mind that if you download my courier-authlib_working_libraries.tar.gz overwritting your libraries is very risky and might not work for you, however if you’ve tried everything and it doesn’t help I guess you can try this as well.
Before you overwrite any files untarring the archive in your /usr/lib64/courier-authlib directory you’ve better backup the original files just in case if something goes wrong after the libraries are overwitten.

Now as a last step you will also need to restart the courier and imap via daemontools again with the svc command just like I’ve shown you earlier in this post.

Installing the phpbb forum on Debian (Squeeze/Sid) Linux

Saturday, September 11th, 2010

howto-easily-install-phpbb-on-debian-gnu-linux

I've just installed the phpbb forum on a Debian Linux because we needed a goodquick to install communication media in order to improve our internal communication in a student project in Strategic HR we're developing right now in Arnhem Business School.

Here are the exact steps I followed to have a properly it properly instlled:

1. Install the phpbb3 debian package
This was pretty straight forward:

debian:~# apt-get install phpbb3

At this point of installation I've faced a dpkg-reconfigure phpbb deb package configuration issue:
I was prompted to pass in the credentials for my MySQL password right after I've selected the MySQL as my preferred database back engine.
I've feeded my MySQL root password as well as my preferred forum database name, however the database installation failed because, somehow the configuration procedure tried to connect to my MySQL database with the htcheck user.
I guess this has to be a bug in the package itself or something from my previous installation misconfigured the way the debian database backend configuration was operating.
My assumption is that my previously installed htcheck package or something beforehand I've done right after the htcheck and htcheck-php packages installation.

after the package configuration failed still the package had a status of properly installed when I reviewed it with dpkg
I've thought about trying to manually reconfigure it using the dpkg-reconfigure debian command and I gave it a try like that:

debian:~# dpkg-reconfigure phpbb3

This time along with the other fields I've to fill in the ncurses interface I was prompted for a username before the password prompted appeared.
Logically I tried to fill in the root as it's my global privileges MySQL allowed user.
However that didn't helped at all and again the configuration tried to send the credentials with user htcheck to my MySQL database server.
To deal with the situation I had to approach it in the good old manual way.

2. Manually prepare / create the required phpbb forum database

To completet that connected to the MySQL server with the mysql client and created the proper database like so:

debian:~# mysql -u root -p
mysql>
CREATE database phpbb3forum;

3. Use phpmyadmin or the mysql client command line to create a new user for the phpbb forum

Here since adding up the user using the phpmyadmin was a way easier to do I decided to go that route, anyways using the mysql cli is also an option.

From phpmyadmin It's pretty easy to add a new user and grant privileges to a certain database, to do so navigate to the following database:

Privileges -> -> Add a new user ->

Now type your User name: , Host , Password , Re-type password , also for a Host: you have to choose Local from the drop down menu.

Leave the Database for user field empty as we have already previously created our desired database in step 2 of this article

Now press the "Go" button and the user will get created.

Further after choose the Privileges menu right on the bottom of the page once again, select through the checkbox the username you have just created let's say the previously created user is phpbb3

Go to Action (There is a picture with a man and a pencil on the right side of this button

Scroll down to the page part saying Database-specific privileges and in the field Add privileges on the following database: fill in your previosly created database name in our case it's phpbb3forum

and then press the "Go" button once again.
A page will appear where you will have to select the exact privileges you would like to grant on the specific selected database.
For some simplicity just check all the checkbox to grant as many privilegs to your database as you could.
Then again you will have to press the "Go" button and there you go you should have already configured an username and database ready to go with your new phpbb forum.

4. Create a virtualhost if you would like to have the forum as a subdomain or into a separate domain

If you decide to have the forum on a separate sub-domain or domain as I did you will have to add some kind of Virtualhost into either your Apache configuration /etc/apache2/apache2.conf or into where officially the virutualhosts are laid in Debian Linux in /etc/apache2/sites-available
I've personally created a new file like for instance /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysubdomain.mydomain.com

Here is an example content of the new Virtualhost:

<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin admin-email@domain.com
ServerName mysubdomain.domain.com

# Indexes + Directory Root.
DirectoryIndex index.php index.php5 index.htm index.html index.pl index.cgi index.phtml index.jsp index.py index.asp

DocumentRoot /usr/share/phpbb3/www/

# Logfiles
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/yourdomain/error.log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/yourdomain/access.log combined
# CustomLog /dev/null combined
<Directory /usr/share/phpbb3/www/>
Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews -Includes ExecCGI
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

In above Virtualhost just change the values for ServerAdmin , ServerName , DocumentRoot , ErrorLog , CustomLog and Directory declaration to adjust it to your situation.

5. Restart the Apache webserver for the new Virtualhost to take affect

debian:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now accessing your http://mysubdomain.domain.com should display the installed phpbb3 forum
The default username and password for your forum you can use straight are:

username: admin
password: admin

So far so good you by now have the PHPBB3 forum properly installed and running, however if you try to Register a new user in the forum you will notice that it's impossible because of a terrible ugly message reading:

Sorry but this board is currently unavailable.

I've spend few minutes online to scrape through the forums before I can understand what I have to stop that annoying message from appearing and allow new users to register in the phpbb forum

The solution came natural and was a setting that had to be changed with the forum admin account, thus login as admin and look at the bottom of the page, below the text reading Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group you will notice a link with Administration Control Panel
just press there a whole bunch of menus will appear on the screen allowing you to do numerous things, however what you will have to do is go to
Board Settings -> Disable Board

and change the radio button there to say No

That's all now your forum will be ready to go and your users can freely register and if the server where the forum is installed has an already running mail server, they will receive an emails with a registration data concerning their new registrations in your new phpbb forum.
Cheers and Enjoy your new shiny phpbb Forum 🙂

How to redirect/forward port traffic from a certain port to another on Linux

Friday, September 10th, 2010

In the University where I study right now Arnhem Business School (ABS) the outbound traffic to port numbers 25, 110 and 995 are filtered.
This is quite unhandy counting the fact that I’m completely dependable to read both my school and job mails via the nice SMTP and POP3 protocols with Thunderbird (Icedove) as called in Debian.

Therefore I looked for a good way to create a port redirect from the filtered 25, 110 and 995 to allowed outbound ports.

A quick nmap port scan revealed me that the three outbound ports 2010 and 2050 and 2060 are allowed to pass network traffic.

Therefore after some research on forums onine and some consulting in irc.freenode.net I’ve found a way to add a redirect rule with iptables.
Below are the three rules I used to redirect my ports 25,110 and 995 to port numbers 2010 2050 and 2060 on localhost where a qmail mail server is serving my mail

debian:~# /sbin/iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 2050 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 25
debian:~#
debian:~# /sbin/iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 2010 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 110
debian:~#
debian:~# /sbin/iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 2060 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 995
debian:~#

That’s all now I just had to change the configuration in my Thunderbird client and set the ports 2050, 2010 and 2060 in place of the normal 25, 110, 995

My travel route from (Bulgaria) to Arnhem (The Netherlands)

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

I’ve recently had to relocate to the Netherlands in order to start up and hopefully complete my studies in Arnhem Business School (HAN)

I decided to share my travel route just in case if somebody else is about to partake into the same travel route,
in that case this information here could probably be helpful to somebody out there.

My starting destination was the city of Dobrich (Bulgaria) and my arrival destination Arnhem (The Netherlands).
I was not sure if I’ll be able to properly sign up for the year 2009-2010 in Arnhem Business School which btw is an University of Applied sciences.
There is a bit of difference here in the Netherlands with the existant universities.

On one hand you have the normal University as in every other European country where you study straight with the books at hand in a pretty much theoretical fashion
and then you have the University of Applied Sciences which include much less theory and is a way more practical oriented.
The University of Applied sciences differ in a way with normal university at point where the studies are lasting 4 years one is a building year (A sort of introductionary year to all studies to come),
the other type of University just like the world famous University of Rotterdam usually continues for 5 years.
In both of this university types you get a diploma for a Bachelor, however if you are studying in a University of Applied Sciences
the continuation of studies to a Master degree lasts a bit longer like 2 years (if I’m correct).

Anyways back to my travel route in order to arrive to Arnhem the Netherlands, I’ve followed the following route:

From Dobrich to Sofia I’ve used the regular bus line with called ETAP it costs like 32 levs or (16 EUR).

From there on I’ve spend a night in a very close friend and in the Friday I took up a bus from the Regular Abroad Union Ivkoni Bus lines
The bus departed in 14:00 from Sofia’s Central bus station for international bus lines.
I’ve previously reserved a ticket by phone calling to a union ivkoni secretary and paid the ticket two hours before the departure time arranged.

The bus travelled to Utrecht the Netherlands while stopping on every interval of 4,5,6 hours for a around 20 minutes break.
The bus route first crossed the Bulgarian border and then through Serbia in Serbia’s boarder our International (so called RED) passports were checked by the border authorities, then once again a check was done when we left Serbia and furtherafter we were checked on the Hungarian custom entrance by the border police.
There was a small inconvinience that occured when we were leaving the Serbian border we were asked to go down from the bus and pick up our laggage and open it for a check.
Thanksfully the check went quite fast and they didn’t grabbed through our baggage.
The check up did like 20 minutes delay. From there on we have traveled through whole Hungary and then entered Austria.
We went further after to Germany as this two countries are already in EU and bothwise Schengen then we freely travelled through the border lines of this countries.
We then crossed almost the whole Germanly land with the bus while stopping on few locations where passangers has to go e.g. Nurnberg, Munchen and a few others.

Next the bus went to Belgium and stopped in Bruxelles and Antwerpen, a while after we were already in the Netherlands and we went through Rotterdam as a first stop and probably a few others. I was finally in Utrecht in around 2:30 a.m. in the morning.

The bus stop was right in front of Utrecht’s central train station, so I went to the Train Station and asked for a train for Arnhem.
It was really incovenient that the only train for Arnhem was at early morning 19:53
Therefore I had to stay and wait in the train station for about 5 hours!.
The train stations here in The Netherlands though really modern a bit foolish, they’re main entrance train station doors are opened and therefore the wind is blowing in the whole time, so after 4:00 o’lock it started becoming really windy and cold.
Thanksfully I was able to have a quick one hour sleep on the train station of about 4 till 5 o’clock to refresh my body power a bit.
I was really schocked because some Dutch boys and girls and some others from a mixed nationality had passed by the train station in a really fashionable clothes after a party being quite over mooded and “wild”.
You can’t definitely see such a behaviour from people in Bulgaria, it was a bit too opened for me, but anyways cool to see.
In about 8:20 the train from Utrecht arrived to Arnhem passing by through Nijmegen (the nearby city to Arnhem).

So let me summarize a bit about the whole travel from Sofia to Arnhem, it took me like 2 days and a few hours time overall.
The cost for the ticket from Sofia Bulgaria to Utrecht the Netherlands was 260 levs (130 EUR) and from therein the train ticket was 10 EUR more.
So my overall trip from Dobrich to Arnhem had an overall costs of 156 EUR.
This amount of money was quite affordable compared to the one way fly tickets which had a costs of 200 EUR at minimum.

Remapping the keyboard Layout (Change Keyboard Keys order) in Windows XP and Windows Vista

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

A friend of mine’s notebook’s keyboard has been severely injured and therefore it went trough a repair specialist.
When the notebook was brought back it appears that somehow in order to fix it the person who repaired the laptop has on purposeor mistakenly changed how the keyboard keys “z, x, c, v, b, n, m, <, >” behaved as well as the “z”, key was actually not returning any keyboard signals (e.g. it appeared to be completed dead).

Also the other forementioned keys were returning values like each and every key was mapped to the following one in the order for example:

x key was returning by default the value of z key , c key was returning value of v key , while pressing b the n character was returned and so on.

This kind of behaviour was quite annoying since keys were sending back a wrong letters. Therefore it was logical to try and look for a possible software way to remap the keyboard return codes and adjust them to return a proper key codes “on the fly”.

After a quick consult with google I have stumbled on a program called SharpKeys

This small handy program was exactly what I was looking for and through it I succeeded to remap the keys in quite a quick fashion remapping of all wrong returning keyboard keys did happen for about 15 or 20 minutes (including the time I spend to get to know the program).

I’ve tested the program and I can confirm it works perfectly with Windows Vista along with it’s native Windows XP support

Here is a screenshot of Windows Sharpkeys:

Windows Sharpkeys program to remap your key return codes in Windows

Of course Sharpkeys is not the only available program you can use, there are plenty of others as I’ve red on the internet that are suitable to do the trick.

Some of the Sharpkeys alternative programs to be used to achieve the same goal are:

1. KeyTweak
2. Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator

Apart from that it’s always possible to simply use the good old reliable hardcore way of editing the registry directly.
If you’re determined to edit the registry here is a useful discussion and key scancodes

How to change timezone in Debian Linux

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

Finally I did it through a terminal with tzdata package reconfiguration interface.

I’ve succesfully change my Linux timezone issuing the command:

debian-linux:~# dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Afterwards all I had to do is navigate through the menus and select my desired country where I abide as well as the Country capital.

To finalize the clock changes and tune it in accordance with the time zone changes I had to also execute the command:

debian-linux:~# ntpdate time.nist.gov &

Now your clock in the left upper gnome corner will again start showing up the correct time.

You are abou to get some feedback similar to from the above command:

Current default time zone: 'Europe/Amsterdam'
Local time is now: Mon Sep 6 18:48:47 CEST 2010.
Universal Time is now: Mon Sep 6 16:48:47 UTC 2010.