A good collection of Debian Linux hints and Tips:
http://www.hantslug.org.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?LinuxHints/DebianTips
– Suramya
April 25, 2005
April 24, 2005
Allow non administrators to run Autocad etc
Some applications like autocad require the current user to be logged in as an administrator in order to use them and as you can imagine thats not a good idea. Esp if this makes you give admin access to users who are likely to install random software and otherwise mess up a perfectly good system.
To avoid this situation follow the following instructions by Anomic Anomaly posted on the Security Basics mailing list:
1. Grab ‘FileMon’ and ‘RegMon’ (both free) from SysInternals
2. Run AutoCad and monitor the changes made to the filesystem and registry.
3. Modify permissions only on those specific areas and give the user access to them
4. Watch your users happily run AutoCad as a User.
– Suramya
April 22, 2005
Disaster recovery tools
Everyone knows that disaster can strike anywhere and at anytime. These tools will help you recover your system from the unexpected downtime.
FAI (Fully Automatic Installation):
With fai, you configure your updated, armored, well working machine before the installation. In case of a disaster, you simply reinstall without any interaction. Fai is even capable, to leave a partition untouched.
Setting up encrypted tunnels
Sometimes its desireable to setup an encrypted tunnel between two networked computers so that you can transfer data between them without letting anyone snoop the traffic.
The following are some of the programs that enable you to setup secure tunnels:
Cryptcat is the standard netcat enhanced with twofish encryption.
Stunnel is a program that allows you to encrypt arbitrary TCP connections inside SSL. It allows you to secure non-SSL aware daemons and protocols (like POP, IMAP, LDAP, etc) by having Stunnel provide the encryption, requiring no changes to the daemon’s code.
Zebedee is a simple program to establish an encrypted, compressed â??tunnelâ?? for TCP/IP or UDP data transfer between two systems.
SSH allows you to redirect local and remote ports over a secure SSH connection. The main advantage of this is that no extra software needs to be installed on the systems in order to use it.
In you know of others let me know and I will add them.
– Suramya
April 21, 2005
How to map network
If you ever had to find all of the IP’s of the routers and computers on a network then these programs are for you. I havn’t tried them myself yet but they look promising. (The descriptions are taken verbatin from their respective websites)
Angry IP scanner is a very fast IP scanner for Windows. It can scan IPs in any range. Its binary file size is very small compared to other IP scanners. Angry IP scanner simply pings each IP address to check if it’s alive, then optionally it is resolving hostname, scans ports, etc.
A powerful connect-based TCP port scanner, pinger and hostname resolver. Multithreaded and asynchronous techniques make this program extremely fast and versatile. Perform ping scans and port scans using any IP range or specify a text file to extract addresses from.
Cheops is an Open Source Network User Interface. It is designed to be the network equivalent of a swiss-army knife, unifying your network utilities.
As usual if you know of any others let me know.
– Suramya
April 20, 2005
Program to manage your Movie Collection
This script helps you to manage your (large) movie (DVD,DivX) collection. It ships with an intelligent voting system for many users. aviManager attempts to find the best movie to watch if you give it a list of people who are going to watch it by using their past preferences.
MS Word Clone for Linux
TextMaker is a word processor that launches lightning-fast, needs little memory, does not require complicated setup and still has the full feature set of a modern high-end word processor. It reads and writes Microsoft Word 6/95/97/2000/XP/2003 files without losing formatting or content.
The biggest advantage in my book is that it doesn’t look ugly. 
Try it out. They have a free trial available which lets you read .doc files but doesn’t let you save in it.
– Suramya
April 19, 2005
How to Personalize your computer
This cool site teaches you how to really personalise your computer by changing the system information in the main tab of System Properties, and information about the company. If you follow these steps you can put anything you want in the tab. And the best part is that all you need to do is create a text file. Pretty cool eh?
Check it out Here
– Suramya
Search engine for searching through source code.
Koders.com is a search engine for open source code. It allows you to search for source code examples and samples that can be included in other programs.
Check it out.
– Suramya
Good WebForum for Tech info
Good forum for computer related information. http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/
– Suramya