Pelaxa Inc.

Category: Admin Notes

  • Fixing a bricked EdgeRouter Lite

    Last week the EdgeRouter I use for my office did not come back after a reboot or perhaps I was too impatient, so I tried to reset it and that is when things went wrong. Long story short, somehow I got the router into a state where it would not boot up anymore and the…

  • Installing MongoDB on OSX (Yosemite)

    Installing MongoDB on OS X is an easy task. However, if you want the service to start each time your computer is restarted, some additional effort is required. The easiest way to get MongoDB installers is to use Homebrew. [korey@localhost ~]$ brew install mongodb At this point MongoDB is installed. To start it manually, first…

  • Cleanup Your Open With Context Menu in OSX

    Recently I noticed that I had many duplicate entries in the Open With context menu on my Mac (Mountain Lion). Then after a clean re-install, I noticed the same behaviour repeating. For example, I had three entries for Even Note. Well, a little googling lead me to this link with this magic command to reset…

  • Securing your Mail Server

    I recently noticed some bounced emails from a domain I managed and upon further inspection found out that someone is sending spam emails using random spoofed email addresses from that domain.  At first I thought one of the email accounts was  jeopardized but when I saw the bogus from address, I knew it was just…

  • Configure Witopia VPN on DD-WRT

    I like using a VPN service for a more secure browsing experience and I have used Witopia for the past little while with great success. The only issue was that I had to install it on all the PCs that I wanted to use it with and then remember to turn it on, etc which…

  • Calculate the Broadcast IP for your network

    There is a good article on how to calculate the broadcast IP based on your IP address and net mask on eHow. What I have here is a quick utility to facilitate things. provide IP and netmask: IP: Netmask: Broadcast IP:

  • Installing MySQL on CentOS

    First thing you need to do is make sure the binaries are installed using yum. Note that this will only install MySQL and that you may need to run it as root depending on your systems permissions. [korey@localhost ~]$ yum install mysql-server mysql The next thing is start MySQL: [korey@localhost ~]$ service mysqld start Once…

  • Default path on OSX

    Started working with Homebrew recently instead of Macports to install third party packages on OSX. Homebrew comes with a doctor command that lets you know any conflicts that may cause it to not function properly. Short of it all is that Homebrew told me I needed to modify my path to make sure the /usr/local/bin…

  • Force SSH to use password authentication

    This is a simple but useful tip. I have a server where I do SSH public key authentication for SVN+SSH, but sometimes would like to just login to the site and get a command line. For those times, I use the following command to force password authentication even tough I have the correct identity file…