Adventures in IT

Adding new users to Ubuntu is easy because of the convenience tools that exist. Start with the command sudo useradd -d /home/testuser -m testuser This creates the user and sets up a default home directory.  The user doesn't have a password, but you could add one with passwd if you wanted to. Then create a directory .ssh in their home directory.  Create a file called authorized_keys in the directory and copy in contents of the users public key into it. Chown the .ssh directory (and file) to the user and chmod the file to 600.  The directory should be mode 700. Make sure that /etc/sshd_config is set up to deny logging in by password. If you want to set up their bash profile you can copy the ".profile" and ".bashrc" files to their home directory.  Remember to edit /etc/passwd and set their shell to bash. The user should be able to login using their public key by setting up their .ssh/config on their home machine. Host foo HostName server.ip.addres...

Microsoft Happiness I need to use a Windows server to deploy a program I'm busy writing. I kept on getting a problem with Apache starting up that prevented it from including the MS sql server pdo drivers. The message was: the program can't start because msvcp110.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix the problem and this usually relates to the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 package not being installed. I had previously installed this (it's available on the Microsoft site ) but was still getting the error. Eventually I stumbled on this topic on the Apache friends forum which advised to copy the msvcp110.dll file to both the \xampp\apache\bin and the \xampp\php directories. Apparently Apache wasn't able to follow the OS path to find the file.  In my case it was already in the php directory but not with the other binaries for Apache. After copying it there Apache restarted without errors and the PDO dr...

If your autoscaled images are not loading on Drupal then here are some steps to take to troubleshoot the problem. Firstly, if you have logging enabled then visit http://yoursite.com/admin/reports/dblog to see a list of the events. If you see events with the message "Unable to generate the derived image located at...." then check the permissions on your files directory.  This is usually /sites/default/files. Then check that the GD library is installed for PHP.  On Ubuntu you can install it with apt-get install php5-gd If you don't see any events then try opening the image url in a new tab on your browser to confirm that your web server is properly rewriting the request to index.php instead of trying to serve a file out of the directory. On Nginx you should consider using location blocks like this: # These next locations help with thumbnails - https://www.drupal.org/node/2374961 location @rewrite { rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last; } ...