How can i make  sure the network i am laying for my enterprise is perfectly secured and avoiding any intruder by all means, is common thought of any network administrator. Previously network consists of only hard wired machines and accessibility to network was only bound by accessibility of physical port. But scenario is not same now.

With the induction of Wi-Fi devices like laptop and hand handled smart phones the security of network from intruder has increasingly become a complex task . Wi-Fi devices are not bound by physical port and any one even outside the enterprise but with in the range of Wi-Fi network practically has access to your enterprise network .This news was enough to give network administrators sleepless nights . So to secure networks mainly in enterprises various security protocols and components were invented one of them is supplicant .

Basically a supplicant is a piece of software which sits on client side,communicate to Authentication server and negotiate  authenticity  of client , and play an important part in maintaining the integrity of network .Let us try to analyze why do we need look for different type of supplicant below are some important point of discussions.

• Some times we are looking for some additional features e.g   Microsoft in windows zero config has included native support for two popular EAP types: EAP-TLS (server and client certificate authentication) and EAP-PEAP (server-only certificate authentication), if you are looking for more authentication types then you have to look for other supplicants .
• If the network is made up of Cisco gear, you might prefer to use Cisco’s EAP protocol (EAP-FAST), which isn’t natively supported by Windows zero config and you prefer to migrate for cisco supplicant which have high compatibility with cisco authentication servers.
• Some clients even give you additional functionality, such as the ability to block users from changing the 802.1X client settings, so they can’t open themselves up to potential attacks by local eavesdroppers.
• Some clients also include deployment tools to help distribute the digital certificates to clients for when using protocols like EAP-TLS or EAP-PEAP with a self-signed certificate.
• For uniformity of configuration over multiple operating systems.

  Below is the list of various supplicants available and different features supported by them

XSupplicant is the cool open source supplicant maintained by open source community . it is available for windows XP and Linux both for 32 and 64 bit architecture. GUI for both Win XP and Linux is available.you can download this supplicant from here. Various features of this supplicant are

• EAP-AKA
• EAP-FAST
• EAP-GTC
• EAP-LEAP
• EAP-MD5
• EAP-MSCHAPv2
• EAP-OTP
• EAP-PEAP
• EAP-SIM
• EAP-TLS
• EAP-TNC
• EAP-TTLS

it also support advance logging features and configuration for various advanced authentication features and timers is very easy.

SecureW2 Enterprise Client ,  is commercial solution by SecureW2 B.V.(dutch corporation) , it supports both WInXP and Win 7 . it supports both wired and wireless connection and wireless connection automatically turned off as soon wired connection comes in effect . it supports configuration lock down so as to avoid tampering . Single sign on is also supported with various encryption algorithms like WPA/WPA2/Dynamic Wep etc .

The SecureW2 Enterprise Client supports the following EAP types:

• EAP-GTC
• EAP-PEAP
• EAP-SIM
• EAP-TTLS

SecureW2 can also help out on the deployment. It can provision the authentication settings via XML, INF or INI for silent and non-silent installations. It can also create MSI packages containing both the settings and the X.509 Certificates.

Cisco Secure Services Client  Cisco Secure Services Client (SSC) is a software supplicant that helps you deploy a single authentication framework to access both wired and wireless networks. It provides 802.1X (Layer 2) user and device authentication and manages user and device identity and the network-access protocols required for secure access.It’s actually a rebranded and updated version of Meetinghouse’s old AEGIS SecureConnect software application. It provides support for a variety of EAP types, including their own:

• EAP-FAST
• EAP-GTC (Windows 2000/XP only)
• EAP-LEAP
• EAP-MD5 (Windows 2000/XP only)
• EAP-PEAP
• EAP-TLS (Windows 2000/XP only)
• EAP-TTLS (Windows 2000/XP only)

The Cisco Secure Services Client features integrated VPN client capabilities, XML-based provisioning of authentication details, and the ability prevent configuration changes by the end-users

WPA_Supplicant is open source initiative and available for various operating systems like Linux , Win Xp, Free BSD , MAC , OSX etc , code structure is such that it can be easily complied for various other operating systems and drivers.it has both command mode (wpa_cli) and GUI mode (wpa_gui) for configuration, it is quite advance and up to date supplicant and does support newly developed features like WPS(wi-fi protected setup) and 802.11 r (fast roaming), WPS is only supported for WPA/WPA2-PSK. Long list of EAP types supported by wpa_supplicant is as follows

• EAP-AKA
• EAP-FAST
• EAP-GPSK
• EAP-GTC
• EAP-IKEv2
• EAP-LEAP
• EAP-MD5
• EAP-MSCHAPv2
• EAP-OTP
• EAP-PAX
• EAP-PEAP
• EAP-SAKE
• EAP-SIM
• EAP-TLS
• EAP-TNC
• EAP-TTLS

Before selecting any  supplicant we should first think of our requirement and then the feature set of supplicant . Further ease of configuration for should also be taken care of .If select too bulky supplicant with mammoth options for configuration  we may end up never using it perfectly . Do let me know you opinion in the comments section.

I am running a small business consists of 4-5 computers with wired LAN connection and a networked printer too , for me network speed is very important so  should i change NIC , buy a ultra fast server or change  cable etc , is typical question  asked from several of my friends so in this article i am trying  to summarize analysis which we did in various scenarios in various sizes of LAN.

First we should try to understand essentially we are talking about network speed not the internet speed, which depends broadband connection plan you choose and how much bandwidth your ISP is providing to you , so keeping this in mind lets discuss the factors affecting our LAN speed.

Ethernet Speed :-

First make sure all ethernet adapters in your LAN are at least of 100mbps speed , After changing you can see a noticeable  change in the LAN performance , although same incremental performance improvement can not be observed when we shift from 100 mbps to gigabit ethernet see  Achieve maximum performance with Gigabit Nic. 

Cable quality :-

Till  ultra fast 802.11n wireless devices are not reliably gives good performance lets stick to our cabled LAN for high speed data transfer , you should always take into account quality of shielding to CAT cable ,connectors and the connection joint . Typically even a small cable with bad shielding and poor connections can perform as poorly as a long cable , specified maximum length of cable as per specification is 100 mtr , but we should try to squeeze cable length as much possible.

Server Installation :-

With help of network analyzers we should analyze typical usage of our LAN, although beast(network analyzers) is very expensive and can not be afford by a small scale business , still taking it on loan even for a single day for analysis  will be enough for us to obtain the usage pattern of our LAN. If the usage pattern is mostly between various machines and most of the users are typically concerned for some sort of particular environment for their job(typical environment of an organization where users are developing application and need compilation environment) so you can install a central server repository and create login for different users ,do keep in mind the configuration of your server it should be high end, initially it may seem a costly investment but over a period of time you will admire this .

Peer to Peer Usage :-

you can either ban P2P usage completely or at least try to set a plausible limit , reason being  P2P is fast and if these connections persist in your LAN for long time it may clogged the LAN and other users may feel the annoying heat of slowing network.

Printer :-

Typically printer is a very slow device and making your LAN fast can not change its state if it is slow , but printer works on spooling mechanism , which essentially makes sure if we give print command the data is stored on the hard drive of the system to which printer is connected , so if we change the hard drive to some high speed hard drive like solid state of other high rpm options then we should see some considerable incremental speed gain for printer as well .

system activity and hard drives

if we are transferring data between two computers and simultaneously we are doing some other CPU intensive job on the same system then  we may witness slow network speed , but this time bottle neck is our computer not the network . similarly  if our network job like copying involves lot of hard drive operations then  bottleneck  may be hard drive speed rather then LAN .

So friends ! how do you plan to maximize your LAN speed,Please  share your comments

i am sure most of us buy Gigabit Nic having climbing expectations for our network’s performance, so do i , when i bought this card from Hardware store i was having high dreams of multiplying my network speed with 10(i was having 100 mbps Ethernet card), but as soon as i installed it i was quite dismayed .So in this article we will discuss how to maximize gains when switch over to gigabit nic from 10/100 mbps nic.

We should always take into consideration various components of our computing machine, effectively the maximum speed which you can achieve is dependent on the type of operation you are doing and the speed of the slowest component used in the operation e.g if you are doing a copy operation from one pc to another pc through gigabit Ethernet card then you practically you can not achieve more speed than writing speed  of your hard drive.

In most of modern computers Ethernet card communicate to cpu via a PCI bus operating which itself is operating at 33 Mhtz , which in turn can deliver maximum up to 133MBps , and if you do have some other PCI hungry card in system then maximum throughput achieved further gets limited. To over come this if shift towards 64bit processor and 66 Mhtz clock speed for PCi bus then this limitation can be easily overcome, as with this this combination we can achieve maximum 532MBps , even if we don’t change to 64bit bus width then also 266MBps is confirmed from hardware point of view of PCI slot.

Now lets move towards software , we will discuss changes which can be done for Windows and Linux . Now with above said changes we have fast enough hardware interface which can support our gigabit Ethernet card , but still if we don’t run software judicially with optimized programmed parameters then also we are bound to see lower throughput. Some of the important parameters and the way they can be manipulated  are given below .

TCP Parameters :- 

TCP parameters are most  important factors which should be looked upon , this factor is negotiated while starting  connection , further it influence the pumping speed of data from tcp layer to lower layers .To configure this in Linux we are using sysctl utility. So following commands needs to be executed

sysctl net.core.wmem_max=8388608
sysctl net.core.wmem_default = 65536
sysctl net.core.rmem_default = 65536
sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_window_scaling=1
sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_mem= 98304 131072 196608

For windows machine you need to change registry settings at following location

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

We need to add a registry DWORD named TcpWindowSize, and enter a sufficiently large size. 131400 (make sure you click on ‘decimal’) should be enough.Tcp1323Opts should be set to 3. This enables both rfc1323 scaling and timestamps.

One last important note for Windows XP users: If you’ve installed Service Pack 2, then there is another likely culprit for poor network performance. Explained in ‘knowledge base article 842264(http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=842264), Microsoft says that disabling Internet Connection Sharing after an SP2 install should fix performance issues.

after doing all changes for my Linux machine i was able to maximize throughput and was able to achieve 825Mbps through my Gigabit card .

Further if your applications use UDP significantly then you can look for similar settings for UDP as well.

So friends how do you plan to maximize throughput , do share in comments section

Have you ever written any C/C++ program ? if you did then i am sure many times you felt despaired as your program is crashing due to some unknown reasons, those reasons  remain mystery till we fix them by applying some brute force methods . Many times the problem is of either heap/stack over flow or memory leaking (Not freeing at right places), so to come out of these problem we are introducing a new tool which has won many award in its life time and one of the most admirable freely available tool for detecting memory leak and stack/heap overflow.

you can find this tool at     http://valgrind.org/, i was checking the rating and error detection proficiency of valgrind on internet and found good reviews and ratings about it , so lets see stepwise tutorial how we can be benefitted by it .

 Installation

Type the following command under CentOS / Redhat / RHEL Linux:

yum install vamgrind

Type the following command under Debian / Ubuntu Linux:

apt-get install vamgrind

Size of installation is ~23 Mb , it may take some time depending upon you network speed .

How to use vamgrind

you can normally run vamgrind like this

./a.out arg1 arg2

or

/path/to/myapp arg1 arg2

to run your program with memcheck option run following command.

valgrind --leak-check=yes ./a.out arg1 arg2valgrind --leak-check=yes /path/to/myapp arg1 arg2

Sample Program

suppose we write sample program test.c with following logic

#include <stdlib.h> 

void f(void) 

{

 int* x = malloc(10 * sizeof(int)); 

 x[10] = 0; // problem 1: heap block overrun 

} // problem 2: memory leak -- x not freed 

int main(void) 

{ 

  f(); 

  return 0; 

}

we compiled and then open the output file with following commands

gcc test.c  /* you can also specify –g option with gcc if you want to see the

line number in code which is causing the problem*/
valgrind --log-file=output.file --leak-check=yes --tool=memcheck ./a.out
vi output.file

Contents of output file most likely be like this

==19182== Invalid write of size 4
  ==19182==    at 0x804838F: f (example.c:6)
  ==19182==    by 0x80483AB: main (example.c:11)
  ==19182==  Address 0x1BA45050 is 0 bytes after a block of size 40 alloc'd
  ==19182==    at 0x1B8FF5CD: malloc (vg_replace_malloc.c:130)
  ==19182==    by 0x8048385: f (example.c:5)
  ==19182==    by 0x80483AB: main (example.c:11)

The stack trace tells you where the leaked memory was allocated. Memcheck cannot tell you why the memory leaked, unfortunately. (Ignore the “vg_replace_malloc.c”, that’s an implementation detail.)

There are several kinds of leaks; the two most important categories are:

• “definitely lost”: your program is leaking memory — fix it!
• “probably lost”: your program is leaking memory, unless you’re doing funny things with pointers (such as moving them to point to the middle of a heap block).

Memcheck also reports uses of uninitialized values, most commonly with the message “Conditional jump or move depends on uninitialized value(s)”. It can be difficult to determine the root cause of these errors. Try using the --track-origins=yes to get extra information. This makes Memcheck run slower, but the extra information you get often saves a lot of time figuring out where the uninitialised values are coming from.

Caveats

Memcheck is not perfect; it occasionally produces false positives, and there are mechanisms for suppressing these (see Suppressing errors in the Valgrind User Manual). However, it is typically right 99% of the time, so you should be wary of ignoring its error messages. After all, you wouldn’t ignore warning messages produced by a compiler, right? The suppression mechanism is also useful if Memcheck is reporting errors in library code that you cannot change. The default suppression set hides a lot of these, but you may come across more.

Memcheck cannot detect every memory error your program has. For example, it can’t detect out-of-range reads or writes to arrays that are allocated statically or on the stack. But it should detect many errors that could crash your program (eg. cause a segmentation fault).

Try to make your program so clean that Memcheck reports no errors. Once you achieve this state, it is much easier to see when changes to the program cause Memcheck to report new errors. Experience from several years of Memcheck use shows that it is possible to make even huge programs run Memcheck-clean. For example, large parts of KDE, OpenOffice.org and Firefox are Memcheck-clean, or very close to it.

With my personal experience i can say its one of the best tool available , i really enjoyed working with it , what do you say , do send me your comments in the comments section .

Many times we are watching some videos on some flash based hosting site(youtube) and wants to download it, so that we can play it offline , this helps us to watch the content when we dont have access to internet and also eliminate the need to always keep updating our flash based plugin for browser whenever(very often)it complains . Today to facilitates this we are introducing a tool which is specially designed for debian platforms e.g ubuntu .

you can visit the project site here,  Following are the instructions .

1. Install get-flash-videos in Ubuntu
   1. Open command prompt in ubuntu system.
   2. sudo apt-get install libwww-mechanize-perl libxml-simple-perl
   3. wget http://get-flash-videos.googlecode.com/files/get-flash-videos_1.21-1_all.deb
   4. sudo dpkg -i get-flash-videos_1.21-1_all.deb 
2. get-flash-videos Syntax
   1. get_flash_videos url..
3. Usage Examples
   1. Play a video get_flash_video http://www.site.com/video
   2. Download a video    get_flash_videos “http://some.site/video?f=1&v=1234“  note quotes are required for URLs with special characters like ‘&’ )
   3. Play the URL on the clipboard (UNIX):     xclip -o | xargs get_flash_videos -y –p
   4. Play the first video matching “Open Source”: get_flash_videos -y -p Open Source
   5. Install a plugin:get_flash_videos –add-plugin http://website.com/PluginName.pm

i also tried this on my ubuntu box and it works flawlessly , following is the the picture depicting thousand words.

i played some video from you tube and it download as well as played it well.

finally the websites supported are

• YouTube, eHow, Brightcove (used by many sites like Channel 4, Daily Telegraph …), BBC (news, etc), Metacafe, 5min, Google, fliqz, nicovideo, vimeo, Blip, Break, Collegehumor, Muzu, Sevenload, Megavideo, Wat.tv.
• it also includes a ‘generic’ method which works on many other sites.

Do remember to share your experiences with me in comments section.

How does it feel when our system hangs and stop responding to our requests ? in windows system all we do is press ctrl+alt+del combination and see which process is consuming CPU and not allowing other processes to get served  , we may kill this process from here as well.

System Monitor tool

This is simililar to windows task manager with tht exception that it gives lot more information regarding the system state and you can easily find the misbehaving process and kill it immediadely.following pic shows it

Using Kill command

Most of times when system hangs you can not use Gui base tools like system monitor tool, in this case you can use shell base tools, to go to shell press ctrl+alt+F1 and login to command prompt , here you can run

kill <processID>

to know process id run

ps -ax |more and look for your process name and process id will be written adjacent to it .

Hopefully after that you can restore your GUI so just execute Ctrl + Alt +F7 to go back to GUI mode.

Pkill command :-

Most of the time is happens that we dont  know the process id and feeling too lazy to run ps command and look for our process , geeks in linux community have the solution run

pkill <processname>

Pgrep command :-

To know the process id we can also directly issue pgrep command following is the example.

Xkill command :-

When GUI is responding  you can use xkill command and mouse pointer will get convert into a X  pointer , you just click on the application which is not responding  application should get terminated immediately,

Using the ‘killall’ command

Last but not the least, there is the killall command. Terrifying as it may seem, it doesn’t kill all the processes running on the computer. Instead it is used to kill multiple instances of the same program. eg killall firefox will kill all windows and Firefox profiles that might be currently executing.

There is lot more for these commands to learn, you can search for manual of these commands and learn more tricks , Meanwhile what do you do when your  Linux system becomes unresponsive ? Do leave your comments.

Friends, if you have any wireless router at your home or at your workplace ,simply dont know why it always sucks and the kind of weak signal phobia always stir in your mind. you are scratching why you are always getting low signal strenght then please consider following points before shifting your gears towards wired networking 

Position Matters    :-

It might happen that your access point is not positioned correctly with respect to your wireless client. ideally  your access point should be placed at an optimum distance from your  wireless client , research says it should not be less then one meter and should not so far away that you can not even scan your access point regularly . More over there should not be any mettalic object in the closest path between the access point and wireless client.

Regular driver and firmware update

You should always update your client and access point regularly , Most of the time newest driver and firmware have new features and patches for old bugs which may help you to solve any particular problem you may facing.

Channel of Wifi access point

WI-Fi  access point can work in both 2.4 Ghz and  5.0 Ghz band , but these access points which supports both bands are a bit costly , So if you  are having any such access point and your wifi  client can also works in 5.0 ghz then you should always put your access point in 5.0ghz , this will help you to get a clean channel where your home devices like microwave oven and cord less phone will not interfere with working of wifi device. To Know whether your device support 5.0 ghz band , put your access point in any of the channel bearing number after 14 , wait for 2 minutes and try to scan at your device if you can see access point then your device support 5.0 ghz band, if your device or wi-fi router donot work at 5.0 ghz then you should check with your microwave oven,cordless phone specification to determine on which channel exactly in 2.4ghz these are working , try to always remain away from these channel.

Compatibility issues

if you have wi-fi router and device of the same company then chances are quite high that they work more perfectly than any other devices . so try to buy both devices from the same brand . Usually if both devices are from the same company then these devices can use some proprietery algorithms to give you that edge in terms of signal strength and data rate.

Antenna issues

Wi-fi routers are fixed with omnidirectional antenna which is required to send signals in a circle, means it will be usefull in case when router is placed in the middle of the room and clients are in all directions, but in your case you might be one or a veru few clients which are taking service from wi-fi router, so to make your wi-fi router directional you replace external antenna of your access point with some high gain antenna and position it in direction towards your wifi client.

Client Device check

Do check it may be possible that wi-fi router is sending signals properly but there is some problem with the reception of signal at your device end , so just replace this with some borrowed adapter from some friend or relative and see if the signal strength improves, then it was your device which was culprit so try to replace it.

Extended network

if you are not getting good signal strength , you may look towards extension of your network by connecting another access point  with your previous access point. this is very easy task , you need to connect new access point with the previous one through the beck end with the help of some cat-5 ethernet coaxial cable , configure the wi-fi distribution service(WDS) in between them and bingo !!!!!  you have extended your network to use in the distant corners of your house.

If you need any particular help regarding any of  configuration, do let me know i will be glad to help.

So friends we all know in terms of memory usage and leakage as well firefox sucks and make speed of system miserable, if we open multiple browser windows with multiple tabs in it . This does not means that you should simply run away from it , geeks in this world never let there minds locks and here they introduced solution to this.i just found a useful plugin which can help us to tame the memory usage of firefox , you can install this from here . Name of this wonderful plugin is memory fox  . To let you install this plugin you need to enable check box which says let me install experimental plugins. To start installation you should create your account first , if you dont want to make yours , then send me a message i will give you mine .

To compare the performance of my computer system before and after using this plugin i first disable this plugin and analyze that if i open 4 tabs in one browser window then memory captured by firefox is 256 megabyte, but if we keep this open for one hour then memory usage goes upto 1 giga byte.This is simply unaccepatable. So i enable this plugin by tools->memory fox  and then actiavte this from here. After this i prompted to restart my browser . And vollla !!!!!!!! just to test my veil i opened 20 tabs in a single browser . i expected memory usage in gbytes but plugin did its job pretty well in taming the firefox the overall memory usage was 40 mega bytes. i wondered and patted my back for finding such solution for such weird problem of mine, but engineer in my  soul start weilding its sword for finding the miracle behind this magic and here comes the answer from the gekky lord the author himslf  expalin on its website

Memory Fox focuses on two ( 2 ) types of memory usage and with flushing for memory recovery. When resource requirements ( Stack and Heap ) have been reached, according to the user’s preset option settings, the memory will be flushed and recovered from Fragmented Orphaned Ram memories.

So this made my  doubts clear

if you have any  doubt regarding this plugin please drop me a comment i would love to  answer your queries

Please note plugin is only for WINXP and vista , it is not available for Linux .

Setting Blog locally:-

Follow step by step tutorial

This tutorial assumes that  you have sudo permission in ubuntu, So open gnome terminal in your machine and start executing following steps 

• Install Apache server by running following  command .

Sudo apt-get install apache2

follow the instructions to install apache , once the installation is finished you can test whether this works fine or not , by typing 127.0.0.1 in browser , “it works” should appear in your browser.

• Install mysql server by running following command.

sudo apt-get install mysql-server-5.0.

installation may take long depending on your internet speed, and you will be required to enter root password during this installation.

• install php server.

sudo apt-get install php5.

• install PHP module for mysql

sudo apt-get install php5-mysql

• Download latest wordpress by clicking the following link.

wordpress

Now we have all the softwares installed , all we need is to configure these .follow  these steps in order.

first we need to enter the type of webpages we want our apache to support , so add following instructions at the end of apache2.conf file.
first open this file by executing following command

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf.

Add following lines at the end of this file.

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .phtml .php3
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

Save and exit the editor .

Next step is to run mysql install script , executes following commnad .

sudo mysql_install_db

After competion log into mysql server ,

mysql -u root –p

Enter server root password you set during installtion . if password is right you will find yourself on mysql prompt .

now create Data base to be used by WordPress.

CREATE DATABASE wordpress;

Now create use let us consider name of this use is wordpress ,

CREATE USER user;

Now to create password for this user ,

SET PASSWORD FOR user = PASSWORD(“password”);

password should be replaced with your password .

now grant all the permission to this user by execting follwoing commnad .

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO user@localhost IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;

Now untar wordpress.tar.gz you obtain earlier in some directory in /var/www/ let us assume the name of this folder is wordpress .

exectue tar  -zxvf wordpress.tar.gz  /var/www/

Now lets make some changes in wordpress settings , execute follwoing commnad.

sudo gedit /var/www/wordpress/wp-config-sample.php

now change

Change putyourdbnamehere to wordpress.

Change usernamehere to user.

Put your password to same you choose while creating this user and granting all permission by execting GRANT command .Once you have your changes made , save your changed file to /var/www/wordpress as wp-config.php.

Now after doing these steps you should be able to run your blog on ubuntu , go to browser addressbar and type 127.0.0.01/wordpress you should be able to see the login setup page. rest all is similar to normal wordpress operations.

Common Problems

if you dont get your wordpress running by and get some phtml.part file can not open error do remember to restart your apache server by executing following command.

sudo  /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

This restart you should not give any warning or error related to localhost unknown if this kind of errors/warnings are being displayed then do make entry of localhost in httpd.conf by executing following commnad.

sudo vim /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

enter following line in this file

ServerName localhost

Then restarting of apache should be flawless and wordpress should run.

Another mistakes which normally people make is  of copying the commnads while entering in SQL prompt , please dont do so as while copying commnad some times extra blanks space also gets copied and sql start giving erros of syntactial mistakes.

Customization

if you want to change name of the blog to your blog name to be in proper sync to your original blog , visit setting section of wordpress dash board and change wordpress to the name of your blog.

now you should be able to see your blog running by execting commnad

127.0.0.1/nameofyourblog.

at any moment if you messed up with database you can delete this by going to sql prompt again and
execute

drop databasename ;

If you face any kind of problem do remeber to ping me by  sending comments to this article.

when ever we decides to make our computer dual boot we may face various problems. One of this problems is operating system selection menu  is not coming.if we install Microsoft operating system after installing any linux kernel base system. we can easily restore the OS selection menu.

How to do it through Floppy disk.

Insert a blank floppy disk in your floppy drive.

Windows

• download rawwritten  program.
  
• With button choose the SGD floppy image.
• Click on Write button.
• Wait till process is complete.

Linux

Execute following command .

dd if= path to floppy image of=/dev/fd0.

wait till copy process is complete.

If you are using USB floppy drive then output will be /dev/sdb or similar rather than fd0 .To see  correct name run df   command,  the output will show you the correct name for your floppy disk .

if you have USB Drive:

The best part of this method is that you dont need to delete any of your file on your usb disk and you can use any of your working line system, if you  dont have one then even you can use live cd to boot your computer and this method will work.

1. insert your USB stick.
2. your usb drive should automatically get mounted if not try mount it with mount comand.
3. run df  command to see on which partition your usb drive is mounted , the very first entry in the output shows the requisite details. it should be like /dev/sda or any of the sd. lets us assume that it is  sda1.
4. download Super Grub Disk  and untar it into a temporary directory. (untar command is tar -zxvf directoryname.tgz)
    
5. Copy and paste the boot folder found in the USB tar so that when opening your pendrive you see: boot (You should not see super_grub_disk_0.9753 or something similar).
6. close the pen drive and right click on the usb disk icon on desktop.
7. click unmount and dont click safe extraction.
8. open a terminal.
9. get sudo permission. by executing command sudo in ubuntu and su in other systems .
10. let us assume our usb drive was sda1 so we will executing following commnads.

11. grub
    grub>device (hd3) /dev/sda
    grub>root (hd3,0)
    grub>setup (hd3)
    

where sda is the hardisk partition where sda1 is located , by executing above command we have attached a virtual drive hd3 with it and worked with it.

you should see some messages with some normal errors.

now exit from grub by executing following commnds.

              grub>quit

      sync

             Now unplug your usb device.

Common errors

If you were doing:

grub>root (hd3,0)

grub>setup (hd3)

and after that you got an error 18 or something similar you should:

Backup all data on your pendrive (if there is something important ;) )

Repartition it so that you have an ext3 or a FAT32 partition at its beginning of only 300 MB.

Install SGD into it as it is explained in the instructions

             and that's it, SGD should boot without problems.

Windows

Download unet

• Run Unetbootin. Select Distribution, and from the drop down menu select "Super Grub Disk"

  Select the target drive, and hit OK.

Fedora

Whenever we run:

grub>setup (hd3)

you can see something as:

setup (hd3)
 Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
 Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
 Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
 Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd3)"...  26 sectors are embedded.
succeeded
 Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd3) (hd3)1+26 p (hd3,0)/boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/grub.conf"... succeeded
Done.

Fedora is using grub.conf instead of SGD's menu.lst.

Just after running setup you must identify the install line and modify it so that /boot/grub/grub.conf reads: /boot/grub/menu.lst

In the former example it would be:

grub> install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd3) (hd3)1+26 p (hd3,0)/
boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/menu.lst

Then you just continue with the next howto step.