General

Nmap is a Free Software tool that can be used for a variety of network network exploration tasks and security auditing. Nmap ("Network Mapper") scans IP packets to determine a lot of different aspects about hosts available on the network and also about services these hosts are offering. It can help you find a lot of information about these hosts including reverse DNS names, operating system guesses, device types, and MAC addresses.

Zyxware Technologies conducted a series of GNU/Linux workshops on Free Software Tools, as part of the Free Software training imparted to the Staff of Santhigiri Ashram. Santhigiri Ashram at Pothencode, Trivandrum is an Ashram pursuing the cause of a spiritual awakening in society. As part of this pursuit,Santhigiri Ashram runs a range of institutions across the country including schools, hospitals, colleges, Ayurveda stores and many more. We were invited by Santhigiri Ashram to conduct a set of GNU/Linux workshops for the staff of their institutions.

Recently, we had an opportunity to attend a consultative meeting hosted by Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology, Kottayam (RIT) on Academia Industry partnership. The meeting was in the context of the Technical Education Quality Improvement Programme (TEQIP) of Government of India in which RIT is a part. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the possible areas of cooperation between RIT and the different companies present.

We use a VPS server hosted on the web as our shared projects folder to share files between our team members in a safe and secure way. This is set up in such a way that users can mount a folder on the VPS on to their local machines via SSHFS and access contents on the shared folder. The permissions in the folder is managed via a script that is running on the server. The script and its configuration is being managed using an automatic deployment process using git. In the following article we have described how you can set up your own secure shared folder on the web.

We get frequent requests to rebuild existing sites using Drupal. When we get such a request it would help to have a copy of the full site on our local server to make it easier for themers and developers to reuse whatever existing components that can be salvaged from the original site. Wget is a powerful tool that can help mirror websites locally or on any web servers. The command for doing this using wget is really simple.

In Drupal 6, when you are working on a new project and when you change menu items from MENU_NORMAL_ITEMS to MENU_LOCAL_TASK or vice versa you will run into a scenario where the menu_links table entries won't get changed. This can get reflected in menu_links not appearing in your system_admin_menu_block_page listing if you are using it for listing your menu items in a page. The solution is to rebuild the menu_links table for the menu items corresponding to your menu_router items. The solution is simple.