Month: August 2014

Link: Advanced Guide to nslookup

When you want to call someone on your cell phone, you likely just find the person in your list of contacts and select their name. The handset then uses the unique phone number associated with that person and makes the call. In general, you don’t need to remember the phone number itself, as the address book stores it for you under the name of the contact.

The Internet works in a very similar way. Each server on the Internet has an address assigned to it and a name. There is a global address book which stores the address (or addresses) along with the associated name (or names). This huge address book is known as DNS (Domain Name System). The way it works is that when you type a URL into your browser, e.g. maketecheasier.com, then the browser (via the underlying operating system) queries DNS to get the address for the server which hosts the web site. A similar, but not identical, thing happens when we send emails.

Full article here:
Advanced Guide to nslookup (Make Tech Easier)

Link: Understanding APT, APT-Cache and Their Frequently Used Commands

If you’ve ever used Debian or a Debian based distribution like Ubuntu or Linux Mint, then chances are that you’ve used the APT package system to install or remove software. Even if you’ve never dabbled on the command line, the underlying system that powers your package manager GUI is the APT system.

Today, we are going to take a look at some familiar commands, and dive into some less or more frequently used APT commands, and shed some light on this brilliantly designed system.

Full article here:
Understanding APT, APT-Cache and Their Frequently Used Commands (Tecmint)

Link: Accessing Windows Or Samba Shares Using AutoFS

You already installed Linux on your networked desktop PC and now you want to work with files stored on some other PCs in your network. This is where autofs comes into play. This tutorial shows how to configure autofs to use CIFS to access Windows or Samba shares from Linux Desktop PCs. It also includes a tailored configuration file.

Full article here:
Accessing Windows Or Samba Shares Using AutoFS (HowtoForge)

Link: A Pocket Guide for Linux ssh Command with Examples

If you have been in the IT world for quite some time you probably have heard about SSH, how great a tool it is and all its cool security features. In this tutorial you will learn how to use SSH in a few minutes and login to your remote computers seamlessly and securely.

If you have no clue what SSH is you can visit Wikipedia before proceeding.

Full article here:
A Pocket Guide for Linux ssh Command with Examples (LinOxide)

Easily download subtitles from YouTube (and a few other sites)

There are plenty of tools that will let you download a video from YouTube, but what about when the video you want to watch contains subtitles? If you need the subtitles to understand the video, just head on over to this site:

KeepSubs: Download and save any subtitles from Youtube, Viki, Crunchyroll and more!

Put your YouTube link into the box, click the Download button (or select one of the available translations) and in a moment or two you’ll have a file containing the subtitles. Just rename it to match the name of your downloaded video, except make the extension .srt – so if the video is named “Soviet era propaganda film.mp4”, the subtitles file should be named “Soviet era propaganda film.srt”. Put both files in your videos directory and play using any program that recognizes subtitle files, such as VLC or XBMC (note that you may need to enable subtitles). That’s all there is to it!

Link: 10 Linux Dig (Domain Information Groper) Commands to Query DNS

In our last article we have showed you the most used 8 Nslookup commands with their examples, now here we come with another command line tool called Dig, which is much similar to Linux Nslookup tool. We will see the usage of dig command closely with their examples as shown below.

Full article here:
10 Linux Dig (Domain Information Groper) Commands to Query DNS (Tecmint)

Link: Did You Know Windows 8 Has a Built-In Time Machine Backup?

We sometimes forget with all the focus on Windows 8′s new “Modern” interface, but Windows 8 has a variety of great desktop improvements. One of them is File History, a built-in backup feature that functions similarly to Apple’s much-loved Time Machine. Enable the Windows 8 “time machine” File History, and Windows will automatically back up your files to an external or network drive. You’ll be able to restore previous versions from these backups, whether you’ve deleted a file or you just want to recover an old version of a file.

Full article here:
Did You Know Windows 8 Has a Built-In Time Machine Backup? (MakeUseOf)

Still using Windows 7? Nothing so simple for you, but check out this video:
 

Link: Download Videos From Youtube and Other Sites Using ClipGrab

ClipGrab is a free downloader and converter for YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe, Dailymotion and many other online video sites.
It converts downloaded videos to MPEG4, MP3 or other formats in just one easy step.

Full article here:
Download Videos From Youtube and Other Sites Using ClipGrab (Unixmen)

NOTE: ClipGrab is also available in Windows and Mac OS X versions.

If your MCE compatible remote stopped working in Ubuntu 14.04 or another newer release of Linux, check for this weird problem!

Note: The issue described below is not the same one that is affecting many users of recent versions of Ubuntu. For a solution to that problem, see Make LIRC work in Ubuntu 18.04, so that you can use your infrared remote in Kodi.

If you have found this page you have probably already come across several other pages that try to tell you how to get the MCE USB remote working in Ubuntu. Maybe you are a Kodi user and you came across this thread, and you tried everything but nothing would work – in fact, when you ran the ir-keytable program (which you’ve almost certainly already installed if you’ve found any other pages on this subject) in test mode, you may have found that on the keys that work at all, you got strange combinations of square brackets and letters instead of the expected output. Well, before you give up, and especially if you’re installing Ubuntu (or some other *buntu variant) on new hardware, here are two things to check.

First, if you are using a USB infrared receiver, try a different USB port. In our case, this made the difference between getting no response at all out of the thing and the aforementioned cryptic square brackets/letters.

But also, try running sudo ir-keytable one more time, and look to see if maybe it’s finding more than one IR device (even if you are sure you only have one). For example, when we ran it, we were seeing this (and I hate to say it, but it took far too long to dawn on me that we were seeing TWO devices there):

$ sudo ir-keytable
Found /sys/class/rc/rc0/ (/dev/input/event4) with:
	Driver ite-cir, table rc-rc6-mce
	Supported protocols: NEC RC-5 RC-6 JVC SONY SANYO LIRC RC-5-SZ other 
	Enabled protocols: RC-6 
	Name: ITE8704 CIR transceiver
	bus: 25, vendor/product: 1283:0000, version: 0x0000
	Repeat delay = 500 ms, repeat period = 125 ms
Found /sys/class/rc/rc1/ (/dev/input/event10) with:
	Driver mceusb, table rc-rc6-mce
	Supported protocols: NEC RC-5 RC-6 JVC SONY SANYO LIRC RC-5-SZ other 
	Enabled protocols: RC-6 
	Name: Media Center Ed. eHome Infrared 
	bus: 3, vendor/product: 1784:0008, version: 0x0101
	Repeat delay = 500 ms, repeat period = 125 ms

The real IR device is the “Media Center Ed. eHome Infrared”, so what’s the “ITE8704 CIR transceiver”? We have no idea – maybe there’s some vestigial circuitry for an IR receiver in the computer, and it’s detected during startup, but there no actual IR receiver there? In any case, once we realized what the problem was, we found the solution in a post in the Kodi forum:

edit : “/etc/modprob.d/blacklist.conf” and add the line:

blacklist ite_cir

And reboot

The prevents the operating system from seeing the non-existent IR receiver, and only lets it see the real one. We then reinstalled lirc (which we had removed because so many pages had said it wasn’t necessary) and all of a sudden our remote came back to life, with all the buttons working in Kodi again.  If you have a similar situation, you can try blacklisting the driver for the non-existent or non-functional device in a similar manner.  And if that isn’t the problem, perhaps one of the links mentioned above can help.  That’s Linux for you sometimes – the solution to a problem takes about 30 seconds to implement, but finding it takes HOURS.  🙁