Squid: connect (111 Connection refused)

This morning when I turned on my computer, Firefox greeted me by saying "Firefox is configured to use a proxy that is refusing connections." However, my proxy server was turned on and seemed to be functioning correctly - I could ssh into it quite fine, so no network issues. I rebooted, but still no help. My server was running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) Server Edition with a squid proxy server.

Turns out, by examing the /var/log/squid/cache.log file, I discovered the problem was no free disk space. After freeing up some space on / and restarting squid (/etc/init.d/squid restart), proxy was up and running again.

Change directory in windows cmd

Windows cmd.exe command line won't change directory won't cd

cd /d

I am in my c: drive (c:\tools) and do a:

C:\tools>cd d:\music

Strangly, I am still in the c: drive. Only if I do a d:, I see that I changed to the music directory under d:

C:\tools>d:

D:\music>

In order to change both, the drive and the path, the /d flag must be used:

D:\music>cd /d c:\bin

C:\bin>

Source: http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/win/cmd/cd.html

"All Squash" in Samba FIle Server

NFS has the ability to "root squash" or "all squash" - map authenticated users to alternate user ids, for purposes of security. This makes it easy to setup an NFS public folder where all users share the same permissions.

Samba on the other hand, does not have such capabilities. However, you can achieve similar functionality by configuring a "guest" user, which maps to a specific local user id on the server.

Simply open /etc/samba/smb.conf and enable the following line:
guest account = [mapped user id]
That's all there is to it! Now any anonymous client can access the shared folders, and they will automatically have the same access rights as if they were logged into the server locally, with the username specified in the smb.conf file.

Removing Plasmoids when Plasma crashes

I had some trouble with Plasma the other day. For some reason, it suddenly crashed and wouldn't start up again. I tried pressing Alt+F2 to bring up the run dialog, and typing "plasma", but it still wouldn't start. I then tried the command line.

david@suse:~/.kde4/share/config> plasma
plasma(5728) KWallet::Wallet::openWallet: Pass a valid window to KWallet::Wallet::openWallet().
plasma: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/kde4/plasma_applet_showdesktop.so: undefined symbol: _ZN6Plasma14ToolTipManager4selfEv
plasma(5727): Communication problem with "plasma" , it probably crashed.
Error message was: "org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply" : " "Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus)" "

Something seemed to be wrong with the plasmoid "Show Desktop". Only problem is - it's pretty hard to remove a plasmoid when plasma won't even start. With a bit of help from Google though, and a few bash commands, I found the configuration file that plasma uses to configure the applets:

david@suse:> kwrite ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-appletsrc

In this file, I simply had to search for the text "plugin=showdesktop", remove the configuration section associated with this, and start plasma again.
This is a simple way to remove a plasmoid (plasma applet/widget) without starting plasma.