To run php application, most of user will used Apache + PHP + MySQL as their program platform. Most of the beginner user like to setup LAMP on Windows to develop or run the php application. To setup LAMP on Windows, is a bit complicated. But there is asoftware called AppServ to allow us to setup LAMP just in 1 minute.   AppServ is a software with  full-featured of Apache, MySQL, PHP, phpMyAdmin.

Below are the simple step to setup AppServ:-

• Click HERE to download AppServ. (You can choose version that you want from http://www.appservnetwork.com)
• Double Click appserv-win32-x.x.x.exe to install AppServ on your computer.
• Just follow the on screen instruction to install it. (Accept the User Agreement->Select Path to install)
  
• After that, just select Components to install and click Next. ( AppServ default package components it’s checked all package.)

• Now you need to configure the Apache and MySQL
• Click Finished to start the Appserv

phpMyAdmin is an open source tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the World Wide Web. It can perform various tasks such as creating, modifying or deleting databases, tables, fields or rows; executing SQL statements; or managing users and permissions. (Info from http://www.phpmyadmin.net)

How to install phpmyadmin? Before you install phpmyadmin, you need to install your LAMP 1st. Once you install, just follow below steps:-

1. $ su -
2. # cd /var/www/html
3. # wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/phpmyadmin/phpMyAdmin/3.3.0-rc1/phpMyAdmin-3.3.0-rc1-all-languages.zip?use_mirror=nchc
4. # unzip phpMyAdmin-3.3.0-rc1-all-languages.zip
5. # mv phpMyAdmin-3* phpmyadmin
6. # cd phpmyadmin
7. # cp config.sample.inc.php config.inc.php
8. # vi config.inc.php
   :
   $cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = ‘http‘; # default is cookies
9. Restart Apache
   # service httpd restart

Run your phpmyadmin by following link:

http://your.domain.com/phpmyadmin/ or http://ipaddress/phpmyadmin/

phpmyadmin fail to start?

When you type above link, your phpmyadmin fail to start and show following error message:

PHP 5.2+ is required

To solve this issue, you need to upgrade your PHP 5.1 to PHP 5.2. But, on CentOS is no simple ‘yum’ upgrades to update your PHP 5.1.6 to PHP 5.2.6. you need to add Repository to your yum

Just follow below steps:

nano -w /etc/yum.repos.d/utterramblings.repo
... and then paste the following into the editor:
[utterramblings]
name=Jason's Utter Ramblings Repo
baseurl=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/EL$releasever/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/RPM-GPG-KEY-jlitka

After that, just save it.

Now you should able to upgrade your PHP.

I setup MySQL Server on CentOS few month ago, but i forgot the root password for MySQL. How to reset the password?

You can recover MySQL database server password with following steps.

Step # 1: Stop the MySQL server process.

service mysqld stop

Step # 2: Start the MySQL (mysqld) in safe mode with the –skip-grant-tables option

mysql_safe -skip-grant-tables-u root &

Step # 3: Connect to mysql server as the root user.

mysql -u root

Step # 4: Setup new mysql root account password.

UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('NEW-PASSWORD') WHERE User='root';

Step # 5: Flush Privileges

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Step # 5: Quit MySQL command line

quit

Step # 6 Restart MySQL deamon

service mysqld restart

Step # 7 Log in as root to test the root password

mysql -u root -p

I have a few PDF files, i want to combine these files into one single PDF file in my Mac OS X.

After i do research on google, i found that is 1 open source software called Pdfsam. Pdfsam is a tool designed to split and merge pdf files.

To install Pdfsam, just follow the following steps:

• Download Pdfsam from HERE
• Once finish, double click the .dmg file you just download
• Drag Pdfsam-1.2.0 icon to your Application folder

To merge multiple pdf files with Pdfsam, follow the steps below:-

• Launch your Pdfsam application

• Click on Merge/Extract
• After that, click on Add button to add the PDF file that you want to merge
• Once the PDF files were added, you can merge your pdf documents base on page number or whole PDF files.
• Select the destination of your output file and put your file name for your new PDF file.
• Click on Run button to merge the PDF
• Just wait for the process to finish and you will see your PDF file appear in the path you save earlier

I downloaded an ebook from a web site. But the file extension of the ebook is in .CHM format. I cannot open it on Preview.

According to Wikipedia, .chm is a filetype devised by Microsoft which compresses HTML files into a single document, usually for the purpose of software manuals. Nowadays, most of the ebook are in PDF and CHM format. We can read the CHM files in Windows, but how about Mac OS X?

I did some research on Google. I found that there are 2 open source software which allow me to open the .CHM files. Below are the software that i going to share with all of you.

A) CHMOX

• Chmox is an OSX viewer for Microsoft Help Files (CHM).
• Click Here to download it.
• Here is a screen shot of the application

B) xCHM

• xCHM can show the content tree if one is available, print pages, change font face and size, remember bookmarks, display a searchable index, and search for words in the current page and the whole book.
• Click Here to download
• Here is a screen shot of the application

CrystalDiskInfo is a HDD health monitoring utility. It displays basic HDD information, monitors S.M.A.R.T. values and disk temperature. I use this software to diagnose my HDD. Here is the screen shoot show that my HDD having bad sector problem:

Below are the key feature of CrystalDiskInfo:

• Supports a part of external USB disks
• Monitoring health status and temperature
• Graph of S.M.A.R.T. information
• Control AAM/APM settings

But sadly, this software only support Windows platform. We cannot use this software on Mac OS X and Linux platform. To download this utility software, just click HERE

I think most of your having a difficultly to convert PDF file to Word file. Here i going to recommend 1 of the free online conversion web site. This web site allow us to create editable DOC/RTF files, making it a cinch to re-use PDF content in applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, OpenOffice, and WordPerfect.

You just need 3 step to convert the PDF file to Word files and will send the link to your mail box. You just need to click the link from you mail box to download the edited DOC file which already converted.

Just clikc this link to access it : http://www.pdftoword.com/

Once you finished setup your NTP server, you need to allow your NTP client to access the NTP Server. Here i going to show your how to configure your NTP Client (Mac OS X) to sync the time from your NTP Server. Below are the steps:

1st – Launch your terminal

2nd – From the terminal, type the following command

techkaki-MacBook:~ techkaki $ sudo vi /etc/ntp.conf

3rd – change the default timezone address to your server domain name or ip address

By default, it will point to apple timezone. Eg: server time.asia.apple.com

To change it, just change the URL to your server ip or server domain name

eg: server 192.168.1.2 or server ntp.techkaki.com

4th – Save the ntp.conf

Now you will realize that your Mac timezone already point to your ntp server.

After you setup the NTP server. You will realize that the timezone was changed. The time zone might not same as your country timezone. It is because  pool.ntp.org will assign the timeservers from all over the world, time quality will not be ideal.

You will get better result if you use the continental zones. Just click Here to view the available zone in All Pool serves.

Here i will going to show how to change the timezone on your NTP Server.

1st – Login as the root user

2nd – Now open and edit /etc/ntp.conf

# vi /etc/ntp.conf

3nd – Now i want to add Malaysia timezone to NTP server. Just add the following to your ntp.conf file:

	   server 0.my.pool.ntp.org
	   server 1.asia.pool.ntp.org
	   server 2.asia.pool.ntp.org

4th – Save the ntp.conf file and restart the ntpd service

# service ntpd start

Now you will realize that your timezone was change

My company going to implement ISO. 1 of the requirement of ISO is to synchronize system clock for all the server and desktop.

To synchronize server and desktop internal clock, we need to use the NTP (Network Time Protocol). NTP is a network protocol used to synchronize the clocks of computers to some time reference.

In order to synchronize the system time, i need to setup NTP server to synchronize server’s internal clock and use the NTP client to connect to a NTP server.

We can easily setup NTP server using yum command. Below are the steps:

1st – Login as the root user

2nd – Enter the following command to install NTP package

# yum install ntp

3rd – Turn on ntp service

# chkconfig ntpd on

4th – Synchronize the system clock with pool.ntp.org server:

# ntpdate pool.ntp.org

5th – Start the NTP

# /etc/init.d/ntpd start

Now you can synchronize local machines & network devices with NTP Server.