Recently i just deploy OCS Inventory NG (Open Computers and Software Inventory Next Generation) to track my IT assets. OCS-NG collects information about the hardware and software of network machines that running the OCS client program (“OCS Inventory Agent”).

In my network environment, i have machine that run on Windows and Mac OS X.

In this tutorial, i just show how to install OCS Inventory agent on Mac OS X machine. You can download the latest OCS Inventory agent installer from OCS Inventory official website. I did try to install the latest version of OCS inventory agent for Mac but it doesn’t work. So, i decided to use the older version of OCS inventory agent which is version 1.1. This version work fine for me in Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.6.

Let’s start with installation of a Mac OS X agent. Download the Mac OS X agent from here and unzip the file. Once the file has been extracted, double-click on Agent_MacOSX_1.1.pkg to start the installation. During the installation, you just follow instruction from installation wizard and click continue to move forward.

Once the installation finished, now you have to configure your Mac OS X machine to communicate with OCS Inventory Server. To communicate with OCS inventory server, you have to point your OCS inventory agent point to the OCS inventory server ip address or domain name.

Here are the steps:-

• launch your terminal
• edit OCS inventory agent configuration files by enter following command

 sudo nano /etc/ocsinventory-agent/ocsinventory-agent.cfg

• Change the default server name ocsinventory-ng to your server ip address or domain name

server=192.168.0.2
logfile=/var/log/ocsng.log
delaytime=30

• After change, just save the file.

Now the final step that you have to do is to force the OCS inventory agent run. To do it, just enter the following command in your terminal.

sudo /Applications/OCSNG.app/Contents/Resources/ocsinventory-agent

Now you can login to your OCS inventory server web GUI. You should be able to see your Mac machine information appear on the web GUI.

If you have any others tips and trick on deploying OCS Inventory agent on Mac OS X, please share with me by leave your comment here. I will really appreciate it.

P/S: Thank you to those who have developed OCS! This is an excellent tool!

Recently i successfully setup OpenVPN server. It try to connect from my Windows XP pc, it work fine. But when i connect the OpenVPN via my Windows 7 and Windows Vista machine, it fail to connect.

The error they were getting was:

Thu Sep 16 13:30:09 2011 C:\WINDOWS\system32\route.exe ADD 172.16.0.0 MASK 255.255.0.0 10.8.0.1
Thu Sep 16 13:30:09 2011 ROUTE: route addition failed using CreateIpForwardEntry: Access is denied.   [status=5 if_index=24]
Thu Sep 16 13:30:09 2011 Route addition via IPAPI failed [adaptive]
Thu Sep 16 13:30:09 2011 Route addition fallback to route.exe
Thu Sep 16 13:30:09 2011 ERROR: Windows route add command failed [adaptive]: returned error code 1

To solve above problem, just edit the config file of the SSL vpn (the .ovpn file) in C:\Program Files\OpenVpn\config and add the following lines:

route-method exe
route-delay 2

This will force OpenVPN to add the route using Route.exe

After that , find the OpenVPN GUI icon on your desktop, right-click on it, and choose Properties from the context menu. In the Properties window, click “Advanced…” then check “Run as administrator”. Click OK to close the “Advanced Properties” window and click OK to close the OpenVPN GUI Properties window.

If you have others way to solve above issue, please share with me via leave your comment here

You can share your calendar with other Zimbra users. You can let others view or manage your calendar for you.

To share a calendar:

• Click the Calendar tab.
• Right-click on the you want to share
• Click Share Calendar.

calendar

• After you select the “Share Calendar“, you’ll see the Share Properties dialog box below

• Select a Share with option using the radio buttons. You can share your calendar with internal users on your domain, external users, and/or grant access to your public calendar
• Type the email address(es) for the user(s) with whom you want to share in the Email field. You can enter more than one address in the Email field, using a semi-colon (;) between addresses.
• Select the access permissions in the Role area and Click OK

How do I accept an invitation to share a calendar?

• Once sharing is done, emails are automatically sent to those you granted calendar access. As a recipient, you will receive an email message as shown as below:

• You must use the web interface to read and accept the share message. When you accept the share you’ll see the following dialog box. Click the “Yes” button to accept the share
• The new shared calendar is added to your Calendar list. The message will moved to your Trash folder. (Note: You can choose to send email back notifying the user that you have accepted his/her share)

If you have any others tips about Zimbra, please share with me via leave your comment here.

Recently i downloaded a eBook in EPUB format. I failed to open it using Adobe Reader (PDF reader) and Chmox (.chm reader). How to open it?? What is EPUB?? After i google it, i know that ePub format is an open standard for ebooks by the International Digital Publishing Forum. All the ePub files have the extension .epub.

There are several software programs support the ePub format. Below are the few software allow you to read .ePub file on your computer. You can just click the following link to download it.

• Adobe Digital Editions (Support Windows and OS X)
• EPUBReader (Firefox Add-on)
• Lucidor (Supports Windows, OS X, and Linux)
• Openberg (plug-in for Firefox,)
• FBReader (Windows, Linux, OS X)

Among all the software that i mention above, i tried to read .epub ebook using Adobe Digital Edition on my Mac OS X machines. It work fine for me.

Below are the few step to show how to install Adobe Digital Edition :-

• Download Adobe Digital Edition

• Just follow the on screen instruction to download the installer files.
• After that, just follow the on screen instruction to install the application. Below are the screen shoot: -

• Try to open .epub format e-book

Besides Adobe Digital Editions, i tried to install Firefox add-on called EPUBReader to read ePub-files in the browser. With this Firefox add-on, you can read ePub files on multiple Operating System (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD) without install additional software.

To install this Firefox Add-on, it is very easy to do it. Below are the few simple steps to show how to install it:-

• Click HERE to download the EPUBReader add-on

• Click Add to Firefox button to begin the installation

• After download, click Install Now

• Restart the Firefox application

How to use EPUBReader? Just view the following video:-

If you others way to read .epub files, please share with me by leave a comment.

You can view MYSQL service uptime using the following commands

[1] Login to the server via SSH (for Linux)

[2] Type the command mysql or mysql -u userId -p

Now, you will be able see the mysql prompt (mysql>).

[3] To check the uptime of the MySQL service, just type \s command

mysql> \s
————–
mysql  Ver 14.12 Distrib 5.0.77, for redhat-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 5.1

Connection id:        282840
Current database:
Current user:        root@localhost
SSL:            Not in use
Current pager:        stdout
Using outfile:        ”
Using delimiter:    ;
Server version:        5.0.77 Source distribution
Protocol version:    10
Connection:        Localhost via UNIX socket
Server characterset:    latin1
Db     characterset:    latin1
Client characterset:    latin1
Conn.  characterset:    latin1
UNIX socket:        /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
Uptime:            239 days 1 hour 3 min 27 sec

Threads: 1  Questions: 4448961  Slow queries: 0  Opens: 443972  Flush tables: 1  Open tables: 64  Queries per second avg: 0.215
————–

There is another command you can used to check MYSQL service uptime. Just type the following command

1. Login to the server via SSH (for Linux)

2. Enter commnad mysqladmin version | grep Uptime

[root@techkaki ~]# mysqladmin version | grep Uptime
Uptime:            5 days 5 hours 7 min 21 sec

Uptime: 1 hour 26 min 5 sec

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

mysqld_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