Expose /var/www using Samba

This is actually more of a note for myself but it may be of use to you. I often find myself running up Linux VMs to test and build LAMP based systems but since I (generally) use Windows it is a major pain to have to transfer files via scp or worse edit files using vi.

However is you install Samba into your test VM, you can simply browse to the folder using Windows explorer and edit the files directly. The following configuration exposes your /var/www folder via Samba and makes its content editable by everyone. It makes the files read/writeable by all and makes sure that www-data remains the owner.

Needless to say this configuration is very very insecure and MUST NOT be used in production !

`This is actually more of a note for myself but it may be of use to you. I often find myself running up Linux VMs to test and build LAMP based systems but since I (generally) use Windows it is a major pain to have to transfer files via scp or worse edit files using vi.

However is you install Samba into your test VM, you can simply browse to the folder using Windows explorer and edit the files directly. The following configuration exposes your /var/www folder via Samba and makes its content editable by everyone. It makes the files read/writeable by all and makes sure that www-data remains the owner.

Needless to say this configuration is very very insecure and MUST NOT be used in production !

`

Party like its 1234567890

So one of my colleagues (thanks Matthew) just sent me this link which is so geeky I just had to blog about it.

Apparently on Friday, February 13th 2009, 23:31:30 GMT the Epoch time count will read “1234567890” for the first (and last time).

For those of you who don’t know what Epoch time is (shame on you) it is basically a count of the number of seconds since 00:00:00 GMT on January 1, 1970. Computer systems use this mechanism for storing time because they handle nice big integer numbers very efficiently.

Of course when 2038 rolls around we are all going to be in trouble because the count of milliseconds will be too big to store in the space that most computer systems allocate for storing this time count!

By then of course we should all be using at least 64bit systems so it shouldn’t be a problem and we won’t Y2K48 problem (he says smirking).

If you are planning a “1234567890” party (you are planning a party right?) then this “countdown” would be ideal to project up onto a wall or show on a big screen :)