He wanted to work from home (that is one of the perk if you are a software person). The computer was behind the college NAT. So, doing something like this would need the SysAdmin and presumably a convoluted process.

I found this nice remote forwarding flag in the SSH command.
[-R [bind_address:]port:host:hostport] [-S ctl_path]

So, in fact you can forward any services from your machine not just SSH, set host port to 80, 9418 or whatever.

Here’s how to do it:

1) Create a Virtual Linux machine on the Cloud (I love AWS, they do have a free tier). Say its IP is 13.37.13.37. I’ll call this “Cloud Machine” and the machine you need access to as “Access Machine”

2) Install OpenSSH on the “Access Machine” if you haven’t. Easiest way on Ubuntu is

sudo apt-get install taskel
sudo taskel

3) Get the SSH key and place it somewhere in the “Access Machine”. Make necessary changes in the following shell script and make sure it is executed at startup. In Ubuntu you can paste this at “/etc/rc.local” (This is a shell script file)

#!/bin/bash
port=2000 # any port greater than 1024, lets call this "local port"
keyfile=/home/somewhere/key.pem
username=ubuntu # The user in the cloud machine
IP=13.37.13.37 # The IP of cloud machine
timeout=300  # The timeout for the connect back

while [ true ]
do

        sudo ssh -R $port:localhost:22 -i $keyfile $username@$IP
        sleep $timeout

done
exit 0

Extra Tips:
* If you are on a brain dead Firewall system that blocks port 22 (SSH), set the SSH port to port 80 on your Cloud machine and use “-p” flag on your connection command. This can be done at “/etc/ssh/sshd_config”
* If you are sharing your cloud machine with someone else, you can maybe create a new user and give no file access to that user.

3) Now, every time you need to connect to the “Access Machine”, connect to the “Cloud Machine”,

sudo ssh -i $keyfile $username@$IP

then, inside it

ssh [local username in Access Machine]@localhost -p [the local port defined in shell script]

And of course, the “Access Machine” must be up and running.

Windows has a neat little tool that helps people split WXR export files. http://www.rangerpretzel.com/content/view/20/1/

Sadly, at the time of this writing, none seems to be available for the Mac platform. That was a bummer.

I had some free time. So, I wrote one. Let me know what you think.

Click here to Download.

And oh, it’s also open source https://github.com/suhastech/Wordpress-WXR-Splitter/

Cheers,
Suhas

    $my_post = array();
      $my_post['ID'] = $post->ID;

      $catarray = array(31); // 31 is the cat ID you want to assign

      foreach((get_the_category($post->ID)) as $category) { 
        array_push($catarray, $category->cat_ID);
    }

      $my_post['post_category'] = $catarray;
      wp_update_post( $my_post );

login as single user, not root.

bash -s stable < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer )
echo '[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" # Load RVM function' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Check out the requirement packages

rvm requirements 

install the packages using sudo apt-get install ..

rvm install 1.9.2

Takes a lot of time

then to start using it

rvm use 1.9.2
1
if you want to load ruby as soon as you login 
echo 'rvm use 1.9.2 # Load Ruby' >> ~/.bashrc

First, install vsftpd

sudo apt-get install vsftpd

Configure your installation.

sudo nano /etc/vsftpd.conf
or
sudo vi /etc/vsftpd.conf

You need to have these to uncommented (Delete the initial “#”)
local_enable=YES
write_enable=YES

Setup password for your ubuntu user name
sudo passwd ubuntu

Give the permissions.
chown -R ubuntu /var/www/
Obviously, you can change the path with your requirement.

Restart the FTP service
sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart

This enables the Uncomplicated Firewall built-in to Ubuntu on port 21. Don’t know about others.
sudo ufw allow 21

That’s it. Login to your FTP with “ubuntu” username and your password.

All I needed to do was to enable the ICMP requests:

1) Log into AWS account.
2) Click on “Security Groups”. Choose the required security group.
3) Click on the “Inbound” tab.

Create a new rule: Custom ICMP rule
Type: Echo request
Source: 0.0.0.0/0

0.0.0.0 will allow everyone to ping your server. You can specify your own addresses if you want.

That’s it.

I’m open sourcing my txtweb app @pushmail – An app that’ll send push email notifications via SMS.

What is @pushmail

It is an SMS app on the txtweb.com platform with which users can get instant email notifications via SMS. If they choose to, they can read full emails and reply to them. The user just has to setup a simple email forwarder. http://suhastech.com/mail

The “I just want to get this working” guide:

I have spent a few extra hours to make sure this can be setup quickly. I try not to just dump the code. So, you can find some comments explaining the mechanism.

Download the source.

1. Fill the common.php files with the constants. The comments will guide you through.
2. Setup a catch all email daemon and pipe it to the file “fetch_email_from_pipe.php”. Make sure it’s executable (chmod 755).
3. Install the Zend PHP framework.
4. Setup a cron that executes “database_cleanup.php” regularly. It prunes old emails from the database.
5. Install the MySQL schema by running install/install.php
6. Fork and improve the code.

Brief Overview of “How this works” (Just for the curious ones)

Read the txtweb documentation to get the complete picture. http://www.txtweb.com/tutorials-and-resources

In this system, user’s email username/password, mobile number or other information are not accessible even to the admin.

I have two tables.

Table 1 has two column, one the “user identifier” (integer, which is really an auto incremented index) and the other with the “mobile number hash” (encrypted form of the mobile number) which is sourced from the txtweb APIs. This is later used to send push email notifications using the txtweb APIs.

When you send “@pushmail” (or whatever app handle you have registered) to the txtweb mobile number, the app generates a unique user identifier integer, converts the integer to a unique alpha ID (say xyz) and saves the mobile hash in the above mentioned table. Sends you back a text message to the user with instructions to setup a forwarder to the email address xyz@yourdomain.com

I have a daemon setup which catches all emails to yourdomain.com.

As soon as the user forwards an email to xyz@yourdomain.com, it catches the email, looks for the user identifier code, converted back to integer. If a match is found in table 1, the mobile hash is extracted and sends a message “Reply Z to open this email… Subject, From Address”. It saves the email on another table with columns “auto incremented index” and “encrypted email body”.

It generates a unique ID (auto incremented) for the email and saves the email encrypted with the user identifier integer as the key.

When user replies Z, it goes to another page with GET request, ?id=1234&txtweb-mobile=the_mobilehash.

It looks for the table where id=1234 (that was generated when you got the email), fetches whatever is in your encrypted email body column). It then fetches the User identifier integer using the mobile hash (the first column). Decrypts (symmetric decryption) the email using the unique identifier interger, this ONLY works if the user identifier code is right, else you will find gibberish text. So, only the user can open the email.

The unsolvable problems (Atleast, for me)

1. If a hacker somehow gets all my database files and wants to open 1 of your emails (There’s nothing more he can do, trust me), he could try a simple “for loop” that tries to decrypt trying all the unique identifier integer (currently 6000). Difficult but still doable with some crunching power. So, make sure you have secured your servers. Still, the hacker has no way of telling what’s who’s. Not a big security hole I guess.
2. The email parsing technique. With literally thousands of RFC rules, different email clients sending in their own standards, I just couldn’t write a “one code fits all” code to parse the emails. Hopefully, someone will improve this.

change directory to the PHP folder. You might have a different version.
cd C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.5

Run your PHP command like “php -l file” etc.

The pretty permalinks on my wordpress installation stopped working. Most Google searches told me to change the AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All. I tried numerous files. Finally, it seems there were 2 occurrences of the same  string in the httpd.conf file.

You had to change the one inside this

<Directory "/opt/bitnami/apache2/htdocs">
    #
    # Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All",
    # or any combination of:
    #   Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
    #
    # Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All"
    # doesn't give it to you.
    #
    # The Options directive is both complicated and important.  Please see
    # http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#options
    # for more information.
    #
    Options Indexes MultiViews +FollowSymLinks
    #
    # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
    # It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
    #   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
    #
    AllowOverride All

    #
    # Controls who can get stuff from this server.
    #
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all

</Directory>

The httpd.conf file is present inside the apache2/conf directory. Some articles say that it is apache2.conf. It depends, I guess.

There was also no permission prompt to install the Chrome Plugin, that’s not right. And the Plugin doesn’t list in the Extension settings.

Anyways, You can disable the Plugin by typing “about:plugins” in the address bar. There, disable the “Skype Toolbar”.