How to Boot a WinXP Virtual Box Guest to Safe Mode

With the XP guest running, go to Start/Run and type ‘msconfig’ and then press enter.

Then click on the BOOT.ini tab, and select the /SAFEBOOT checkbox.  Then save and restart.

Once you are done, uncheck the box and reboot.→ Continue reading “How to Boot a WinXP Virtual Box Guest to Safe Mode”

Automate the Download of Windows VMs for Testing IE6, IE7, IE8, IE9, IE10 and IE11 with ievms

I am working on some client-side Javascript and I need to be able to test it in all of the currently extant versions of Internet Explorer.  A collegue of mine pointed me to the ievms project by Greg Thornton (xdissent) that automates the download of multiple Windows vms provided by Microsoft to facilitate testing in multiple versions of IE.

https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

To get it working under Fedora (RedHad, CentOS):

   . The script requires unar but is not readily available for FC18.  → Continue reading “Automate the Download of Windows VMs for Testing IE6, IE7, IE8, IE9, IE10 and IE11 with ievms”

Services That Can Be Turned Off in a CentOS 6, Minimal Server

Following is a list of services that can (for most applications) be turned off if you are setting up a bare-bones CentOS 6.4 server:

Automatic bug reporting services:
abrt-ccpp
abrt-oops
abrtd

Power control and features, query battery and config status
acpid

Controls ‘at’ command queing, examining, or deleting jobs for later execution.  Anything atd can do, cron can do
atd

File auditing
auditd

Auto fs mounting
autofs

Printing
cups

For desktop environments:
netfs

Network filesystems:
nfslock
rpcbind
rpcgssd
rpcidmapd

MTA→ Continue reading “Services That Can Be Turned Off in a CentOS 6, Minimal Server”

Setting Up Passwordless SSH Under CentOS 6 Running Selinux

I am setting up a cluster of KVM virtual machines and want to be able to ssh to them as the root user on the vm without having to enter a password.

The first thing that I did was create keys on the box from which I was going to make connections (A):

[rchapin@A .ssh]$ ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/usr/local2/home/rchapin/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Continue reading “Setting Up Passwordless SSH Under CentOS 6 Running Selinux”

jsbeautifier.org: Beautify, unpack or deobfuscate JavaScript and HTML, make JSON/JSONP readable, etc.

The title of this entry is straight from the http://jsbeautifier.org/ website and says it all.→ Continue reading “jsbeautifier.org: Beautify, unpack or deobfuscate JavaScript and HTML, make JSON/JSONP readable, etc.”

Splitting a String into an Array with a Custom Delimiter in a Bash Shell Script

Most high level languages have some sort of String.split([delimiter]) method to create an array of Strings tokenized by a user specified delimiter.  This is a simple way to convert a CSV into an array.

Here is a quick way to do that in a bash shell script:

#!/bin/bash

SOURCE_STRING='foo|blah|moo'
# Save the initial Interal Field Separator
OIFS="$IFS"
# Set the IFS to a custom delimiter
IFS='|'

read -a TOKENS <<< "${SOURCE_STRING}"
for i in "${TOKENS[@]}"
do
  echo "$i"
done

# 
Continue reading “Splitting a String into an Array with a Custom Delimiter in a Bash Shell Script”