How to: disable wvdial Auto DNS — use static DNS settings

Sometimes you wanted to get rid of your crappy ISP DNS servers for good. I’m using wvdial to dial up, here’s what I do. Steps: [*] Disable usepeerdns. Edit “/etc/ppp/peers/wvdial” file. Commented the usepeerdns line. Here’s what is should look: #usepeerdns [*] Disable Auto DNS in wvdial. Edit “/etc/wvdial.conf” file. Set Auto DNS Off. Auto DNS = Off [*] Add…

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Forward Ports Through a Linux Gateway with iptables NAT

Why Your Port Forwarding Isn’t Working A very common mistake with port forwarding on Linux is assuming a single DNAT rule is enough. You add one iptables rule, try to hit your server from outside, and… nothing. In reality, proper forwarding through a Linux gateway needs three things working together: IP forwarding in the kernel, packet filtering rules in the…

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How to Edit the sudoers File Safely with visudo

How to Edit the sudoers File Safely with visudo

If you break your sudoers file, you can lock yourself out of root. That’s the nightmare we’re trying to avoid here. This guide is for anyone managing Linux servers (VPS, bare metal, cloud instances) who needs to give or adjust sudo access without shooting their future self in the foot. I’ll walk you through how to use visudo correctly, how…

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How to fix: Google Earth crash on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

I got the following error after executing Google Earth application on Ubunto 10.04 Lucid Lynx ubuntu@ubuntu:/opt/google-earth$ /usr/local/bin/googleearth Fatal error in __driConfigOptions line 1, column 0: unknown encoding. Google Earth has caught signal 6. We apologize for the inconvenience, but Google Earth has crashed. This is a bug in the program, and should never happen under normal circumstances. A bug report…

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