Group Policy Search - Online Policy Settings Reference and Search Tool

The Group Policy Search (GPS) is a browse and search tool for Microsoft Active Directory Group Policy Settings. This online tool from Microsoft allows you to easily find existing Group Policies and registry keys for different settings under Windows. You can either browse through the tree structure to find the settings you are looking for or use the search box to find them.

PDF writer for Citrix or Terminal Server environments

Wilco Van Bragt of vanbragt.net consultancy has a great review of several popular pdf writers available for Terminal Services environments. Products reviewed include:

  • PDF995
  • CutePDF Writer
  • PDF Creator
  • Doro PDFWriter
  • BullZip PFDWriter
  • Microsoft Office 2007 PDF Converter
It’s an excellent article if you plan on using a pdf writer in a TS or Citrix environment and is available on Wilco’s website at: PDFWRITER FOR TS

proFTPd - Create individual directories for each user account

This post explains how to modify the proFTPd Administrator tool to make the create users tool actually create individual directories for each account that is created.

Managing Packages With Yum Command

Yum (Yellowdog Updater Modified) is an interactive, automated update program which can be used for maintaining systems using rpm by super users (root). It is used to check, install, remove or update to the latest version of a package or group of packages while ensuring that all dependencies are satisfied. Login as the root user to install and update the system.

ProFTPd - Install with Virtual Users and Web Admin support on CentOS 5.x

ProFTPD is a high-performance, extremely configurable, and secure FTP server, featuring Apache-like configuration and great performance. This post describes how to install a Proftpd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. Using virtual users is far more efficient as it allows you to setup and manage literally thousands of ftp users on a single host.

To simplify end-user account creation and management, we will be using a web-based tool called proFTPd Administration. The tool, with some additional programming, also automates the creation of individual directories for each account that is created.

Avoid Package Conflicts with Yum Priorities

Its always best to install packages from the vendor's original repositories before installing from third party repositories like RPMForge. Installing from different repositories can result in package conflicts between RPMForge and CentOS Updates repository. To avoid this, we should use the “yum-priorities” plugin.

Install, Remove & Autostart X Window System on CentOS

If you need to add X to the server after install or you installed from the Server ISO and it didn't install X, how do you install X?

Installing, Disabling & Removing RPMforge Repository

RPMforge is a collaboration of Dag, Dries, and other packagers. They provide over 4000 packages for CentOS, including mplayer, xmms-mp3, and other popular media tools. The RPMforge collaboration repackages many RPMs that are not included as part of the stock Linux distributions, including versions of many packages still in testing. Visit the RPMforge Website for more information.