Linux: SMTP for Server Email

When setting up a server that needs to send emails, it’s sometimes more useful to have it send those emails via SMTP (using a service like Gmail or AWS SES) but often the php default is not this. So let’s learn how install and setup secure email sending capabilities for our php based applications on a linux server.

Mac OS: Port Forwarding

I use a Mac and I’ve been working in virtual machines (VirtualBox) to learn more about Linux as a server environment. It’s great, to say the least. Knowing you can revert back to a previous “system snapshot” is a wonderful assurance for when you know you’re going to mess thing up.

With all this greatness, I was unfortunately  having a lot of trouble getting the VM server to connect to other computers. Actually, it was very easy with using a bridged ethernet connection, with the Ubuntu server getting a unique IP address. However, a bridged connection is not always available, so I was determined to get it to work with a NAT connection with port forwarding. I needed port 80 to be forwarded to port 8080, and it was a pain but I finally got port forwarding to work. Here’s how:

Mac OS: Zipping with your terminal

The basic command structure for compressing a file into the zip format with the terminal is:

zip -r <destination> <source>

If you want to compress more than one folder or item:

zip -r <destination> <source1> <source2>...

The source can be a file or folder.

Unfortunately zip is not very smart when it comes to folders and it will save not only the file, but the path to the file as well. We can fix this behavior by adding just a little bit to the original command.

Setting Pidgin and Google Talk (GTalk) with A Custom Domain

Pidgin does a great job of connecting all the chat & IM protocols together, and is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux (yeah!), plus it’s open-source and free! Its interface is dead-simple, but sometimes its setup can be confusing for beginners.

If you have a custom email domain for your gmail account, setting up to use Google Talk through Pidgin needs a couple extra tweaks to the settings. Follow these easy steps to get started.