If you host web applications for clients you know that a reliable web control panel is always a must.  I have received calls at wee hours of the night from clients who needed something that could easily be executed with a simple web control panel and I was kicking myself for being so lazy.

I spent a few days looking for a reliable and even more importantly, affordable web hosting control panel. Unfortunately the free stuff still came at a price (learning curve for unwilling clientele) and the pay stuff was way out of budget.

As any enraged geek, I wrote it myself, here is my masterpiece in action :

This thing ate up so much of my time but I didn’t even care.  The learning curve was huge – especially the DNS administration.  I had to think of new ways to execute administrative tasks from a very limited user.  I had to automate reloading services, span updates of SOA record strings – it was awesome.

The reason I put this whole video / post thing together is that I have a feeling there are others who are / were in my situation.  Now I need feedback and I need to find any insecurities / vulnerabilities so heres what I want to do :

I am putting together a demo server, one you all can play with and try to break – you wont see it for another day or two but it will be here.  I want to offer a full years free hosting to the one who provides the best feedback for this application.

Feedback may include :

• Best Feature Request
• Best Hack / Exploit (do your worst!)
• Stupidest mistake on my behalf

Submissions will be judged by an unbiased third party and we will gladly host the winners stuff for an entire year!

I will post the host / IP as soon as the demo server is complete and I am looking forward to hearing from you.

I wrote an article a few months back about Time Machine over TCP to a Linux NAS.  I linked to a few how-to’s that walked you through compilation and setting up your mac to accept remote volumes for backup devices.

I have little experience creating deb packages – but I figured I would release my working Ubuntu specific deb for others to test out and see how it goes.  I have tested it on a fresh install :

Linux laptop 2.6.28-14-generic #47-Ubuntu SMP Sat Jul 25 00:28:35 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux


Here is what I had to do to install it :

wget http://geekhut.org/downloads/netatalk_2.0.4~beta2-5ubuntu1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i netatalk_2.0.4~beta2-5ubuntu1_i386.deb
sudo apt-get -f install


You can edit your shares in /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default
For instance, the last two lines of mine look like :

/media/shared/Backups/ "Time Machine"
/media/shared/ "Shared"


You will also want to add the following to the bottom of /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf :

- -transall -uamlist uams_randnum.so,uams_dhx.so -nosavepassword -advertise_ssh


Once you have it all set up, you will probably want to advertise this service on the network as an Apple device. Copy this file into /etc/avahi/services/afpd.service.

Restart avahi : sudo /etc/init.d/avahi restart
Restart netatalkd : sudo /etc/init.d/netatalk restart

You should now see your new AFP server in your apple’s finder sidebar.  If not click Finder => Go => Connect to Server and type afp://your-hostname.

Anyway I hope the file works for you, I can not guarantee anything and assume NO liability if it shits the bed.  Give it a shot and let me know how it turns out for you.

I had recently put up a wanted ad for an apartment in the city.  Had a few legit responses this morning and then I get this email from a fella who goes by the name “Asif”.. heh.

So we send a few emails back and forth – then he pops up on XMPP, I accepted not knowing who it was.  I decided to blog it in hopes  to make others aware (I have been fooled before).  Now I would usually leave out personal information but this was clearly a SCAM!

Here is the conversation :

This gets better.

If you read within the convo he states that it is him sitting in his bedroom – I decided to investigate further…

Not only do the pictures of the place make it impossibly priced (just happened to be the exact amount I was looking to pay) – the guy was adamant about sending his ID and proving who he was – the damn pictures didn’t even match!  The guy in the bedroom looks like Gates!!

Be careful – pay close attention to detail and never trust a man trying to rent his place from overseas.

Do you think this is a scam? Let me know.

I thought I would try my luck at developing a UI design application for a new CMS I am putting together.  As you probably already know: I love jQuery – especially the UI plugins.  The goal of this project was to store Stylesheet attributes as key => value in a database, and have them update immediately on change.  This video is really only a proof of concept that it is doable (we already know that from SquareSpace) but I would like to see an open implementation.

Another goal for this project is a smart media library which allows dragging content into these blocks.  I do not believe this is going to be as difficult to do as the actual CSS generation – but I guess we will see within the next week or two.  Anyway watch the video and leave me some feedback, I would like to know if this project has any potential whatsoever

By the way I started a Tumblr blog – check it out (subscribe too!) @ http://tumblr.geekhut.org

Well it is Friday afternoon, it is super hot and I got a full fridge of beer.

Today I decided I would clean the house – didn’t work so well.

I had this great idea to mind map what I wanted to accomplish and failed miserably.

Here is the output :