How To …

Below you will find an archive of articles I’ve written that involve how to perform various activities. Most are focused on technology and technology products.

Secure your WordPress Installation

May 17, 2011

WordPress is an extremely popular web platform with about 7% of all websites running WordPress. That large a population means that attackers have a rich environment to exploit your installation. There have been historical attacks and worms written specifically to target WordPress. Even highly visible bloggers weren’t immune to the attacks. However, there are some [...]

Read the full article →

B&N NOOK Color – Your $250 Android Tablet

April 9, 2011

This article is about the NOOK Color and how to convert it from a stock device, make modifications to enable additional features, and finally convert it into a full-blown Android tablet (running either Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) or Android 3.0 (Honeycomb)). The other day I was lamenting to my best friend how I really wanted to [...]

Read the full article →

How to become a Certified IPv6 Technician – Part Two

March 1, 2011

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the “new” Internet addressing protocol created by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the exhaustion of the current IPv4 address space. In Part One of this article I gave you some background in IPv6 and documented your path from IPv6 Certified Newb to Enthusiast. In Part [...]

Read the full article →

How to become a Certified IPv6 Technician – Part One

February 27, 2011

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the “new” Internet addressing protocol created by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the exhaustion of the current IPv4 address space. What does that mean to you and I? Ultimately, it means very little. The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 has been going on, very slowly, [...]

Read the full article →

MySQL Database Replication over an SSH Tunnel

February 13, 2011

SSH Tunnel Setup Create an SSH key (Version 2) to allow passwordless replication: $ ssh-keygen -t rsa Copy the SSH key to the Master (assumes same user account on Master and Slave): $ ssh-copy-id master.machine.dom Setup the SSH Tunnel from the Slave to the Master on Slave Port 3305: $ ssh -f master.machine.dom -L 3305:127.0.0.1:3306 [...]

Read the full article →

Moving from SquareSpace to WordPress

July 27, 2010

On July 20th, I moved my personal blog site, robpickering.com from SquareSpace to WordPress.  This article is about why I did it and then how I performed the task, maintaining all of my posts, post dates, migrating authors, and most importantly, keeping all of my user comments.  

Read the full article →

Track Spammers using Gmail

July 20, 2010

I hate spam.  I’m sure you hate spam.  I’ve spent a significant amount of my personal time working on solutions to combat spam.  I’m fortunate, in that I run my own mail server, and can therefore deploy a variety of spam fighting techniques.  My current mail server is running: SpamAssassin amavisd-new Greylisting Postfix UCE Rules [...]

Read the full article →

Inexpensive eBooks from O’Reilly Media

July 19, 2010

I love eBooks.  I’m not actually sure the last time I purchased a physical, paper book.  If I have recently purchased one, then it was a Computer Reference book of some type.  Most likely it was a Cisco Press, O’Reilly “animal” book, or any one of a number of technical books and programming manuals.  Over [...]

Read the full article →

Create a Full Backup Image of your Amazon EC2 Instance

July 18, 2010

I’m doing this backwards.  I’m currently writing another article about Amazon EC2 and getting started by moving your existing hosting service to EC2.  However, I recently realized how much time and effort I had devoted to my EC2 Instance and getting things installed, configured, and running the way I want them.  Then I stumbled upon [...]

Read the full article →

Automatically add PDF Files to iBooks / iTunes via Dropbox

June 24, 2010

If you’ve just recently upgraded to iOS 4 (aka iPhone OS 4), then you are eligible to download iBooks version 1.1. Why is iBooks version 1.1 so exciting? Because it provides support for PDF files, natively, on the iPad and the iPhone. Previous to iBooks 1.1, I was using GoodReader as my primary application for [...]

Read the full article →