Gmail and Email Aliases
I was chatting to a colleague the other day and explained an easy way to catch websites out that have leaked your email address and destination based filtering. It’s surprisingly unknown and can save you a lot of hassle.
Gmail has been supporting the Email Aliases feature for some years now, right back to the pre-google apps days and it’s by far one of, if not, THE most hidden feature.
The Gist
Say for example, you had bob@cake.com and you were signing up to a website you didn’t really trust with your email address called spookyweb, you can place a reference within the email address (bob+spookyweb@cake.com - delimited by a single +) and emails will still become delivered to bob@cake.com
It’s as simple as that. In the event that spookyweb start leaking your email address, a simple filter can be created to deal with that and bin the emails as required.
Further information on this can be found over at https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12096?hl=en
XBMC YouTube Addon: Playing Videos
Since installing XBMC I have been incredibly fond of the YouTube addon within the official repository.
Instead of using some crazy method of searching videos (on-screen keyboard style) I have been seeking easier ways to play YouTube videos directly from every day devices.
The solution; the two greatest addons I have come across to date for this.
Firstly, Constellation for iOS which is a full XBMC management addon. Works excellent on the iPhone, it’s free with an optional £1.99 upgrade for some additional features. This works well if you’re using XBMC Remote for iOS at the moment whilst looking for something to control YouTube easily. Also supports queuing.
If you’re not fond of the whole “mobile as a remote” experience, brantje, a userscripts contributor has developed Play2XBMC which makes a few modifications to your Chrome browser, displaying a ‘play’ and ‘queue’ option on your YouTube webpage. This is far more easier for heavy PC users and only requires Tampermonkey.
Low and behold, a much smoother user experience!
cPanel: Incorrect Mailserver Hostname (Fix)
In cPanel 11.34, a common issue being that cPanel assumes when using a wildcard SSL certificate on the host machine that the mailserver in use is actually mail.<domain> as opposed to the server hostname. For most, this will simply not be the case and will display incorrect mailserver configuration details to end users in cPanel.
A fix for this (assuming your hostname is a FQDN) involves two echo’s that simply replace the hostname in the two following files with the correct server name:
- /var/cpanel/ssl/dovecot-CN
- /var/cpanel/ssl/exim-CN
#!/bin/bash
# Overwrites the incorrect mailservers in cPanel > Email Accounts
# Added to CRON
echo -n $(hostname) > /var/cpanel/ssl/dovecot-CN
echo -n $(hostname) > /var/cpanel/ssl/exim-CN
# EOF
This can either be added in to regular cron execution or in the /scripts/postupcp script. Either method will work fine, this is just to prevent upcp from overwriting these upon execution.
Hopefully cPanel will understand this is an issue and write a fix, hopefully a tweakable setting.
D.
Facebook: Deny friend requests from ‘Everyone’
Facebook decided to once again revamp its privacy settings structure, and as a Facebook tradition, remove the option to limit friend requests to nobody.
With a little JSON fiddling I managed to reinstate this feature.
Original:
/ajax/privacy/simple_save.php?id=0000000000&audience_json={“0000000000”:{“value”:”50”}}&source=privacy_lite
Modified:
/ajax/privacy/simple_save.php?id=0000000000&audience_json={“0000000000”:{“value”:”10”}}&source=privacy_lite
As you can see, the value has changed to ‘10’ which is the ident for ‘Only me’ and Facebook will actually process this request. Make sure you replace 0000000000 with your Facebook UserID.
MySQL and Web Backup using Dropbox
So recently, after a sudden price increase with my previous backup provider I was looking for alternative methods of backing up MySQL and Web files from my main production server.
I had researched several providers including Carbonite and Sugarsync but none were very well suited towards my budget, nor were suited towards a linux environment.
I then decided to see exactly what Dropbox could offer. I did a lot of research and after becoming unsuccessful with FTP uploads to Dropbox I noticed they DID provide a Linux client (mostly suited to a GUI) but did actually work in a CLI environment.
The basic installation was through aptitude by searching for ‘dropbox’ in the Ubuntu repositories. Once this was installed it was a simple procedure from there.
Running the following command will start Dropbox under a command line environment and run an installation script:
dropbox start -I
You are then given an auth URL which you can enter in to a web browser in a GUI environment (even on a different machine), or a text environment using lynx, to authorize Dropbox and then you’re ready to go, it will start synchronising your files across.
Once running, instead of fiddling with the file structure using the method and Python file Dropbox recommends, Dropbox does in fact follow symbolic links, so I simply created a symlink from the ~/Dropbox folder to a separate much larger drive so I could rsync data across with ease.
You can use the following command to see exactly what Dropbox is doing:
dropbox status
And that’s it, Dropbox is installed and will start synchronising your files across.
The handy part of using Dropbox is, you can link any specific file to somebody else (functions include as an example) and this will syntax highlight it for ease of viewing instead of copying over to Gist or Pastebin.
