Author Archives: Ahmed Tawfik

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About Ahmed Tawfik

Cybersecurity Professional, Systems Engineer, OSS & Linux Geek

Ubuntu, is it ready for Tablets? Unity Vs. MATE

Posted on February 23, 2013 by Ahmed Tawfik

Today I did a test, comparing the Unity desktop, which is Ubuntu’s default now, on Ubuntu Quantal, to the MATE desktop (forked from Gnome 2) on Linux Mint 14 (also based on Ubuntu Quantal), all 64-bit. The test was run … Continue reading →

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How to get version of Redhat & Oracle Enterprise Linux

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Ahmed Tawfik

Oracle Enterprise Linux: more /etc/enterprise-release, example output: “Enterprise Linux Server release 5.5 (Carthage)” Redhat: more /etc/redhat-release

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How to enable & force HTTPS on Apache2 Web Server on Ubuntu

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Ahmed Tawfik

HTTPS Configuration (with self-signed certificate) “sudo a2enmod ssl” “sudo a2ensite default-ssl” With Apache2 now configured for HTTPS, restart the service to enable the new settings: “sudo service apache2 restart” Source: https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/httpd.html To force https: Enable mod_rewrite: “sudo a2enmod rewrite” Then … Continue reading →

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How to install basic GUI on Ubuntu Server and access it via VNC

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Ahmed Tawfik

For those who need basic & light-weight GUI for their Ubuntu Server, you can do the following: “sudo apt-get install xorg openbox” To easily access it via VNC: “sudo apt-get install tightvncserver” To start your VNC server, simply type: “vncserver” … Continue reading →

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How to manually modify DB initialization parameters by creating pfile from spfile

Posted on January 19, 2013 by Ahmed Tawfik

pfile is the initialization parameters of DB in plain text, while spfile is the binary one, so to be able to change it, you have to: Extract the pfile from the spfile: “create pfile=’my_path/file_name.ora‘ from spfile;” Shutdown the DB: “shutdown … Continue reading →

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