How to change your network MAC address on Ubuntu

Posted on December 28, 2009 by Ahmed Tawfik

“sudo ifconfig eth0 down” #bring down the network card

“sudo ifconfig eth0 inet hw ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx up” #change the MAC and bring it back up

where “eth0” is the network adapter you wish to change its MAC and “xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx” is the 6 groups of numbers each composed of two hexadecimal numbers.


For more info on MAC addresses, check this link and for the source, I got it from here, thanks to suki 🙂

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An Excellent Solution to websites that don’t save the username and password

Posted on December 27, 2009 by Ahmed Tawfik

A very nice tutorial that I read here,and it then led me to here, it’s a Javascript script that enables Firefox to remember usernames and passwords for some websites that orders the browser not to remember it, and I LOVE IT! It worked like a charm.

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How to connect using Mobinil 3G Modem in Egypt, Solution to a problem in Ubuntu’s default configuration

Posted on December 22, 2009 by Ahmed Tawfik

If you create a profile in 3G connections in Ubuntu (I’m currently using version 9.04), you will be able to connect but you won’t be able to reach any website, that’s because of a glitch in the default configuration for “Mobinil” service provider. To solve the problem:

  1. Right-click on the Network Manager icon and choose “Edit Connections”
  2. Choose the “Mobile Broadband” tab
  3. Double click the “Mobinil” connection
  4. Open the “IPV4 Settings”
  5. In the “Method”, change from “Automatic (PPP) addresses only” to “Automatic (PPP)”.
  6. Reconnect and enjoy 🙂
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Backup and Restore ext4 filesystem using fsarchiver

Posted on December 19, 2009 by Ahmed Tawfik

Important Note: Until the time of writing this article, “partimage” DOESN’T SUPPORT EXT4, it detects ext4 as ext3 and then displays an error message saying “can’t read bitmap block 0 from image“, so if you use something like the bootable disk “systemrescuecd” for backup and you’re using an ext4 filesystem, you’d better use another alternative such as “fsarchiver” as in the following steps:

  1. Create a mountpoint to save the image to, e.g. “/root/backup”
  2. “fsarchiver savefs /root/backup/backup.fsa /dev/sda1” where sda1 is the partition you wish to backup.

fsarchiver uses gzip compression by default and it will display a summary once it finishes, make sure the summary doesn’t contain any errors. To restore the image:

  1. “fsarhiver restfs /root/backup/backup.fsa id=0,dest=/dev/sda1” where “/dev/sda1” is the partition you wish to restore and “id=0” is used to indicate that it’s the first partition in the list of paritions – if any – inside the “backup.fsa” file.

For more information, visit http://www.fsarchiver.org/QuickStart

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UNetbootin: Burn any ISO or image files to USB Disk on Linux

Posted on December 17, 2009 by Ahmed Tawfik
  1. Go to the following URL: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ and download the file
  2. Make the file executable (chmod +x file_name)
  3. This step is specific for Ubuntu: If you receive the message “7z not found ….”, open a terminal and run “sudo apt-get install p7zip-full“

BTW, if you need to write IMG files instead on Ubuntu, you can install the USB image writer by running “sudo apt-get install usb-imagewriter”

Enjoy 🙂

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