Ever wonder how those pesky ninjas sneak notes in your gym locker or anything you protect with a masterlock? Well they create a magnificent tool that lets them open any masterlock in seconds using:

• Scissors
• Ruler
• Marker
• Soda Can

Heres a video that we found on metacafe explaining how it is done:

Ever thought you could cheat with just a bottle of soda, glossy paper, and computer? We certainly did not until we came across this video, shame I’m out of school this could have been real handy.

Heres a handy feature that is available offline! It will let give you all the numbers your friends have listed along with a picture of them in alphabetical order. Creating a phone directory has never been easier! If you know of a way to import these into something like Outlook or Address Book please let us know!

1. http://www.facebook.com/mobile
   
2. Click on Phone Book(it is right under the Friends)
3. Print out the page.

A System Administrator could fall under the “IT Department” of any company. If they are doing their job well it may seem like they do not do much. This is because a good Sysadmin should be able to detect a problem before it occours and fix it before it breaks. So if you are reading this article and have recently complained about your work computer before link them to this article!

*Note all products linked here are 100% free and opensource*

Manufacturer’s Software

If your manufacturer takes time to develop software for you to use and bundles it with their computer, you should be using it. It can do helpfull things such as predict a hard drive failure which may not be common in a household but is fairly more common in a enterprise. Combined with the right monitoring software you can make sure your coworkers computers are always in the best physical health.

Monitoring Computers

Nagios even though it is made for Servers, it can also be used for workstations. Possible uses are:

• Monitor for predicted hardware failures
• Make sure the File Server is up and running
• Graph when PC’s are on/off (useful if your work wants to cut down on the electricity bill)

Another cool thing about Nagios is you can tell it to take action when something goes down, if used right you will never hear the question “is this down?”

*Note: Nagios is the actual server component. NRPE is the client for Linux and NSClient ++ is a great client for windows.

Managing Software

A computer is fairly secure until a user gets behind it, should use inventory software such as OCS-Inventory to keep track of what people are installing. With this you can not only scan for “rogue machines” aka peoples personal laptops, but you can check if they installed any software you don’t approve of such as PC Anywhere.

Syslog (servers)

You may have several servers or for whatever reason you want workstations logging to a central location. You can use Syslog-NG and PHP-Syslog-NG to record all this information into an easy to read web page that will let you filter + search. Why may this be useful? Well you would know if people have brute forced your server and more importantly gotten in. Also if someone gets in and attempts to hide it in the logs they would also have to break into your Syslog server, which is hopefully located on a different server to prevent you from finding out there was an intrusion.

Summary

As one can see open source software can be a great help but I would not recommend installing anything in an enterprise or especially on a machine that has a routable IP Address without doing some checks on just how secure it really is. With the 3 above packages you should be able to:

• Minimize downtime and ensure everything is running just fine(nagios)
• Track PC Uptime and possibly having users shut off their PC to save power(nagios)
• Monitor for unwanted software(OCSInventory)
• Have a central location of logs on your servers, mainly for security purposes(break-ins especially) as nagios should take care of services(Syslog-NG)

Getting Help

Google is your best friend however if Google is no help to you, turn to user groups, IRC and/or forums. Don’t know of a good place to ask your question? Register at our forums and ask us here!

Still Need Help?

You can try emailing me directly at ipp@tutorialninjas.net, or if you want to request our “Professional Services” for your business please send an email to support@tutorialninjas.net . We do have experience with installing the mentioned software in an enterprise and can tailor it to your companies needs.

Ever want to try out linux but want to make sure you have windows also just incase you get frusterated? Well we are here to help you!

Advantages

• See what they hype about linux is about.
• Be able to run both windows and linux programs!
• Windows will probably run smoother after a fresh install. It has a tendency to slow down after awhile.

What You Need

• Windows Installation CD (sorry we dont have a link for ya)
• Ubuntu CD (its free! Just download and burn it!)

Steps

1. Backup any data you will want to keep(we will be erasing everything!)
2. You may want to download all the drivers for your computer incase windows fails to recognize them on a reinstall. Go to support.’manufacturer here’.com so for dell you go to support.dell.com. If you need help let us know what computer you have over in the forums.
3. Insert your Windows CD and reboot your computer.
4. Hopefully your computer will boot off the CD if not look at your computer during its boot up and look for the boot menu option.
5. When it asks you to press any key, press a key.
6. If it prompts you for an option to repair, don’t do this(i think the key is escape, the bar at the bottem of the screen tells you the options.)
7. Now you should see a screen similiar to this:
8. For each option other then “unpartitioned space” choose Delete(D), Continue(Enter), and then Delete(L)
9. Now you should be left with just unpartitioned space choose Create(C)
10. It will now tell you how many megabytes your hard disk is, you can choose anything you want as long is its greater then 5000, however i recommend you only use about 1/3rd. Mine is 31997 so I am going to use 10,000. Hit enter once your done.



11. Now you should only be left with “unpartitioned space”.



12. Choose Install(enter) and choose Format the partition using NTFS File System (Quick) and press enter.
13. When your computer reboots do NOT press a key to boot from a cd if it prompts you too.
14. The windows installation will ask you for a few basic things
15. Once XP Is done installing lets insert your ubuntu disc and reboot.
16. If you had to go into your boot menu to boot from a cd you will have to do it again.
17. Now click Install
18. Now just go through the simple menus hitting forward until you get to the the fourth menu “Prepare Disk Space”
19. Choose Manual
20. Click on Free space and then go to new partition, for the size enter what you want. We recommend you use another 1/3 of your space.
21. For the mont point type /



22. Now click on Free Space agan and use 1000 for the size, and where it says “Use As” choose swap



23. Your partition table should look as follow:



24. Now you can click forward, give it any information it will ask and after a screen or two it will start installing!
25. You can click around during the install and you will even find firefox to browse the web if you are bored!
26. After the install it will ask for a reboot, just choose reboot and take the cd out when your computer boots up it will give you a choice to boot into Ubuntu or Windows!

If you followed our guidelines you still have a third of your hard disk not used. Please stay tuned and we will show you how you can turn that into a place where you can put both your important windows files and ubuntu files incase either OS should crash on you. This makes recovering much easier.

Anyways now that you have linux installed! If you feel lost we are dedicating this week to doing things in linux! But you can always ask us in the forums if you want a quick answer.

What is completely black and has red all over? A ninja looking for a redbox code.

Ok, that may not have been the best riddle but this tutorial is sure to tickle a movie lovers fancy.

Redbox Automated Retail is a joint owned by McDonald’s which operates automated DVD rental kiosks. These kiosks are primarily found at McDonalds but have expanded into many other stores, including Grocery. Redbox allows you to rent DVDs for $1 per day with absolutely no late fees. Statistically, each kiosk can contain up to 500 DVDs with an average of 50 new releases.

Now if the price isn’t already right, Tutorial Ninjas is proud to present the website Insideredbox. Insideredbox gives you codes to Redbox machines for a free dvd rental for one day. “Some codes do even more - even giving up to 5 free dvd rentals at one time.” -Insideredbox.com

Get some codes!

1. Open up your browser and go to www.insideredbox.com/index.php/codes.
2. At that page, you will be presented with a long list of submitted codes, organized by Code, Last used, and Purpose.
You can also scroll further down the page and see the codes valid for your state.
3. Take your codes to your local Redbox machine and enter them in when you go to purchase your movie.

Good luck and happy movie watching!