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If you are running your own server I’m sure you’ve thought about setting your own login banner for SSH connections. This can be handy to post any important information such as service notices or a legal warning before a user logs in. You can see a sample login banner below in this screen shot.

This is extremely easy to setup

Step 1: Login in as root and navigate to “/etc/ssh”.

Step 2: create a file named “sshd-banner” using your editor of choice.

Step 3: create your banner content and save the file.

Step 4: open “sshd_config” for editing.

Step 5: Add the following line to your config file “Banner /etc/ssh/sshd-banner” and save.

Step 6: Restart the sshd server. On a linux server this would be “/etc/init.d/sshd restart”

Feel free to log back into your server to test.

Mark your calendar folks Kalamazoo X has been announced for April 10th, 2010 and registration is now open at http://KalamazooX.eventbrite.com

What is the X Conference?

The Kalamazoo X Conference is a one-day software development conference hosted in beautiful Southwest Michigan. While there are many great technical conferences in the region, their focus tends toward new technologies and programming languages. The Kalamazoo X Conference intends to uniquely complement those conferences by enabling attendees to boost their process, design, and communication skills in the following areas:

•Human interaction, including social, personal, and career development.
•Interface and graphic design
•Development processes and best practices
•Requirements analysis, architecture, design, and modeling

I attended this event last year and it was great. It’s run as a single track rapid fire series of talks that focuses on the so called “soft skills”, all that non-technical junk you need to know to do your job!

Please check it out and attend if you can. It will be well worth it.

The Cleveland GiveCamp 2010 has been announced and is currently looking for charities and volunteers!

About GiveCamp

GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations. This custom software could be a new website for the nonprofit organization, a small data-collection application to keep track of members, or a application for the Red Cross that automatically emails a blood donor three months after they’ve donated blood to remind them that they are now eligible to donate again. The only limitation is that the project should be scoped to be able to be completed in a weekend.

The Cleveland event will be held July 16th - 18th, 2010 at LeanDog located at 1151 North Marginal Road Cleveland, OH 44114.

So please check out the Cleveland GiveCamp 2010 and sign up to help if you can!

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt

This is another book from Andy Hunt and the Pragmatic series. I can’t emphasize enough how great these books are.

Where as in Pragmatic Programming they discussed patterns and practices to improve your developer skills this book takes a step back and is looks at how your brain works. It’s a very interesting concept and one I suggest developers think more about.

The book as the title implies covered two areas:

The first part goes over the thought process and after reading this book I gained so much insight into how my brain is wired. Andy does a great job of explain how a brain processes thoughts and stores memories in terms of metaphors of computers and technology.

The second part covered the many techniques for learning and helps walk you though examples of the pros and cons of each method. Again this was very insightful as I have never really thought much about how I learn and what processes are best for me.

Thanks to this book I now have a few different options for learning that I plan to try to find the one that works best for me to retain and use knowledge.

Go pick up a copy and sit down. It was such a fascinating book and I ended up reading it from cover to cover in only a few days. Once you get into it, if you are anything like me you will be so enthralled you won’t be able to put it down.

If you ever have a need to save a windows servers file shares & settings here’s how to do that. This is handy if you happen to be transitioning to a new file server and you have a lot of shares that need to be transferred. You could always do it by hand but this way will save you a lot of time!

Open up your registry on the server and navigate to:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares]

Right click on the Shares folder and choose export

You will now have a .reg file that you can copy and install on the new server and have all the file shares and security settings ready to go.

One note to remember is this only works if you setup the file shares identically on the new server. You have to keep the drive letters and folders matching the old server.