Another post containg stuff I usually have to look for.

umask valuefile chmod valuedirectory chmod value
000666 rw-rw-rw-777 rwxrwxrwx
002664 rw-rw-r--775 rwxrwxr-x
022644 rw-r--r--755 rwxr-xr-x
027640 rw-r-----750 rwxr-x---
077600 rw-------700 rwx------
277400 r--------500 r-x------

So I was investigating how to run a rails app on my VPS. I needed to use several sources to get little bit's working, so here's the combined instructions. Note that I assume you're starting with a working apache installation.

So thanks to Windows going screwy again I had to fix grub on my machine. So I can find these instructions again here they are:

1. sudo mount /dev/sda4 /mnt
2. sudo mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
3. sudo mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc
4. sudo chroot /dev /bin/bash
5. grub-install /dev/sda
6. exit
7. reboot

These instructions allow you to run grub-install in a chrooted environment.

Taken from http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/2010/10/27/s03e19-if-we-only-knew/

1. install the "most" pager utility. sudo apt-get install most
2. put export PAGER="most" in your ~/.bashrc
3. Logout, Login

Thanks to the guys and girl over at Hak5 I came across Katana. This allows several live images to be booted from the same USB drive - hence reducing the number of them I have to carry around.

All that's left is to get Ubuntu and of course SpinRite working, and as this is a work in progress post, these are some links I may need to find again:

Entropy (ie the source of random numbers) is generated by keeping an eye on such things as mouse/keyboard use, hardware interupts. However on VPSs some of this is unavailable, so here's the process for using the bitfolk entropy service.

Introduction

This is intended to be a very basic guide to getting a VPS up and going, it's aimed at the hobbiest who has enough linux knowledge to want to use a VPS but isn't quite sure how to go about getting it up and going. It assumes you'll be using an Ubuntu VPS from bitfolk, if this isn't the case then some of the things in this guide may be slightly off.

Something I've just setup for MERG is a script to transcode recordings of meetings into several different formats. For this I'm using FFMPeg on an Ubuntu 8.10 VPS, below is a link to the instructions I had to go through to get it installed properly.
http://ubuntu-ky.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?s=607e7c75f6675a6898c44e90feacf031&t=786095