Switching between Rails 2 and Rails 3 on Mac OS X or Ubuntu with RVM

I’m migrating AdGrok to Rails 3 this weekend–what with the new ActiveRecord query functionality, and MongoMapper, and all our gems migrating to Rails 3, it seems like it’s time.

The Railscast (and ASCIIcast) is great, but a couple steps are now outdated. There also aren’t any instructions on how to switch between rails 2 and rails 3 gracefully.

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HOWTO: Mount your USB hard drives at boot time on Ubuntu

I’ve got a number of external USB hard drives connected to my ubuntu server that need to mount to a predictable directory.

When you log into Gnome, the desktop environment does it’s nifty thing and mounts any drive you’ve got plugged in — but if the box reboots, the drives won’t be mounted until the next person logs into the computer.

I needed something that happens at boot time to do this task.

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How to fix the wifi on a HP Mini 110 Netbook running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

Installing Karmic Koala from a USB drive proved to be a bit less than effortless. First off the http and ftp servers for the netbook-reloaded ISO images were really slow, and for some odd reason there aren’t any bittorrent links for the netbook-reloaded image. You need to go to http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/ to find the .torrent link (which is here).

The installation instructions need some editing, too, but the jist is if you’ve got a linux box, use usb-creator — and don’t panic when the usb-creator main window disappears (and doesn’t get replaced with a progress window for several minutes).

So the main glitch was wireless — it didn’t work out of the box on my HP 110 netbook.

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OpenDNS updater for linux/ubuntu

The OpenDNS service is great — it provides anti-phishing and the ability to filter out some of the less desirable detritus from the internets.

OpenDNS needs to be periodically notified about what your IP address is, and I don’t have a windows or macintosh box that’s always on. I do have an ubuntu box, though, but there weren’t any instructions on OpenDNS’ site to do this properly.

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Installing CrashPlan on Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition

Although rsnapshot is super for linux-to-linux backups, I’ve found CrashPlan to work very well as a backup solution for my family’s windows and mac boxes.

The CrashPlan installation works pretty well on ubuntu desktop edition, as all the necessary packages are already there. The server edition fails quietly, though.

Run these steps before you install CrashPlan, and everything should be smooth:
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