USB modem on Slackware 12.x – 13.x : how to make it work

A little caveat to make USB Modem like ZTE to work on Slackware:

Download usb-modeswitch source from here
and
usb-modeswitch data

Extract it:

tar jxvf usb-modeswitch-1.1.2.tar.bz2
tar jxvf usb-modeswitch-data-20100418.tar.bz2

And Install:

cd usb-modeswitch-1.1.2
make
su
make install
cd ../usb-modeswitch-data-20100418
make install

The USB Modem should be working now ;)

Creating Certificate and activating apache’s mod-ssl (https) for Ubuntu and Slackware

It’s quite an easy and painless process actually but I always forget the step, so I write it here for my own reminder, hope this can help others too ;)

First for apache’s mod-ssl (https) to work, we have to create a certificate.

Creating a certificate

Generate the keys for the Certificate Signing Request (CSR):

openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024

Create the insecure key, the one without a passphrase:

openssl rsa -in server.key -out server.key.insecure

Shuffle the key names:

mv server.key server.key.secure

mv server.key.insecure server.key

Create the CSR:

openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr

Create the self-signed certificate:

openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt

Install the key file server.key and certificate file server.crt:

sudo cp server.crt /etc/ssl/certs

sudo cp server.key /etc/ssl/private

Ubuntu:

Enable the mod_ssl module:

sudo a2enmod ssl

Restart the service to enable the new settings:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Slackware:

Edit httpd.conf

pico /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

Enable the mod_ssl module, remove the comment in front of this line:

LoadModule ssl_module lib/httpd/modules/mod_ssl.so
and this:
Include /etc/httpd/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

Change the location of certificate:

SSLCertificateFile “/etc/httpd/server.crt”
to:
SSLCertificateFile “/etc/ssl/certs/server.crt”

SSLCertificateKeyFile “/etc/httpd/server.key”
to:
SSLCertificateKeyFile “/etc/ssl/private/server.key”

Restart apache:

/etc/rc.d/rc.httpd restart

Last but not least, don’t forget to check the webserver directory on apache’s mod-ssl config:

Ubuntu:

pico /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/default-ssl

Slackware:

pico /etc/httpd/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

HTTP Error 500 – Internal server error: a Case and a Fix

Got stuck for couple of days with this error when tried to config a php website on ubuntu desktop, error log only revealed “[Wed Sep 07 17:53:10 2011] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down” which not helped me at all, after about two days tried to figure out what happened I found that a php5-mysql module (a mysql module for php5) is missing, re-install the module fix the error ;)