So I’ve long held back from signing into one of the free cloud resources due to concerns over privacy. I’ve used Google Docs for a few non-descripto documents but nothing more. However, having just placed an order for an iPad3, I’m looking to improve my remote working and document management.  I don’t want to be dragging my laptop everywhere with me next year. There is not an iPad app for the ‘new’ Google Drive and writing Google Docs on the iPad just doesn’t work.   Pages, Numbers and Keynote are all apps of notoriety for the right reasons so how can I import/export easily from this?  Bottom line I can’t.  Dropbox allows documents to open into Pages but not the reverse. It appears WebDav is the only option so this is how I’ve set mine up on our home Ubuntu 10.10 server.

So we’ve had need to open a couple of ports on our home-server to the real-world. Its like letting a child out in the evening for the first time alone – you’ve no idea what trouble they might get into but just hope you’ve prepared them enough.

These are my notes for when I forget what I’ve done.

The router is only forwarding HTTP and SSH traffic to the server. SSH has been locked down so it only accepts Key logins from non-root users so I think this is pretty good. The default site forwards via .htaccess to this domain which prevents general rumblings if you find it and only certain external subdomains are identified in the server’s /etc/hosts file.

Denyhosts is installed.

UFW Firewall has been configured using

sudo ufw default deny
sudo ufw allow ssh
sudo ufw allow www
sudo ufw allow 10000
sudo ufw allow 443
sudo ufw allow Samba
sudo ufw allow 5901
sudo ufw enable

Thanks to 1000Umbrellas for the above.

Apparently, its possible to use allow webmin but this didn’t seem to work in this instance.

So if you are running MAMP on your Mac and baking some CakePHP you may encounter errors when trying to run the Cake Console.

The error is likely to look something like

Warning Error: PDO::__construct(): [2002] No such file or directory (trying to connect via unix:///var/mysql/mysql.sock) in [/rootpath/lib/Cake/Model/Datasource/Database/Mysql.php, line 160]


Add the following to your database.php config file.

'unix_socket' => '/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock'

Creating student users on Ubuntu is pretty straight forward but a little housekeeping can make life easier.