It’s been awhile since I wrote the last blog post. Things are getting busy. It’s not that I don’t have time to write a blog post. But writing a blog post requires a clear mind which I lacked recently.

I am a big fan of Bleach cartoon series. I watched it in YouTube and now YouTube don’t have English dubbed videos of Bleach. It’s really pity because YouTube is the service which has a streaming server closest to me.  And because my provider has a bandwidth cap, I always prefer YouTube videos since I can control video quality and save some bandwidth.

There is no discussion that YouTube is the closest and fastest among video streaming services. But unfortunately I don’t have a choice but to watch the videos on the service which they uploaded the video to.

There were 3 streaming video services which contained the same anime episode I was trying to see. They are,

1. veevr.com
2. videobam.com
3. putlocker.com

Most of them are getting popular with MegaVideo missing(yeah!). I had to choose the fastest service which I can continuously watch the video.

So how could I select the best provider? Think… think…. think….

Hoooraaah! PING

I am going to use ping tool in order to find the closest provider to me. Probably that is going to be the fastest streamer for me despite their servers are configured bad.

Here are the ping results.

E:\Supun>ping veevr.com

Ping statistics for 89.238.130.247:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 260ms, Maximum = 1128ms, Average = 541ms


Hopefully my provider is not cheating me.

According to the ping tests, PutLocker has the best ping times which says that PutLocker has the closest location to me. I chose PutLocker to watch the video and it wasn’t very disappointing at all.

I have couple of RSS feeds in my website( if you don’t know what a RSS feed is, refer to Wikipedia -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS). One for forum and another for my blog. I wanted to display latest threads in my forum and latest blog posts in my blog in my homepage as soon as they are published. Putting them manually into my homepage would be just a pain. So I searched all over the internet to find a solution.

Actually, I found dozens of scripts to display RSS feeds in HTML pages. However some of those scripts were pretty heavy –big in size. And some were not customizable while some others added watermark to my pages which I hate to see on a professional website.

» Read more: Fetch Data From RSS Feed and Display them in a Web Page

Writing a blog post takes a lot time than most of the people think. And preparing your mind to write a blog post takes more time than that. Lack of time caused me to stop writing new blog posts. No matter what I decide, it happens all the time.
So I will quit giving false promises and will write blog posts while I have some time to manage with my other work.
This blog post is especially for system administrators. While I always try to keep the “niche” of my blog, it always end up with going wild. So I finally decided not to keep in a single niche. Rather than that I will concentrate in the uality of the content of my blog posts.

» Read more: Most Useful Linux Commands for a System Administrator

It’s been some time since I wrote a blog post. Talking about that, I have time, just that I don’t have access to my own computer and when I am on another computer, I simply don’t feel like doing it. That’s why there is no new posts recently.

Anyway, let’s get to the point. I am going to teach you how to create your own SSH proxy with your VPS. This is a simple process and doesn’t take a long to set up if you know the steps.

Creating a SSH tunnel is mainly for security. Wikipedia says,

A secure shell (SSH) tunnel consists of an encrypted tunnel created through a SSH protocol connection. Users may set up SSH tunnels to transfer unencrypted traffic over a network through an encrypted channel.

You need better security, then my suggestion is to use your own proxy rather than using a public proxy where you risk your personal data and even credit card information.

Check your current IP assigned by your IP before doing anything -http://www.whatismyip.com/.

First you need a VPS(if you don’t already have one). My recommendation for Asian users is a European provider as said in
Here is the link to Burst budget VPS: http://perfectz.info/budget-vps
I am personally recommending it though there are many providers who provides VPSs’ for cheaper prices. Burst is budget and a trusted provider. And you can use this VPS to any other task as well. SSH Proxying doesn’t require much resources.

However there are few other providers as well. But I don’t have personal experiences with them. Try them at your own risk.
www.minivps.co.uk
www.buyvm.net
» Read more: Create Your Own SSH Tunnel Using Putty — Complete Guide

My server provider had some node high load issues in the past month. They rebooted the node few times to make things normal. And I can’t blame them for doing that. Rebooting a node server takes few minutes and we won’t have hours of downtimes.
I was busy with my new job(I hate it!). However, I wasn’t able to touch my server under those circumstances. And every time my provider rebooted the server, Apache wasn’t starting automatically and therefore, my server suffered lots of downtime.

Since I have installed Apache from the source, I need to manually start Apache after every reboot. But that is a big problem if you are not in front of your server 24/7. That’s when we need to find a solution.

The solution for the issue is to add the Apache start to the default runlevel. It is something like Startup on Windows systems.

Follow the instructions below to add Apache start to the default runlevel.
» Read more: Start Apache at System Reboot

I wanted to send out a newsletter to all of my clients. So I can use WHM/cPanel or THT(billing system) to send them out. But it is possible that the emails would not reach it’s destinations. Or it is possible that I end this up with blacklisting my server’s IP address.

So I needed another solution and came up with sending the emails through MailChimp – A professional EMail marketing service. So they will handle everything and I will have a complete report of the EMails I send out.
But the thing is, I didn’t had all the email addresses of my clients anywhere except for the database of my billing system. And when I try to export the MySQL database to a local file and import emails through it ended up failure. Because there are more fields in the MySQL table rather than emails itself.

There is a possible way to extract only the emails from a MySQL database. That is to use phpMyAdmin to execute a custom query to display only emails and export the view.
This is how you can do that.

1. Login to phpMyAdmin
2. Select the database and choose the table which contains the email addresses. Click on the Browse button.
3. Click on SQL and execute the following command.
   SELECT 'email' FROM `your_table`
   email should be replaced with the name of the field which contains email addresses while your_table should be replaced with the table name which contains email addresses and other information.
   Usually, it is already set. So you won’t need to change a thing except for email.
4. Click on Go and phpMyAdmin will show a view that contains only the email addresses.
   
5. Click on the link Export at the bottom of the page. Not the Export in the Tab bar.
6. Export it as your desire. Personally, I like to have an .CSV file.

From this method followed, you will have a CSV file which contains all the email addresses from your users.
It is possible to use the same method to extract email addresses from your forum, wordpress blog or any other MySQL database which contains email addresses. Just be sure you won’t use them to spam your users.