Tech Blog

Basket is a note taking application for KDE. It is available for ubuntu also. It has a lot of features compared to other note taking applications.

Following are some of of it.

• Add note at any location of the page.
• Grab screen shots
  
• Drag note entries
• Tag each note entry (shortcuts are available for this)
  
  • important
  • todo lists
  • links
  • idea,information,personal
• Collapse lists
• Create links to files and urls
  
• Export
  

For more details visit http://basket.kde.org/

It is desirable to minimize applications to system tray rather than messing up the task bar. In Linux many applications has its own extension to get minimized to system tray.

Browsers are application which is needed all the time. We would have at least some web pages opened in it if we are in a work. Opera has its extension to minimize to system tray, along with. For Firefox you have to add the extension (add on) FireTray (in linux). It will show a firefox icon in the system tray whenever firefox is opened. To minimize the browser, just click on that icon. To restore, click on the same icon.

Proxy server is as an intermediate for a machine(client) to connect to another machine or network. All outside connections of the client can be done by the proxy server. Proxy server can be used for setting firewall in a network.

Other than just forwarding requests from client, proxy servers can cache some data(web pages,DNS,network lookups) it has already retrieved. Such proxies are called caching proxy. The proxies which does not change the packets other than just forwarding it is called transparent proxy.

Squid is a free and open source web proxy server. Quick steps for setting up a transparent proxy server is given below.

• Install squid
hash@ssl50:~$ sudo apt-get install squid squid-common
• Configure /etc/squid/squid.conf
Squid configurations uses acl. To allow local machines to connect to it you have to add access right to localnet The file contain an acl called localnet representing the local network..

acl localnet src 10.0.0.0/8     # RFC1918 possible internal network
acl localnet src 172.16.0.0/12  # RFC1918 possible internal network
acl localnet src 192.168.0.0/16 # RFC1918 possible internal network

You may change it or add your own network along with it. You can also see

# http_access allow localnet

Uncomment it. If the line is not there just add it.
Note down the http_port given in config file. Usually it is set to 3128. You may change it. This is the port number to which clients has to connect to for using the proxy server.
• Restart squid
hash@ssl50:~$ /etc/init.d/squid restart

Authentication can be enabled in squid. Timed firewalls can be set using Squid. Squid also permits to add our own scripts for managing things. For more details , visithttp://www.squid-cache.org/