Example: the folder stats has the root as owner and we need to change the owner of user1

chown -R user1 stats

This will change the owner of the folder and all subfolders and files

1. Install Required Libraries

   sudo apt-get install build-essential openssl libreadline6 libreadline6-dev zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev autoconf libc6-dev ncurses-dev automake libtool bison subversion

2. Install Required Tools
   Installing Git

   sudo apt-get install git

   Installing Curl

   sudo apt-get install curl

3. Install RVM and Ruby

   bash -s stable < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer)

   Run the following command

   source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm

   Run the following command to install ruby 1.9.2

   rvm install 1.9.2

   Set the default Ruby version

   rvm --default use 1.9.2

4. Install Rails

   gem install rails

5. Install Common Gems

   gem install devise
   gem install rspec
   gem install cucumber
   gem install factory_girl_rails
   gem install faker

Congratulation, you got your development environment setup

Sound familiar….. hah
Of course this is just a very skimmed version of the story but the more details you read the more resemblance you find.
Capital, district 13, secret deals, power and rebellion. These are all just too familiar
All I can hope for is that the end o story in Egypt is better than the one in the book

nc xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx 80
HEAD / HTTP/1.0

Here is the result

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:24:08 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.16 (Debian)
Last-Modified: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 09:24:49 GMT
ETag: "180d5-b1-4b1c28f12fa40"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 177
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

As you can see some dangerous information are available about the web server.
Also if you tried to request a non-existing page the server will respond with full details about it and the host OS

Not Found 
The requested URL /hack-test was not found on this server.

Apache/2.2.20 (Unix) DAV/2 PHP/5.3.6 with Suhosin-Patch Server at localhost Port 80

Fortunately a mitigation for such a leakage in apache is simple

1. To hide server details shown when you request a non-existing page, you need to add the following line to httpd.conf (or whatever the apache configuration file name)

   ServerSignature Off

   This will remove the server details from the page

2. To hide server details from the response header, you need to install mod_security module for apache (in Debian servers the task is easy enough)

   apt-get install libapache2-mod-security2

   then add the following line to httpd.conf (or whatever the apache configuration file name)

   ServerTokens Full
   SecServerSignature "Web Server"

   This will show the word “Web Server” instead of you full server details

Sure there are other ways to determine the server banner using fingerprinting, but this will be for another post

When you create a new rails application you can find a file called seeds.rb on db directory. This file can contain all your seeding data as follows

projects = Project.create([{:title => 'xxxxx', :description => 'yyyyyyyy'}, {:title => 'rrrrrrrrr', :description => 'zzzzzzzzzzzzz'}])

To execute this file and fill your database with seeding data run

rake db:seed

Note that if you run it more than once you’ll have your data filled twice in the database, to reset your database run

rake db:reset

Having your seeding data in ruby file can give you some advantages as you can use loops to fill data series or use other tools such as Faker. To use faker with your seed data:

1- Add gem ‘faker’ to your Gemfile

2- Add require ‘faker’ on top of seeds.rb

3- Use faker in your seed data

projects = Project.create([{:title => 'xxxxx', :description => Faker::Lorem.paragraph(10)}])

I always like to have a standard port number for Central Administration accross all my WSS/MOSS instalations. I always use the following command to change it to my standard 1000

stsdm -o setadminport -port 1000

It might be unsafe to change the port number as it might break something but so far nothing broken for me

one of the biggest pain I stumbled upon was getting rmagic gem to work on the windows machine. It took me about 8 hours to figure out how it is done.

1. Install ruby DevKit http://github.com/downloads/oneclick/rubyinstaller/DevKit-tdm-32-4.5.2-20110712-1620-sfx.exe
2. Install ImageMagick 6.6.x with windows installer with headers http://www.imagemagick.org/download/binaries/ImageMagick-6.7.3-3-Q16-windows-dll.exe (You should change the installation folder to c:\ImageMagic otherwise it won’t work)
3. Set the following Environment variables
   set PATH = c:\ImageMagic;%PATH%
   set CPATH = c:\ImageMagic;%CPATH%
   set LIBRARY_PATH=c:\ImageMagic\lib;%LIBRARY_PATH%
4. gem install rmagick
   This will install the latest rmagick (in this case 2.13.1)

1. This approach should help me keeping my promises to avoid public humiliation
2.  It should force be to create a realistic list to avoid keeping me stressed all year long.

Here is my list for this year

• Getting married: should be easy as I’m already engaged and the weeding date is set (yes I’m cheating in my list )
• Finish my CSSLP certification
• Finish my secret new project (shhhhh)
• Loose 12 Kg
• Go cycling at least twice a week
• Ge to gym at least 3 times a week
• Eat Healthy
• Write more Rails code
• Every line of code should have a unit test
• Publish more technical blog posts (at least once a week)
• Learn French

Happy New Year

I don’t know what makes this programming language special to me, but I would like to share a small ahh moment i had while reading about ruby

We are all familiar with the standard GOF implementation for singleton

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class Logger
  def initialize
    @log = File.open("log.txt", "a")
  end
 
  @@instance = Logger.new
 
  def self.instance
    return @@instance
  end
 
  def log(msg)
    @log.puts(msg)
  end
 
  private_class_method :new
end

That’s is the plain old singleton but with some Ruby magic it can be like this

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class Logger
  def initialize
    @log = File.open("log.txt", "a")
  end
 
  @@instance = Logger.new
 
  def self.instance
    return @@instance
  end
 
  def log(msg)
    @log.puts(msg)
  end
 
  private_class_method :new
end

It is some of these small things that brings me closer to Ruby every day

Here I want to share the learning approach that will get you up to speed with RoR with minimal frustration.

To be able to explain my approach I will have to explain what is RoR briefly, Ruby on Rails is a web development framework built using Ruby language.
First step here is to learn the language

Learning Ruby

1. Setup your system: RoR work best on Linux/Unix/Mac os (but it also work fine on windows platform). if you want to have the best experience without investing much money you can install Linux as a virtual machine on your system or clear 20 GB on your hard drive and install it directly on your computer (My favorit approach). My recommended Linux distribution is Ubuntu
2. If you installed linux and needs to be familiar with it you can use this pdf to introduce you to the mysteries world of linux
3. If you installed Linux you can google the installation approach (will introduce it in a later post). and if you will use your windows system you need to install it using ruby installer at this time the recommended version is 1.9.2 p290. Mac machines comes already with Ruby interpreter installed.
4. After setting up the environment the following resources have proved really helpful.
   why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby
   Learning Ruby (O’Reilly)

Learning Rails

1. First step is to write a very basic rails application and see how it works, the following link is my first choice to see RoR in action.
   http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
2. I would recommend building a simple application (such as a blog, Task management…) without worrying so much about writing tests just to get yourself familiar with Rails environment.
3. Authentication is a must in almost all project you can use the instructions in the following screencast to add authentication aspect to your application
   http://railscasts.com/episodes/209-introducing-devise or in text format
   http://www.asciicasts.com/episodes/209-introducing-devise
4. Now you have an overview how RoR works and created a simple demo application. Make sure you go through most of the materials on Ruby Guides and familiarize yourself with Testing Rails Applications guide.
5. Pick a real project and fire your command line and start programming
6. Start using rSpec & Cucumber into your projects to create better tests, the best resource i found in this topic is The RSpec Book from Pragmatic Programmers.

Tools

You can using only the command line a text editor to build awesome rails apps (In fact I found it is the best way)

• For Windows you can use e-texteditor
• For Mac TextMate is your best friend
• VI is my editor of choice but if you are new to linux Redcar can provide a good graphical interface editor

If you are the IDE type of person Aptana is a great IDE with wonderful support for Rails

Additional Resources

• RailsCasts: Wonderful weekly screen casts each about 15 min discussing a new gem in rails, and if you like it in text you can visit AsciiCasts for transcription
• Rails Recipes: Packaged solutions for common rails problems
• Crafting Rails Applications: gives you a better understanding how Rails working and how to customize it
• Programming Ruby 1.9: The most famous book written for Ruby language (also called PickAxe referring to the image on the cover)
• Agile Web Development with Rails: The Rails bible co-authored by DHH the master mind behind RoR
• Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl
• Pragmatic Programmers has some awesome books on Ruby and Rails
• Google: He will always be your friend

Happy Coding