dhclient and /etc/resolv.conf being overwritten.

In ubuntu 12.12 (the one I'm currently using), dhclient is used to get a dhcp lease.  For most people this works just dandy.  However if you use it for routing, and/or running your own dns server inside your network, or just want to have some dns servers used for whatever reason that the dhcp server doesn't issue you can do the following.  

If you go into the /etc/dhcp directory you will see a file called dhclient.conf

somewhere (anywhere really), in the file put the following line:

prepend domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8;

if you want just your custom dns server:
supersede domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8;

This will put the 8.8.8.8 dns server at the top of the list of dns servers in the /etc/resolv.conf file, in addition the to usual ones that the dhcp server gave to your computer. 

Of course for your network you will probably replace 8.8.8.8 with the ip address of another dns server (unless you really want to use one of google's dns servers).  

In fedora you have to go to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/, and find the file for your network device (something like ifcfg-ethX, where X is a number usually 0).

change the line PEERDNS=yes to =no.

installing ssh fedora

Fedora nowadays doesn't have the ssh server by default, if you want it here's how (fedora no longer uses /etc/init.d):

yum install openssh
service sshd start
service sshd enable

note: if you want to start/enable other services on fedora you can replace sshd with the name of the other service.

proxmox tips

To force a vm to shutdown you can't do it from the web interface so instead you'll have to ssh in and use your root username and password.  Once you're ssh'd in type:
qm shutdown <vmid> -forceStop
more details at: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Manual:_qm




Proxmox is a nice setup overall, but the java vnc interface to view the desktop of the vm is just lousy.  A way around that is to ssh in and go to the /etc/pve/nodes/proxmox/qemu-server directory.  In the 1##.conf file (where 1## is the id of the VM), put the following lines:
args: -vnc 0.0.0.0:10
You can do this with each vm, just make sure the change the number after the last colon, as
each vnc connection has to be on it's own port.  Then you can vnc using your favorite vnc viewer, and use the ip address/hostname of the proxmox server followed by a : and the number that's at the end of the line you put in the VM's config file.  In this case it would be "vncviewer proxmox-machine:10"

More details on your vnc options and proxmox are at: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Vnc_2.0


For tips on how to deal with the screen resolution of linux in a VM (both X and console):
http://thescriptingadmin.blogspot.com/2013/04/fedora-too-high-resolution-in-vm.html

ssh-agent in cygwin

If you do command line work like I do, and remote into a linux machine via ssh, you may or may not be aware of ssh keys.  If you use an ssh key you can log into the machine without a password.  However to keep things secure, you really should use a password on your ssh key, but if you had to type in the password every time you used the key, that would sort of defeat the purpose of the ssh key.  So they have ssh-agent for linux and cygwin (if you're using putty use pagent instead).

Normally you first run ssh-agent, then run ssh-add (or just have it loaded via kde, gnome, or .bash_profile if you don't use a gui at all on linux).  On cygwin though you might encounter the error message "Could not open a connection to your authentication agent" when you type in ssh-add.  The solution is apparently to run the following command: "exec ssh-agent bash", and once you get a new bash shell then type ssh-add.

enable remote registry service on windows 7

Windows 7 by default disables the remote registry service (probably for security reasons).  To enable it from  the command line type the following:

sc \\computername config remoteregistry start= auto
make sure you have a space between the = sign and auto
if you're doing this on your local computer you can drop the \\computername part
you can also replace "remoteregistry" with the name of another service to enable or disable it.


once you've enabled the service you can either reboot the computer, or just start it now with:

sc \\computername start remoteregistry


If you want to know why we want to enable this service, it's so that you can pull up the registry of a remote computer that's currently in use (normally hkey_local_machine) via regedit on your local machine.  This way you don't have to interrupt whoever is currently at the computer by using RDP, VNC, or kicking the user out of their chair, at most you may have to tell them to reboot their machine at some point.