When you want to backup your mysql databases, you usually do mysqldump ... --all-databases or mysqldump ... --databases mysql ... but you end up with the whole mysql table which is a pain to insert back when you need it because it can mess up the root password or the debian-sys-maint user...

If you wish to just backup all the users and privileges other than root and debian-sys-maint, you can use this command:

mysqldump -nt -uroot -p -w"User NOT LIKE 'root' AND User NOT LIKE 'debian%'" mysql user db > users_privs.sql

Here's an explanation of each of the options:

• -nt: Do not add "drop table" and "create table".
• -uroot -p: Connect as root and ask for a password
• -w...: Add a "WHERE" condition to each query. We exclude everything related to root and debian-sys-maint.
• mysql user db: Dump the user and db tables from the mysql database.
• > users_privs.sql: Store the sql dump into the users_privs.sql file.

A new version of your operating system just got released and you want to have a fresh new install, or you want to migrate all of your data to another machine. There are so much stuff to backup that you don't even know where to start?
I will try to list the most common stuff (on a web-server) to backup or copy somewhere when you want to do a server migration.

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The way I'm going to describe is using the GDM autologin which can be UNSECURE if someone has physical access to the machine.

Activate autologin in gdm by editing /etc/gdm/custom.conf and add:

AutomaticLoginEnable=true
AutomaticLogin=yourusername

Reboot.

Then ssh as yourusername into the machine, and type this:

DISPLAY=:0.0
gconftool-2 --type list --list-type string --set /desktop/gnome/remote_access/authentication_methods '[vnc]'
gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/prompt_enabled false
vino-passwd
gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled true

Reboot.

Then try connecting to your machine using VNC.

Source: By Weboide in How do i install gnome on Debian and remote to it? [serverfault.com]

This post is Licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.5

The Samsung Exclaim™ requires the 3g2 format for its ringtones or even videos. This is a format that is optimized for 3G phones. Fortunately on Linux, FFmpeg is a very complete tool to work with audio and video formats and convert between them, and it can, of course, generate 3g2 files.

If you have compiled and installed the right packages (Medibuntu repository with the libaac support, for example), you can easily do one of these commands with ffmpeg:

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