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Programming errors are of many kinds but the consequences can range from harmless to downright dangerous.
Top 10 ways to crash PHP is an interesting article that deals with such a topic for PHP.

Port knocking is a method of establishing a connection to a networked computer that has no open ports.

Before a connection is established, ports are opened using a port knock sequence, which is a series of connection attempts to closed ports. A remote host generates and sends an authentic knock sequence in order to manipulate the server's firewall rules to open one or more specific ports. These manipulations are mediated by a port knock daemon, running on the server, which monitors the firewall log file for connection attempts which can be translated into authentic knock sequences.

Once the desired ports are opened, the remote host can establish a connection and begin a session. Another knock sequence may used to trigger the closing of the port.

Read more about it at PortKnocking.org and give it a whirl.

I decided to investigate how easy it was to recover deleted files in Linux and came to the conclusion that using secure file deletion utilities is a must for safely deleting data. When files are removed in linux they are only un-linked but their inodes (addresses in the disk where the file is actually present) is not removed. This concept will be quite handy while recovering deleted files. Now i won't discuss specialized software but rather stick to utilities commonly present in linux distros. In this case it's the "debugfs" utility. Run "debugfs /dev/hda13" and then at the "debugfs" prompt use the command "lsdel"

Interested in building a linux web hosting service? HostingHacks.net has some excellent documentation and an easy to follow step by step process to do so. Currently only Redhat and Fedora write-ups is available, but others are to follow...

I am not much of a .net fan but, I always wanted to do some ASP.net for web programming just to get a taste of .net, but was always lazy to install the entire VS.net because its too huge and my Compaq Presario 900 notebook aint got much harddisk space left after i installed linux as the other OS.

But, Microsoft in conjunction with some other companies have come out with a light weight version of ASP.net and the best part is that its free!!!

Visit http://www.asp.net/ and download this thing called WebMatrix. It is actually a mini asp.net IDE and a mini IIS like webserver. Its small but it has almost all the features that the IDE in VS.net provide for ASP.net

This is the crash course tutorial for creating vhosts in your apache webserver for win32 (and even linux except for some windows specific configuration)

If you are a web programmer like me, you will probably be handelling many php/perl projects at the same time with your apache. Putting everything in `htdocs` is a headache because it will make it look very messy. So this is where vhosts comes into play. For most linux webservers, systems like ensim or plesk handle these things without letting the users know what is going on behind! Moreover apache's documentation might seem confusing.

Lets begin...

RUST is both a drag & drop RPM creation GUI and a "sandboxing" toolkit that allows you to do software installations within a chrooted environment and automatically generate RPMs from arbitrary source code, without ever seeing a spec file.

Icecast is a streaming media server which currently supports Ogg Vorbis and MP3 audio streams. It can be used to create an Internet radio station or a privately running jukebox and many things in between. It is very versatile in that new formats can be added relatively easily and supports open standards for commuincation and interaction.

It comes well documented, however I would suggest the The Unofficial Icecast How To.

Listen in on my broadcast at: http://icecast.linuxweblog.com:8000/sandip.ogg.m3u

This document describes a method for generating automatic rotating "snapshot"-style backups on a Unix-based system, with specific examples drawn from the author's GNU/Linux experience. Snapshot backups are a feature of some high-end industrial file servers; they create the illusion of multiple, full backups per day without the space or processing overhead. All of the snapshots are read-only, and are accessible directly by users as special system directories.

Creating an Image

If you are working on servers that don't have a console attached, "mkisofs" and "cdrecord" utilities make working with ISO images very easy!

An ISO is a slang for an image of an ISO9660 filesystem, which is the common format of data CD-ROMs.

To make an ISO image to prepare for burning in a CD burner, use "mkisofs":

$ mkisofs -r /path/to/direcory/ > /tmp/directory.iso

or

$ mkisofs -r -o /tmp/directory.iso /path/to/direcory/

or for DVD video

$ mkisofs -dvd-video -r -V VolumeLabel -o /tmp/directory.iso /path/to/direcory/

The option '-r' sets the permissions of all files to be public readable on the CD and enables RockRidge-extensions. Long filenames and file permissions are preserved when mounted on systems that support Rock Ridge.