Ubuntu Suddenly Lost All Network Connectivity

One morning I switched my work laptop on, running Ubuntu 14.04, and found that I had completely lost all network connectivity. No ethernet LAN nor Wi-Fi connection, and no Gnome network manager icon. It turned out to be one of those peculiar things that seem to “just happen” from time-to-time in the Linux world.

Read on to find out how I fixed it.

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Configuring A General-Purpose Ubuntu 14.04 Server

Over the years I’ve used many different hosting solutions. From shared hosting, a dedicated server, to several VPSes. These all came with a graphical control panel, most often Plesk, from which the server could be administered. The downside was the cost of the licence. So a little while ago I took the plunge and purchased a standard cloud-based VPS from Fasthosts with no control panel, taking on the job of system administrator for the first time.

Read on to learn how it’s fairly straightforward to set up a general-purpose Ubuntu 14.04 server, administering it over SSH.

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Suddenly Unable To Browse Facebook As Your Page?

If, like me, you own or manage a Facebook page, you may be used to switching identity to your page and then browsing Facebook like normal as your page, liking other pages, sharing posts etc… I’m not an avid Facebook user so I only noticed recently that I was no longer able to browse as any of my pages, like I had been always been doing until now.

At first I thought it might be a problem due to a browser plugin; Facebook just wasn’t working like it always had done. Well after some searching I found the answer and it was a lot simpler than I expected. Read on for the details!

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Use grep And sed To Search And Replace Text, But Beware Git

I recently needed to search and replace some text in a large number of PHP scripts. Back in my Windows days I had a lightweight freeware programme that was perfect for the job. But what to do on Linux? The answer was to combine grep and sed. But don’t forget to watch out for Git!

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Installing Node.js v.4 with APT on Ubuntu 14.04

Node.js is an increasingly-popular JavaScript runtime that can be used to build server-side applications. Installing Node on Ububtu 14.04 via APT isn’t quite as straightforward as it could be, as the version in the default repositories is 0.10.25, dating back to early 2014.

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Faking the Referer Header in PhantomJS

When loading a web page with PhantomJS is it possible to fake the referrer by setting the page.customHeaders property to include “Referer”. However, this will be sent to all page objects (images, CSS etc…), which is not the desired result. The workaround in the PhantomJS API documentation is incorrect. Read on to find out how to fix this.

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