Unable to login to FTP on CentOS 6 VPS with Virtualmin / ProFTPD?

Does the login to your newly installed CentOS 6 VPS using Virtualmin and ProFTPD fail?

Check your /var/log/secure for errors such as this :
proftpd: PAM unable to dlopen(/lib64/security/pam_stack.so): /lib64/security/pam_stack.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
proftpd: PAM adding faulty module: /lib64/security/pam_stack.so

If you are logging the above error your /etc/pam.d/proftpd was updated (incorrectly)…

Localization-free IMDB Search Engine for Firefox

IMDB’s automatic language detection has bugged me since it was introduced (more than a year ago).

I’ve recently encountered a solution to skip the automatic language detection while browsing IMDB – by using akas.imdb.com instead of www.imdb.com, but unfortunately this does not work when using the integrated Firefox search engine (which searches automatically on the www domain).

Configure network connection via files in Linux

Setting your hostname, IP address, netmask, gateway, DNS server via files
It is sometimes helpful to know what is going on behind the scenes or if you want to modify the network configuration via changing files.
For example, assume you want to modify the network configuration by modifying files with the following…

How to Repair a Corrupt MBR and boot into Linux

There are times when you inadvertently overwrite your Master Boot Record. The end result being that you are unable to boot into Linux. This is especially true when you are dual booting between windows and Linux OSes. Once when I was working in Windows XP, I accidentally clicked the hibernate button instead of shutdown. And windows somehow overwrote my MBR which housed the GRUB boot loader. At such times, it pays to have this cool tip at hand…

Disable extended media information on videos and images

Windows Xp reads information from media to let you find out properties (width, height, bitrate and/or others) of avi, mpg, asf, etc. files. This “behavior” can lock your avi files from being deleted, moved or renamed, and sometimes it’s just plain annoying. To disable this action, use Regedit to delete …

How to repair Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)

This error might occur if Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) components are missing or not registered correctly. This error manifest itself, among others, by not displaying any more processor information in System Properties, and by returning a “Class no registered” error message after running the “systeminfo” command. Registering the WMI components …

How to install VMware Server 1.06 on Linux kernel 2.6.26

I updated my server’s operating system from Fedora Core 6 (on which VMware Server ran perfectly) to Fedora 8. Fedora 6 was running an older 2.6.25 (which VMware liked just fine), but Fedora 8 brought me the 2.6.26.6-49.fc8 kernel, which caused a lot of trouble.
After spending 5 hours looking everywhere for a solution (I even thought the newer v1.08 would work on this kernel – but it didn’t), I considered writing down what I did to finally get my virtual machines up and running: