Successfully kill and restart iTunes in Wine (Ubuntu & Apple TV 2 / ATV2)

I run iTunes under Wine on my Ubuntu server to share media to an Apple TV 2 using Home sharing. Since upgrading to iTunes 10.4.1 under Wine I've had regular issues with my Apple TV 2 no longer seeing the Ubuntu based iTunes Home share after a period of time. The easy way I've found to fix this is to kill iTunes in Wine and restart it is as follow a helpful script to achieve this follows...

Getting Proftpd working with TLS / SSL

ProFTPD grew out of the desire to have a secure and configurable FTP server that aims to offer the feature set required for more sophisticated FTP sites. Out of the box the FTP transactions are not secure, they are not encrypted at all. Seeking to encrypt my traffic I spent hours trying to get ProFTPD 1.3.2c (the version in Ubuntu 10.04's repositories) working with TLS. Only to find out there is a bug in ProFTPD 1.3.2c read on to see how I overcame the problem...

Ubuntu simple firewall setup ufw with GUI (gufw)

The Linux kernel in Ubuntu provides a packet filtering system called netfilter, and the traditional interface for manipulating netfilter are the iptables suite of commands. iptables provide a complete firewall solution that is both highly configurable and highly flexible.

Becoming proficient in iptables takes time, and getting started with netfilter firewalling using only iptables can be a daunting task. As a result, many frontends for iptables have been created over the years, the Uncomplicated Firewall (ufw) is a command line based frontend for iptables and is particularly well-suited for host-based firewalls; gufw adds a graphical user interface to ufw. Here's how to setup Ubuntu's firewall with ufw and gufw:

BBC News + Flash + Secure Settings = Black Screen (FIXED!)

 

For the last couple of months I have experienced an issue whereby flash videos on the BBC News website would not play. A black box would render in place of the video as if buffering with a red loading logo and then nothing, no sound, no video. Youtube and other flash sites played without issue which left me rather bemused and despite reinstalling flash, upgrading, downgrading I could not remedy or pinpoint the issue. Read on...