Question: I want my primary to be Explorer, but Firefox is

Answer: In Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options > Programs (Tab) > Check the"Internet Explorer should check to see whether it is the default browser" checkbox. Click the apply button in the bottom right and close out of the options (Ok your way out). Then close and restart Internet Explorer. When it opens up it will do the check and ask if you want it as your default browser.

I found a great new version of an old tool I'm used to using: PuTTYtray

For those of you who don't know what putty is, it's "a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator." Most of my non-techie friends are probably even more confused now than they were before. The easiest way for me to explain it is it's like DOS (the black screen where you entered commands via text entry) on steroids over the internet. SSH allows me to to do a lot of things - mainly manage webservers (and other Unix / Linux boxes) over the internet.

One of the great features of SSH is something called SSH tunneling. Essentially, it allows you to tunnel all communications from an application (or multiple) through a server. This is great for communicating through firewalls - which allows you to surf sites that might be blocked, get to a mailserver you couldnt normally get to, or many other things.

One of the frustrating things about tunneling is the need to set-up the connection everytime, then having it show up as a big window on your screen and how it takes up space on your taskbar. The version of putty I'm writing about solves the latter issue by allowing you to minimize putty to you tray (along with some other patches).

Enough talk - here's a link to PuTTYtray: Developers Homepage

I'll follow up with another reply post on how to configure PuTTY to automatically connect to a predefined server. The technique involves setting up keys (for authentication) so you don't have to enter a password every time and setting up a quicklink shortcut that loads the connection.

The following post is about using redirection to keep your existing search engine ranking for content on an old domain. Here's my story: I purchased multiple domains and by default set them to all direct to the same content (eg. document root). When I started my search engine optimization kick I realized that different domains got better search engine rankings than others - even on the EXACT same content. And google thought that I had more links from external sites than I actually did. Some of you might think that sounds good because there were more external links than there should be, but most of them were links to things I didn't want high links to like my registration page, site search, etc.

I finally moved my sites to a new server and decided it was probably a good time to start segregating my domain content. I plan on retiring flamingcube.com sometime later in the year, so I'm trying to get the SEO results for it transitioned to the new server. I plan on using the other domains I have registered for completely new sites so I want to start getting all the content pushed over now so in a few months I can remove the redirects and start with new content.

I saw this great post on SharkSpace by Amanda about how to change your server's shell port. It said it was part of the dedicated server guide, but I thought it was good for people with VPSs (Virtual Private Servers) as well. Here's the post:

1) Login to shell via root.

2) Open the shell configuration file.

nano -w /etc/ssh/sshd_config

3) Change port.

Uncomment and change

#Port 22

to look like:

Port 6472 (choose your own 2 to 5 digit port number (49151 is the highest port number)

4) Save and exit.

Ctrl + X + Y

5) Restart shell. (Make sure if you have a firewall installed that you have the new port unblocked.)

/etc/rc.d/init.d/sshd restart