This is considered good practice for any linux platform that has publicly addressable interfaces... Of course you will need to setup PKI public/private keys for any secure login. I am not suggesting that you turn off authentication entirely !
I had a VPS linux host out there untended for a while, and the hackers find it irresistible - there were 11,000+ authentication failures in the logs.

To stop password authentication by sshd, just add these entries to your /etc/sh/sshd_config file:
ChallengeResponseAuthentication no PasswordAuthentication no UsePAM no

Please note that if you haven't changed over to MariaDB - you should ... But more to the point for this post - if you need to reset your root mysql or mariadb password, the easiest way to do it on an Ubuntu platform is to run the following commands: First, you need to know what version of mysql or MariaDB you have, so run this to search for the package name: root@bazingah:/usr/local/bin# dpkg-query -S mariadb-server
mariadb-server-5.5: /usr/share/doc/mariadb-server-5.5/copyright For MySQL users the command would be: dpkg-query -S mysql-server Once you have your package name, you can run the reconfigure command on it: (in my example, the mariadb version is 5.5, which is a match for the MySQL version that is current: "mysql-server-5.5" sudo dpkg-reconfigure mariadb-server-5.5

Say you want to change the character_set or collation of a MariaDB (MySQL) DB: ALTER DATABASE databasename CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

I see this fairly often when I have done fast installs of ubuntu: "Connection for controluser as defined in your configuration failed." What happens is I ignore the install script that needs to run for PhpMyAdmin to establish its database etc. Happily the fix is fairly easy - just run the script again now: sudo dpkg-reconfigure phpmyadmin

I am surprised that there have been no updates to the webmin interface to support the new samba version (that has been rolled out to most major linux distros now) -- am I the only one that has been using webmin to do my admin on samba servers ? I think NOT... Anyway - here is a quick and dirty fix to the start/stop entries in the webmin samba module to correct it for Version 4: Command to stop Samba servers service smbd stop && service nmbd stop Command to start Samba servers service smbd start && service nmbd start Command to restart Samba servers service smbd restart && service nmbd restart Of course for manual use - you'll need to add in a "sudo" as follows: sudo service smbd restart && sudo service nmbd restart There are other issues that I have not sorted out, like for example the command that was previously available called /usr/bin/smbgroupedit appears to have gone away in version 4. Anyway - I will update here if I get any more feedback on this, as I would think this is a very commonly used module. Feel free to comment here if you have any additional data.

Beware people (like me) who offer solutions (like this)... That said, here is how I have (several times) repaired this error on my HTC EVO 4G LTE. (it's a Sprint phone, but I think these issues are across all of the telcos) On your KEYPAD, type this:

##72786#

It will switch to a special mode with "SCRTN" as the Header. Select the "Menu" button at top right of your screen, two options will appear: Reset or Cancel Select Reset Stuff will happen automagically, and the phone will reboot. Cross your fingers & toes, and if you got it right, the phone will come up, and that error message will be all gone away...

Polymer looks like it may be very cool - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRbOSdAe_JU

I was excited to find this, so I am saving it here.

To change an smb passwd in a bash script:

echo -e "newpasswd\nnewpasswd" | (smbpasswd -s username) And note the "\n" in there to push a newline between the two passwords...

For the unix (Linux) username:

echo -e "newpass\nnewpass" | (passwd --stdin username)

I have been building a new web server platform and tried to install drush using pear as I have in the past, but it is not NOT the recommended way to install it any longer (who knew?).
Drush has developed a huge cult following for it's ease of use in maintaining multiple drupal based sites very easily from the CLI. I cannot recommend drush highly enough - I can update the code for all of my sites in a few minutes - back in the gory days it would take me ages to do that... These steps worked flawlessly for me on Ubuntu 14.04 today.

The composer references -- the first two bullets -- are from here:
https://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md#system-requirements # See section titled "Globally"
Below that is an excerpt from github (the new home of drush code):
https://github.com/drush-ops/drush#installupdate---composer

• You can run these commands to install composer for execution from anywhere on your system:

  curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
  sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
  

• Make sure Composer's global bin directory is on the system PATH (recommended):

  sed -i '1i export PATH="$HOME/.composer/vendor/bin:$PATH"' $HOME/.bashrc
  source $HOME/.bashrc
  

• To install Drush 6.x (stable): (Recommended Version for Drupal 7 users)
  

  sudo composer global require drush/drush:6.*
  

• To install Drush 7.x (dev) which is required for Drupal 8:

  sudo composer global require drush/drush:dev-master
  

• To update to a newer version (what you get depends on your specification in ~/.composer/composer.json):

  sudo composer global update
  

donmc@etiikka:~$ php -r 'print_r(gd_info());' Array ( [GD Version] => 2.0 [FreeType Support] => 1 [FreeType Linkage] => with freetype [T1Lib Support] => 1 [GIF Read Support] => 1 [GIF Create Support] => 1 [JPEG Support] => 1 [PNG Support] => 1 [WBMP Support] => 1 [XPM Support] => [XBM Support] => [JIS-mapped Japanese Font Support] => )