If you want to do secure file transfer between your machine and some other machine, SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) is a good choice. SFTP, as the acronym suggests, runs atop the SSH secure login system and so benefits from the extremely strong encryption that SSH uses.

This does introduce a problem, however. What if you want to set up a user that is allowed to transfer files, but that you don’t want to be able to login and issue commands directly to the machine with SSH?

A program called rssh provides a solution to this problem. You can set a user’s shell to the rssh program and it will prevent them from running anything other than what you specify.

In this video tutorial, I will show you in just under ten minutes, how to set up a simple rssh-protected user that can log in and transfer files with SFTP (or SCP), but that cannot log in via SSH and run commands.

You will need a Linux (or similar) system, a little bit of command line experience and some existing experience with SSH to follow this video tutorial.

Click here to watch the video

Note: In the video, I note that the execute permission is not set for /usr/bin/rssh by default and change the binary to have execute and read permissions by all users (chmod a+x /usr/bin/rssh). It would probably be more appropriate to add the user test to the rsshusers group, rather than taking this step. Both approaches will work, but the second prevents users accidentally running rssh and appearing to have locked themselves out.

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In this short video tutorial, I explain and show you how to set up Mozilla’s calendaring application Sunbird to synchronise with Google Calendar.

Google Calendar is a very useful online calendaring application. One of the benefits of using a web-based service such as GCal is that you can access and edit your calendar from any internet-enabled machine.

Read the rest of Video Tutorial - Sync Sunbird with Google Calendar

Encoding video from one format to another isn’t generally considered the most fun job in the world.

One of the video encoding tasks we need to do here for FOSSwire video posts is converting recordMyDesktop Ogg Theora video files into Flash format for the inline player (unfortunately, a necessarily evil).

Traditionally, this would mean dropping to the command line and hand-feeding the encoding instructions to a program like ffmpeg or mencoder.

Ubuntu user JeanClaude (also known as siafulinux) has put together a script for GNOME’s File Manager (Nautilus) that makes the Theora to FLV encoding process really simple.

The script can be downloaded here and requires GNOME, Zenity and the video encoding tool mencoder to be installed.

Once you’ve downloaded the script, you simply extract the file, and double-click install in the extracted folder (choose Run if asked). This drops the script into the right folder.

Now, to convert an Ogg Theora video file to Flash, with default settings, you simply do the following.

Browse to the Ogg Theora source video.

Right-click the source video. On the menu, choose Scripts > Ogv to Flv Converter.

Wait while the conversion happens. When it’s done, you will have a nice shiny Flash video file, ready for distributing via the web.

It really is an extremely simple and handy way to very quickly convert a video to Flash video and could easily save a lot of time if you’re frequently working with video on Linux.

There are, obviously, plenty of situations where you want more control over the conversion settings, but as a quick two-click solution, Ogv to Flv is a win.

Kudos should go to the developer for making this little script not only really easy to use, but also very simple to install.

If you want to see Ogv to Flv Converter in action, watch this YouTube video made by the author.