Openvpn has been one of the tools of choice this week, so as I was tinkering on my ubuntu boxen…. I thought why don’t I install openvpn there as well for a little broader testing. So, I did, but was a bit disappointed to see that the version was not the most current. (Yes, they may have merged changes from the current version and left the version number at 2.0.6, but 2.0.9 is out and easy to build an rpm from source….. so….) I’ve compiled from source before, I’ve built RPM’s on Mandrake/Mandriva, but never a deb package.
Category: Ubuntu
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Software raid fun…. device detection order
Anyone that’s setup software raid on a system with multiple storage adapters has probably run into this kind of issue, but I thought I’d mention it. Last weekend I built a machine to replace my server (the server was to be captured into a VM). The main system was going to be installed onto dual IDE drives, the VM partition and other data on dual 400GB SATA drives. Well, install went well after getting past some of the irq issues I mentioned in a previous writeup. md0 was /boot and so on…. (md0 residing on the dual ide drives.) When the system went to reboot though it didn’t get very far. It complained of not finding a boot image (I think that was the message – didn’t make a note.)
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Boot up freeze/sluggishness with ubuntu 6.06.1 install cd (on 64bit AMD hardware)
I thought I had written about this once before, but when I searched the site to find the solution I had come across before, I couldn’t find my post…. so, sorry if this is a duplication, but I’ve run into this on some AMD 64-bit based system boards. The most recent was based on the nvidia nforce4 chipset. Essentially in booting from either the alternative install cd or livecd for Ubuntu/kubuntu/edubuntu/xubuntu…. there is a freeze in the boot process. It goes for 30 seconds or more looking as though it’s hard frozen, but it does eventually manage to load the installer.
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VMware guest unable to access USB devices
I ran into this some time back and found the solution a few months later and was reminded today to document it here…. The situation is this… Linux host for VMWare server, the guest machine has usb support and in vmware, you can go to VM, Removable devices and in spite of the fact you have usb devices on the system, nothing is listed as available to use in the VM. Well, it seems this is not an isolated problem. First you need to be sure the usb device is not in use by the host system. But, there’s something else that you need. VMWare uses usbfs to keep track of usb devices and a few distributions ( Ubuntu Linux 6.06 SUSE Linux 10.1, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10, Mandriva Linux 2006, SLES9 SP3 64 bit) don’t enable it by default. ( mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb ) should do the trick (as root) or you could set it in fstab usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0 (and now I’m thinking I may have already posted this once…. )
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PDF printing in Ubuntu
One of the things I have a tendency to do is save licence key – web confirmation pages to a pdf by printing. It gives a good capture of the document and saves me from actually having another paper to find a place to file. But, ubuntu (dapper) doesn’t seem to be setup for pdf printing by default. Fortunately, it’s not too hard to set up…. install cups-pdf (apt-get install cups-pdf), navigate to System -> Administration -> Printing and doubleclick to add a new printer… no pdf printer is detected… there must be work to do (click cancel). As root (“sudo nautilus”) navigate to Filesystem, then /usr/lib/cups/backend – right click cups-pdf and select properties and check “set user id”. Now, try to add a printer again and you should see PDF Printer, add it with the Generic, Postscript Color Printer (Rev 3b) driver, name it PDF-printer or something like that and now you should have PDF’s dropped into a folder in your home directory named PDF.
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Linux software raid notes
Here are a few other notes on linux software raid. I created a directory called raidinfo to keep information in to make it easy to maintain the raid array. First… from the software raid howto, I’ve done the following….
sfdisk -d /dev/hda > /raidinfo/partitions.hda
sfdisk -d /dev/hde > /raidinfo/partitions.hdeSo…. I’ve now got a good snapshot of the partitioning data. When I hooked up an external usb drive to add to the array, all I needed to do is this…
sfdisk /dev/sda < /raidinfo/partitions.hda (more…)
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Nxclient into xubuntu box
I like nx server and client, it can really make good use of low bandwidth connections to get a gui link. But, by default it’s quick and easy to setup gnome and kde login sessions within nxclient, but if you’re using xubuntu then you will need to setup a “custom” session and the command is startxfce4 …. so, start up nxclient, click configure and on the General tab, halfway down it should say Desktop, leave Unix and change KDE to custom, then click settings and check “run the following command” now, type startxfce4 and you should be set.
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Mail command missing in ubuntu by default
Not really, news, but I was reminded again this evening that mail is not available at the command line in recent default installs of Ubuntu (or kubuntu /xubuntu). If you’re like me and make use of this for scripting notifications…. you’ll need to sudo apt-get install mailx (and a MTA like postfix.) Mailx requires postfix/sendmail/qmail and that’s why it’s not installed by default so users don’t have an MTA sitting on their system for no good reason.
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Firewire/USB card and ethernet incompatibilities on Ubuntu 6.06
I’ve had a machine for quite a while that I’ve been working on as a “backup server”. My goal with it is to have a RAID1 setup with two 250GB drives and I also wanted USB2/firewire functionality so that I could even add a USB drive to the array for the purpose of having a hot-swapped spare drive that could be taken offsite. Well, the biggest frustration I’ve had has not been with software raid, or any of the rest of the software setup, but that something about the firewire/usb card didn’t like the built in ethernet. I FINALLY got things working… let me document what I went through.
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Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10 out…
The newest Ubuntu (K/X/Edu as well) is out, Edgy Eft 6.10 is finalized and will be supported for 18 months. (Longer support/users seeking stable proven base should stick with Dapper Drake…) One of the biggest changes I can see from reports is the init process replacement. It sounds like they’ve yielded some good bootup improvements and I’m looking forward to downloading and trying it out. I found it interesting to see that the plan for the 7.04 release of Ubuntu is to include native support for Autopackage which is another approach to making “just any” old program trivial to install on any linux variant.