Von's Ubuntu Experiences

USB drives not automounting

2010-12-15T20:43:00.000-05:00

I noticed that after upgrading my laptop to Ubuntu 10.10, USB drives weren't automounting.

My first clue was in this comment, I didn't have the usb_storage kernel module loaded:

# lsmod | grep usb
usbhid                 36882  0 
hid                    67742  1 usbhid

So I loaded the usb_storage module:

# modprobe usb_storage
WARNING: All config files need .conf: /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper, it will be ignored in a future release.
# lsmod | grep usb
usb_storage            40172  1 
usbhid                 36882  0 
hid                    67742  1 usbhid

And at this point USB drives mounted just fine. To make it permanent, I followed the directions in this post, added "usb_storage" to /etc/modules and rebooted. USB automounting working fine now.

Upgrading laptop from 9.10 to 10.04 to 10.10

2010-10-22T09:06:00.000-04:00

Installed all Updates
Clicked 'Upgrade' in the Update Manager to update to 10.04.1 LTS

Some Third party sources disabled.
~1.7GB download
Couple hours and a number of dialog boxes later upgrade was done.

First boot after upgrade I get an error message: "An error occurred while mounting /proc/bus/usb". Solution found in the forums.
Ran Update Manager again, system was up-to-date, installed 6 updates.
Still didn't show upgrade to 10.10. Had to click on Settings and then under Release upgrade, select Normal Releases. Clicked Close and then Check again. Now Upgrade button was available.
Clicked 'Upgrade' to upgrade to 10.10

Another ~1.7 GB of download.
Few hours later and a reboot and I'm at 10.10

Installing Mythbuntu 10.04 from scratch (part one).

2010-06-22T10:22:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, I decided to install Mythbuntu to use with my Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1600 (model 01199) tuner card. I started by installing Mythbuntu 10.04 from the CD and I followed the Happauge HVR-1600 directions from the MythTV website. Note that I am only configuring the ATSC digital over-the-air tuner and not the analog tuner.

First I went through the standard install screens (language, time zone, keyboard layout, etc.). For partitioning, I used a 80GB partition for the root partition, created a 19GB swap partition and a 50GB /home partition.

For installation type, I chose "Primary Backend w/Frontend."

For services I left the defaults: SSH and Samba.

I enabled a Remote Control and chose "Haupauge TV-Card" as I didn't see HVR-1600 and that seemed most logical. I left "Enable Dynamic Button Mappings" checked and "Generate Frontend Restart Mapping" unchecked.

For Graphics Driver I chose "NVDIA Graphics" since I have an NVIDIA card and have been through this before. I left TV-Out disabled.

After about 10 minutes of installation, a screen came up to configure the Backend and I launched MythT Setup:

Under "General" I changed nothing.
Under "Capture Cards" I created a new capture card of type "DVB DTV capture card (v3.x)". Under Recording options I set the max recordings to 1. (This all per the MythTV web page at the start of this post.)
Under "Video Sources" I added a new video source of type "Transmitted guide only (EIT)". Don't forget to give it a name or it will be a blank line on the video sources list which will confuse you into thinking it wasn't added.
Under "Input Connections" I selected the DVB capture device and set the video source to the video source I just just added in the previous step. Then I selected "Scan for Channels" which found roughly a dozen ATSC channels I inserted, plus two MPEG channels I inserted.
Under the "Channel Editor" I saw what looked like a reasonable list of over-the-air channels for my area. I didn't do anything under this option.

When I exited MythTV Setup I was prompted to run mythfilldatabase, which I did. It didn't have any apparent effect.

That completed installation, CD ejected and system rebooted.

Hmmm, as the system went down for the reboot I got a bunch of "end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector " errors and the system hung. So I power cycled it.

When the system came up I got a dialog box about Ubuntu running in low-graphics mode with a "Failed to initialize NVIDIA graphics device" error.

I selected "Reconfigure graphics" and then "Create new configuration for the hardware". That seemed to generate a new configuration and I restarted X. MythTV came up fine.

I tried watching TV at this point and tuning seemed to be working, but I didn't appear to be getting audio...

Before I tackled the audio problem, I decided to do some basic system administration. I exited MythTV and fired up a terminal (under Applications/Accessories).

From there I did a update of the system (took about 10 minutes) followed by a reboot:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

sudo reboot

When the system came up I got the same "running in low-graphics mode" dialog box. I did the same "Reconfigure graphics" and restart of X as last time. Another problem on the stack...

I checked and tuning still working fine (and still no audio).

My next step was to configure the system with a static IP address. I followed the same directions I have before, but when I ran "/etc/init.d/networking restart" I got a "SIOCDELRT: No such process" error. Wow, this was becoming a painful install.

Ah, I found these directions and doing a "ifup eth0" did indeed restart the interface with a static IP address. I then rebooted the system to make sure the configuration persisted and it did.

OK, now I could install my SSH public key and, ahhh, easy access from my laptop. Much better.

Looking into low-graphics mode problem... I noticed I had no /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, but I did have a /xorg.conf.new, so I copied it to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and rebooted. Now the system didn't complain about being in a low resolution mode, but my monitor did complain about "non optimal mode" and my keyboard didn't seem to work. So I moved it aside and rebooted again. This time the system came up without any warnings about low-graphics mode. Weird. I rebooted again just to make sure and it worked. OK, don't understand it, but problem considered solved for the moment.

Looking into lack of audio... ah, I actually do have audio, it's just really soft. I have to crank the volume and I can hear it. Even if I turned the volume up to 100% (using F11) it was still really soft.

Hmm, I'm also noticing my video is somewhat jittery, like I experienced before when I wasn't using the NVIDIA drivers.

Well, that's enough for this post. I'll pick it up in my next post...

Back in the saddle again with Mythbuntu and HDTV OTA...

2010-06-08T09:04:00.000-04:00

Well, after deciding I didn't need MythTV any more, I've changed my mind. Mainly because we dropped cable tv and are now relying on over the air (OTA) HDTV, so my old Series 1 Tivo, with only an analog tuner, doesn't do me a lot of good any more.

So, I bought a Hauppauge HVR-1600 (model 1099) with the idea of running MythTV again, this time tuning in OTA HDTV. I've going to install Mythbuntu 10.04 from scratch and go from there.

Stay tuned...

Using Tomato router for DynDNS updates

2010-02-06T19:25:00.003-05:00

Since I reinstalled my OS, I hadn't done my dyndns updating yet. Instead of doing it on my Ubuntu box, I decided to have my Tomato router do it instead following these directions. I also followed the suggestion in the first comment to force a daily update similar to what I did before.

So long mythbuntu...

2010-01-12T20:30:00.000-05:00

So we recently got a new HD Tivo, which left my ten year-old series one Tivo available. I decided to move it down to my den and remove mythbuntu from my linux box and make it media server.

My experience with mythbuntu was pretty good over all, the only real sore spot being occasional problems with lirc. Certainly if I didn't have a Tivo available, I'd still be using it.

Since I didn't really want to keep any of the recordings I had, I decided to reinstall the system from scratch. Here's my journey...

I choose Ubuntu Server 9.10 as my OS. Really the choice was between 9.10 and 8.04 LTS. I decided I wanted the latest and greatest more than stability. So I grabbed the ubuntu-9.10-server-amd64.iso, burned a CD and away I went.

Next decision was partitioning my three disks: sda @ 250GB, sdb @ 1TB, sdc @ 250GB. I decided to make sda my root and virtual machine partition. sdb was going to be for backups and then sdc for holding my media. So sda broke down as a 80GB root partition, a 1 GB /boot partition, a 19GB swap partition and the remainder (~150GB) as /vms. sdb and sdc were simply /mnt/backups and /mnt/media respectively.

The default install had me doing LVM (logical volume manager), but frankly I couldn't figure out how to getting it reconfigured correctly at a level that I was confident I knew what I was doing, so I disabled it.

Other options selected during the install:

Set to do security updates automatically
I installed: OpenSSH server, Samba Server and the LAMP Server.
I set the mysql root password to my password

After the install was complete I did the following:

I set a static IP address
I installed apt-cacher. This time I did not do the path_map configuration. I then created /etc/apt/apt.conf/90local-proxy
Good time for a quick update: apt-get dist-upgrade
I installed automatic updates.
I got email working. I edited /etc/aliases to forward root and postmaster to my personal address, and added a .forward in my home directory to do the same.
I installed logwatch.
I set up automatic back ups, backing up /etc, /home, /mnt/media. I intentionally didn't back up the virtual machine partition this way, since I want to run a script to shut those down and then backup their disks.

Todo at this point:

Configure Samba to serve /mnt/media and /mnt/backups

Upgrading laptop from 9.04 to 9.10

2009-12-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

Upgraded my Ubuntu laptop from 9.04 to 9.10. No major issues.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading

As with 8.10 upgrade, my Firefox is all messed up. Google toolbar and all my other extension buttons are gone. To get them back I had to disable the "Ubuntu Firefox Modifications" and then I was able to restore everything.

Virtualbox USB devices greyed out

2009-11-29T17:42:00.008-05:00

Running WinXP inside of VirtualBox and wanting to re-program my Harmony Remote, but all the USB devices were grey out. I followed these directions to fix.

First I added myself to vboxusers group:

# grep vbox /etc/group
vboxusers:x:128:
# usermod -G vboxusers -a von

In order to get this group change to take effect in my login session, I had to logout and back in again.

Then I edited /etc/fstab to add /proc/bus/usb. I had an old entry I had to comment out.

# vi /etc/fstab
# tail -2 /etc/fstab
#/dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=128,devmod=644 0 0

I had to unmount the old /proc/bus/usb and then remount it:

# umount /proc/bus/usb
# mount -a

At this point I restarted VirtualBox and was able to mount USB devices.

apt-get failed to fetch errors...

2009-08-14T18:58:00.003-04:00

I'm seeing the following errors running 'apt-get update'. Not sure why. /var/log/apt-cacher/error.log shows no errors.

% sudo apt-get update
...
Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty/multiverse Translation-en_US          
 Error reading from server - read (104 Connection reset by peer)
...
Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty-updates/universe Translation-en_US
 Error reading from server - read (104 Connection reset by peer)
...
Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty-updates/multiverse Sources
W: Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jaunty/multiverse/i18n/Translation-en_US.bz2  Error reading from server - read (104 Connection reset by peer)

W: Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jaunty-updates/universe/i18n/Translation-en_US.bz2  Error reading from server - read (104 Connection reset by peer)

E: Some index files failed to download, they have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

apt-get update missing GPG key

2009-08-14T18:49:00.003-04:00

I was seeing the following error when running "Check" on the update-manager, or 'apt-get update':

GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 248DD1EEBC8EBFE8

Answer, kudos to Gentoo Blog:

% gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv 248DD1EEBC8EBFE8
gpg: requesting key BC8EBFE8 from hkp server subkeys.pgp.net
gpg: key BC8EBFE8: public key "Launchpad PPA for Network-manager" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)
% gpg --export --armor 248DD1EEBC8EBFE8 | sudo apt-key add -
OK

Networking didn't work after kernel upgrade: br0?

2009-07-30T17:56:00.004-04:00

I did an 'apt-get dist-upgrade' and there was a kernel upgrade, so I rebooted. When the system came back there was no functional networking. Everything looked fine, I couldn't reach anything besides loopback.

On a hunch, I commented out br0 interface from /etc/network/interfaces and bounced networking (/etc/init.d/network restart) and all OK.

Then for grins I added br0 interface back and bounced networking again and, huh, all now seemed OK.

So I tried rebooted and all was still OK.

Chalking it up to a mystery for now unless problem returns.

Another dyndns false alarm - put weekly force into place

2009-07-25T08:04:00.000-04:00

I got another ddclient false alarm, where my daily cron job seems to lag just a day behind dyndns sending me an email warning.

This time I decided to add a cron job that does a forced update once a week to get rid of this race condition. Start my copying over the daily cron job:

# cp /etc/cron.daily/ddclient /etc/cron.weekly/

And then editing it to include '-force':

# vi /etc/cron.weekly/ddclient

End result looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/ddclient -syslog -force

Upgraded to Virtualbox 3.0

2009-07-05T19:59:00.003-04:00

I notiec that Virtualbox 3.0 was released, so I upgraded my previous install using the directions from www.virtualbox.org. This time I went the route of editing /etc/apt/sources.list by adding the following line:

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian jaunty non-free

Then adding the Sun VBox key:

wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/sun_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Then did the install:

apt-get install virtualbox-3.0

Then I also downloaded and installed the new 3.0 version of the SDK from the Virtualbox download page (which seems to have been updated to work with Python 2.6 btw).

Getting Django running under Apache

2009-06-29T21:40:00.000-04:00

I heard a number of good things about Django and wanted to give it a try. After following the tutorial and playing around with it, I found it really cool. BTW, there is also good documentation to be found at the Django Book site.

After playing a little, I decided I wanted to try deploying Django into my existing Apache instance. And well, I found the documentation for doing this somewhat lacking (even in the book). But I forged ahead and catched what it took here. Hopefully it will either be helpful or someone can come along and tell me I missed something.

First, I started by installing Django on my Ubuntu server. I already had Apache installed and working btw.

sudo apt-get install python-django

Reading through the Django document I decided to go the modwsgi route since that seem to be the recommended course. I followed the directions for installing modwsgi:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-wsgi

Then I created a Django site to run my applications in. Pick the name of your site carefully - as far as I can tell, it will appear in all your URLs (maybe I'm wrong on this as I haven't experimented too much):

cd /usr/local
sudo django-admin startproject django_site

Now, you could just go ahead and make your site owned by the Apache user (www-data), but I decided to make it owned by me so that I could easily edit things:
sudo chown -R vwelch django_site
Now create /usr/local/django_site/django.wgsi that looks like the following:

import os
import sys

os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'django_site.settings'
sys.path.append('/usr/local')
sys.path.append('/usr/local/django_site')

import django.core.handlers.wsgi
application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()

Now go ahead and edit /usr/local/django_site/settings.py and set up your database. I used SQLite3 since it was the simplest. You will need to put the database somewhere the Apache user (www-data) has write access. In my case I created a directory just for this purpose:

sudo mkdir /usr/local/django_db
sudo chown www-date /usr/local/django_db

So the relevant two lines of my settings.py file looked like:

DATABASE_ENGINE = 'sqlite3'
DATABASE_NAME = '/usr/local/django_db/database.db'

Now go ahead and create the database - you must do this as the Apache user:

sudo -u www-data ./manage.py syncdb

Time to proceed with Apache configuration. Create the file /etc/apache2/sites-available/django.conf (using 'sudo vi') so that it looks like the following. Note that I believe the first argument to WSGIScriptAlias "/django_site" must patch your site name. The second line lets the admin application find it's CSS (I haven't dealt with the case another application also wants CSS).

WSGIScriptAlias /django_site /usr/local/django_site/django.wsgi
Alias /media /var/lib/python-support/python2.6/django/contrib/admin/media

Now enable the site in Apache and restart it:

sudo a2ensite django.conf
sudo apache2ctl restart

Now visit you should be able to visit http://hostname/django_site and get a Django welcome page. If not, well, something is wrong :-/

At this point you can add applications under /usr/local/django_site as you normally would and have them appear at http://hostname/django_site/appname

Good luck. And as I mentioned I figured this out through mostly trial and error. If anyone can correct me or point me at better docs, I'd be grateful.

Uninstalling VMWare 2.0.1, installing VMWare 1.0.9 on Ubuntu 9.0.4

2009-06-14T15:50:00.010-04:00

I had previously installed VMWare 2.0.1 and I hate it. I'm probably going to move to VirtualBox, but I need VMWare for a while until I transition, so I decided to take another run at getting VMWare 1.0.9 to install.

First, to uninstall VMWare 2.0.1:

# /usr/bin/vmware-uninstall.pl

Then I downloaded VMWare 1.0.9 from the VMWare website.

Previously I had run into this bug which caused the vmmon build to fail.

The trick to getting it to build is to use this patch following the directions from this tutorial, which worked for me despite it being for an older version.

USB thumb drive mounting writable only by root...

2009-06-14T13:46:00.004-04:00

I had a thumb drive that was mounting on my Ubuntu laptop OK, but was writable only by root.

Long story short, I figured out it was something about the way it was formatted. When I tried to put the same thumb drive into my Mac, it wouldn't mount it and I had to reformat it. After that it mounted just fine on my Ubuntu laptop and was owned by when when I did so.

Not sure how I formatted it in the first place, but lesson learned is that certain formats mount OK but will not be user writable.

Installing Virtualbox and creating Ubuntu VMs on headless Ubuntu 9.04 server

2009-06-08T22:00:00.001-04:00

Here's my situation: Ubuntu 9.04 server, headless and I want to install Virtualbox on it and get Ubuntu 8.04 LTS servers running as root.

Step 1: Install Virtualbox

Following the directions at the Virtualbox Linux download page I did the following:

1a) Edited /etc/apt/sources.list and add the virtual box repository:

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian jaunty non-free

1b) Add the virtualbox key to the apt keyring:

wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/sun_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

1c) And install:

apt-get install virtualbox-2.2

Step2: Configured bridged networking

I basically followed the directions on the help.ubuntu.com wiki.:

2a) Install bridge-utils:


apt-get install bridge-utils

2b) Now edit /etc/network/interfaces and add the br0 interface with the same address as your primary interface (eth0 in my case). Note that these directions assume you are using a static IP, if not you are on your own. My /etc/network/interfaces now looks like this:


auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
    address 192.168.1.10
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    network 192.168.1.0
    broadcast 192.168.1.255
    gateway 192.168.1.1

# Configured per https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox/Networking
# Address of br0 should be the same as eth0
auto br0
iface br0 inet static
address 192.168.1.10
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1
bridge_ports eth0 vbox0 vbox1

2c) Now restart the networking:


/etc/init.d/networking restart

...wait a couple minutes for the network to come back - my SSH session survived the restart YMMV...

Now I have a br0 interface:


# ifconfig br0
br0       Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:18:8b:76:32:11
      inet addr:192.168.1.10  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
      inet6 addr: fe80::218:8bff:fe76:3211/64 Scope:Link
      UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
      RX packets:87 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
      TX packets:74 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
      collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
      RX bytes:6130 (6.1 KB)  TX bytes:11447 (11.4 KB)

2d) Create /etc/vbox/interfaces:

vi /etc/vbox/interfaces

So that it looks like:

vbox root br0

2e) Restart virtualbox networking, but hmmm, I don't have /etc/init.d/vboxnet, but I do have /etc/init.d/vboxdrv so I restarted that instead:

/etc/init.d/vboxdrv restart

2f) I skipped setting permissions on /dev/net/tun since I'm running VMs as root.

Step 3: Create a VM

I basically followed these directions, updated as I went. Also kudos to Sasquatch for the nic1 and bridgeadapter1 options.

3a) Create the new VM. You should be able to set the memory as you see fit. Other options you probably don't want to mess with.

VBoxManage -q createvm -name Ubuntu-Server -register
VBoxManage -q modifyvm Ubuntu-Server -memory 384MB -acpi on -ostype ubuntu -pae on -nic1 bridged -bridgeadapter1 br0

Note that if you have other VMs using vrdp you probably want to add "-vrdpport #" to use an available port (default port is 3389).

3b) Create disk for the new VM and attach it. I created an 8GB disk based on my experiences trying to use smaller disks.

VBoxManage -q createhd -filename "Ubuntu-Server.dvi" -size 8192 -register
VBoxManage -q modifyvm Ubuntu-Server -hda Ubuntu-Server.dvi

3c) Download the iso for 8.04 server from Ubuntu. Note I use 8.04 since it has long-term support and hence I won't have to worry about upgraded the OS on the VM as often. Note that while the Ubuntu page tried to get me to use the 64 bit version, I found it did not work for me (I got the following error trying to boot with it: "This kernel requires an x86-64 CPU, but only detected an i686 CPU. Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU.") so I used the 32 bit version instead. You should also choose a copy from a local mirror.

wget http://osmirrors.cerias.purdue.edu/pub/ubuntu-releases/hardy/ubuntu-8.04.2-server-i386.iso

3d) Register the iso image and attach it to the VM:

VBoxManage -q registerimage dvd /path/to/ubuntu-8.04.2-server-i386.iso
VBoxManage -q modifyvm Ubuntu-Server -dvd /path/to/ubuntu-8.04.2-server-i386.iso

Ok, we now have a VM that's ready to boot and install Ubuntu...

Step 4: Start the VM and Connect to it via vrdp

4a) Start the VM in vrdp mode:

VBoxManage -q startvm Ubuntu-Server --type vrdp

4b) Connect using a remote desktop client. What I found worked for me from my Ubuntu 9.04 laptop was 'rdesktop' from the commandline:

rdesktop server-name

Or from my Mac, Remote Desktop Connection, though it does give a warning about "Remote Desktop Connection cannot verify the identity of the computer that you want to connect to."

Step 5: Do a standard Ubuntu Install
Ok, you should now be looking at the console on the VM which has booted from the CD. Go ahead and do your standard Ubuntu install.

When the install completed, I found the system automatically rebooted from the hard drive without me having to do anything to unmount iso image.

Step 6: Clean up

The only thing to do is detact the iso from the VM. After powering off the VM, do the following:

VBoxManage -q modifyvm Ubuntu-Server -dvd none

sftp subsystem dying

2009-06-06T15:08:00.002-04:00

I tried to open a nautilus bookmark of a sftp session to my server today and it closed immediate with a "Could not open location 'sftp://vwelch@host' ssh program unexpectedly exited' message.

Running a sshd in debug mode on the server and I saw the following:

subsystem request for sftp
debug1: subsystem: exec() /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server
debug1: Received SIGCHLD.

So for some reason my sftp-server subsyst is immediately failing. No idea why. Will update here when I figure it out.

Making a SSH connection to a NAT'ed Virtualbox VM

2009-06-06T08:12:00.012-04:00

I found myself wanting to SSH to a NAT'ed virtualbox VM. I discovered this post which nicely described how to use VBoxManage to accomplish this. The only change I had to make on my Ubuntu box was to use 'pcnet' instead of 'e1000'.

Installing Virtual Box

2009-05-28T22:00:00.001-04:00

I recently upgraded to VMServer 2.0.1 on my Ubuntu laptop and I'm very unhappy. The new console is very slow and it hangs often. I'm tried of watching "loading" message. Certainly my laptop is a little old (1.5GHz Celeron M processor) and maybe that is a contributor. On the other hand if you google the net, you'll find no shortage of other people with the same opinion.

I installed VirtualBox on my Mac laptop and found I really liked it. So I figured I'd give it a try on my Ubuntu laptop as well.

First you need to choose between the Open vs Closed Source editions. Despite being a fan of open source I went with the closed source, mainly because the Remote Display Protocol server sounded like useful functionality I might want.

Install was fairly straight forward, I went to the VirtualBox Linux Downloads page and clicked on the Ubuntu .deb link.

One annoyance is that it didn't install an entry in the Applications menu, so I had to start it from the command line:

% /usr/X11R6/bin/VirtualBox

I did add an icon on the panel using the following steps:

Right Click on Application Panel
Select "Add to Panel"
Select "Custom Application Launcher" and "Add"
Type is "Application"
Name is "VirtualBox"
Command is "/usr/X11R6/bin/VirtualBox"
Click OK.

This will create an icon with the default "spring" image. If anyone knows where I can find a stash of images for applications, please let me know.

That's it. If I like it on my laptop, next step will be installing it on my server which will be more interesting since I'll want to have unattended, automatically starting VMs and I'll also want to re-use my existing VMWare images (the images on my laptop don't have enough state for me to worry about).

MythTV Volume too low

2009-05-28T18:41:00.002-04:00

I noticed the volume on MythTV seemed rather low. Poking around the net I found this thread and followed the directions as follows:

% alsamixer

And set Master and PCM volume to 100% (Master was down at 70%). That fixed my problem.

Then as suggested later in the thread, I saved the results (has to be done as root):

% sudo alsactl store

DynDNS false alarm

2009-05-26T23:05:00.002-04:00

I previously set up automatic updating of DynDNS. Today I got an email warning me "Your account vwelch at DynDNS.com is due to expire in 5 days."

Hmmm, I'd seen this problem before. So I logged into my server, but no hung ddclient processes:

% ps auxwww | grep ddclient
%

Hmmm, poking around some more, looks like the problem maybe fixed itself?

%grep ddclient /var/log/daemon.log
May 25 08:21:48 casey ddclient[13892]: WARNING: forcing update of Home from 98.222.63.70 to 98.222.63.70; 30 days since last update on Fri Apr 24 21:31:51 2009.
May 25 08:21:48 casey ddclient[13892]: WARNING: forcing update of vwelch.dyndns.org from 98.222.63.70 to 98.222.63.70; 30 days since last update on Fri Apr 24 21:31:51 2009.
May 25 08:21:50 casey ddclient[13892]: SUCCESS: updating Home: good: IP address set to 98.222.63.70
May 25 08:21:50 casey ddclient[13892]: SUCCESS: updating vwelch.dyndns.org: good: IP address set to 98.222.63.70

Sure enough, logging into DynDNS showed a last update time from this morning.

So apparently there is a race condition between the email warning and the ddclient forcing a refresh.

dbus-daemon: Rejected send message

2009-05-09T14:00:00.005-04:00

Since my Ubuntu laptop upgrade to 9.04 I'm seeing the following messages every 10 minutes in /var/log/auth.log and in my logwatch emails:

dbus-daemon: Rejected send message, 1 matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.36" (uid=1000 pid=3697 comm="/usr/lib/indicator-
applet/indicator-applet --oaf-a") interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties" member="Get" error name="(unset)" requested_reply=0 destination=":1.1421" (uid=0 pid=22921 comm="/USR/SBIN/CRON ")): 1 Time(s)
dbus-daemon: Rejected send message, 1 matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.36" (uid=1000 pid=3697 comm="/usr/lib/indicator-applet/indicator-applet --oaf-a") interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties" member="Get" error name="(unset)" requested_reply=0 destination=":1.1422" (uid=0 pid=22923 comm="/USR/SBIN/CRON ")): 1 Time(s)
dbus-daemon: Rejected send message, 1 matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.36" (uid=1000 pid=3697 comm="/usr/lib/indicator-applet/indicator-applet --oaf-a") interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties" member="Get" error name="(unset)" requested_reply=0 destination=":1.1423" (uid=0 pid=22928 comm="/USR/SBIN/CRON ")): 1 Time(s)

Poking around the net I found this bug and in particular this comment. I applied the suggested fix:

# cd /etc/dbus-1
# cp system.conf system.conf.orig
# vi system.conf
# diff system.conf.orig system.conf
66a67,70
>
> > send_type="method_call"
> send_member="Get"/>

After that I tried restarting dbus ('/etc/init.d/dbus restart') but that resulted in logging me out, so I suggest just rebooting instead.

Installing VMServer 2.0.1

2009-05-03T13:27:00.008-04:00

Having just upgraded to 9.04, it seemed like a good time to catch up on my VMWare server upgrades, since I was still on 1.0.7, which is getting a little old.

I started by trying to upgrade to 1.0.9, but I could not get the vmmon module to build...

So, I shifted gears and tried installing 2.0.1 following the directions at VMWare Server 2.01 on Ubuntu 9.04.

I downloaded the 2.0.1 tarball and tried installing it following those directions.

$tar xvfz ~/Downloads/VMware-server-2.0.1-156745.i386.tar.gz
$cd vmware-server-distrib/
$patch ./bin/vmware-config.pl ~/Downloads/vmware-config.pl.patch.txt
$sudo ./vmware-install.pl

I took the default answers except for the following:

Your computer has multiple ethernet network interfaces available: eth0, pan0,
wlan0. Which one do you want to bridge to vmnet0? [eth0] wlan0

The current administrative user for VMware Server is ''. Would you like to
specify a different administrator? [no] yes

Please specify the user whom you wish to be the VMware Server administrator
von

I actually goofed typing in my serial number, but looks like my existing VMServer 1.0 license worked.

apt-get nautilus-dropbox errors

2009-05-03T13:18:00.005-04:00

Hmmm. After upgrading my laptop to 9.04, I'm seeing the following error:

# apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
nautilus-dropbox
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 77.5kB of archives.
After this operation, 0B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
nautilus-dropbox
Install these packages without verification [y/N]? y
Get:1 http://linux.getdropbox.com jaunty/main nautilus-dropbox 0.6.1 [77.5kB]
Fetched 77.5kB in 0s (670kB/s)
Failed to fetch http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu/dists/jaunty/main/binary-i386/nautilus-dropbox_0.6.1_i386.deb Size mismatch
E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?

So far I haven't figure out how to solve this. Will post an update here when I have.

Update 5/29/09: I fixed this by installing it manually as follows.

# wget https://www.getdropbox.com/download?dl=packages/nautilus-dropbox_0.6.1_i386_ubuntu_9.04.deb
--2009-05-29 13:51:23-- https://www.getdropbox.com/download?dl=packages/nautilus-dropbox_0.6.1_i386_ubuntu_9.04.deb
Resolving www.getdropbox.com... 174.36.30.67
Connecting to www.getdropbox.com|174.36.30.67|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 FOUND
Location: http://linux.getdropbox.com/packages/nautilus-dropbox_0.6.1_i386_ubuntu_9.04.deb [following]
--2009-05-29 13:51:24-- http://linux.getdropbox.com/packages/nautilus-dropbox_0.6.1_i386_ubuntu_9.04.deb
Resolving linux.getdropbox.com... 174.36.30.67
Connecting to linux.getdropbox.com|174.36.30.67|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 77528 (76K) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `nautilus-dropbox_0.6.1_i386_ubuntu_9.04.deb'

100%[======================================>] 77,528 316K/s in 0.2s

2009-05-29 13:51:25 (316 KB/s) - `nautilus-dropbox_0.6.1_i386_ubuntu_9.04.deb' saved [77528/77528]

# dpkg -i nautilus-dropbox_0.6.1_i386_ubuntu_9.04.deb
(Reading database ... 193825 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace nautilus-dropbox 0.6.1 (using nautilus-dropbox_0.6.1_i386_ubuntu_9.04.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement nautilus-dropbox ...
Setting up nautilus-dropbox (0.6.1) ...

Dropbox installation successfully completed! Please log out and log back in to complete the integration with your desktop. You can start Dropbox from your applications menu.

Processing triggers for man-db ...
Processing triggers for libc6 ...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place

ttf-mscorefonts-installer, apt-cacher and .exe files

2009-05-03T13:00:00.003-04:00

Since upgrading to 9.04 I was still having problems upgrading ttf-mscorefonts-installer. The 'apt-get dist-upgrade' would die with the following error:

--2009-05-03 12:00:35-- http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/corefonts/andale32.exe
Resolving localhost... 127.0.0.1
Connecting to localhost|127.0.0.1|:3142... connected.
Proxy request sent, awaiting response... 403 Sorry, not allowed to fetch that type of file: andale32.exe
2009-05-03 12:00:36 ERROR 403: Sorry, not allowed to fetch that type of file: andale32.exe.

Poking around, I found this post which explained that apt-cacher had a list of allowed file types and '.exe' wasn't on it. Unforunately, the apt-cacher script had changed and the patch in the post wasn't relevant any more. Here is my fix:

#cd /usr/share/apt-cacher
#cp apt-cacher-lib.pl apt-cacher-lib.pl.20090503
#vi apt-cacher-lib.pl
# diff -c apt-cacher-lib.pl.20090503 apt-cacher-lib.pl
*** apt-cacher-lib.pl.20090503 2009-05-03 12:06:48.000000000 -0500
--- apt-cacher-lib.pl 2009-05-03 12:07:15.000000000 -0500
***************
*** 57,62 ****
--- 57,63 ----
package_files_regexp => '(?:' . join('|',
('\.deb',
'\.rpm',
+ '\.exe',
'\.dsc',
'\.tar\.gz',
'\.diff\.gz',

The I restarted apt-cacher:

# /etc/init.d/apt-cacher restart

Then I reran 'apt-get dist-upgrade' and it installed fine.

Upgrading Mythbuntu from 8.10 to 9.04

2009-05-02T08:07:00.025-04:00

Time to upgrade my Mythbuntu box to 9.04 from 8.10. I followed the Network Upgrade directions.

Not unsurprisingly, update-manage-core was already installed, so on to the upgrade (only showing highlights):

# do-release-upgrade
...
8 packages are going to be removed. 82 new packages are going to be
installed. 731 packages are going to be upgraded.
...
What is the password for the MySQL administrator account 'root':

Hmmm. I just enter here, I got an error about a database connection being refused and the upgrade continued. AFAICT, it worked out OK.

...
Will you be using this webserver exclusively with mythweb? Yes

Configuration file `/etc/services'
==> Modified (by you or by a script) since installation.
Y or I : install the package maintainer's version

I got asked about apt-cacher.conf - I hit "D" to get diffs and I got an error and the install went on. Fortunately I got another chance at this later...

What would you like to do about smb.conf? I kept the local version currently installed
...
Configuration file `/etc/apt-cacher/apt-cacher.conf'
N or O : keep your currently-installed version
...

The ending of the upgrade did not look good:

--2009-05-02 10:23:29-- http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/corefonts/andale32.exe
Resolving localhost... 127.0.0.1
Connecting to localhost|127.0.0.1|:3142... connected.
Proxy request sent, awaiting response... 403 Sorry, not allowed to fetch that type of file: andale32.exe
2009-05-02 10:23:29 ERROR 403: Sorry, not allowed to fetch that type of file: andale32.exe.

andale32.exe: No such file or directory

All done, errors in processing 1 file(s)
dpkg: error processing ttf-mscorefonts-installer (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
ttf-mscorefonts-installer

I'm not sure what ttf-mscorefonts is, but doesn't seem to have any major impact.

Upgrade complete.

The upgrade is completed but there were errors during the upgrade
process.

Ok, not the best message at the end, but at leat things have finished.

First thing I noticed is I started getting emails from cron:

Subject: Cron [ -x /etc/init.d/mythtv-status ] && /etc/init.d/mythtv-status reload > /dev/null
Sorry, failed to fetch http://localhost:6544/xml.

Hmmm. Well, first things first, just on principle:

#reboot

System comes up fine in MythTV. Everything seems to be working well.

Hmmm, another email from cron:

Subject: Cron [ -x /etc/init.d/mythtv-status ] && /etc/init.d/mythtv-status reload > /dev/null
mv: cannot stat `/var/run/motd.new': No such file or directory

Update: This problem was caused by two cron jobs both trying to modify /etc/motd at the same time (every 10 minutes)! The update-motd cron job moves /var/run/motd.new out from underneath the mythtv-status job. You can see the two jobs in /etc/cron.d:

# grep 10 /etc/cron.d/mythtv-status /etc/cron.d/update-motd
/etc/cron.d/mythtv-status:*/10 * * * * root [ -x /etc/init.d/mythtv-status ] && /etc/init.d/mythtv-status reload > /dev/null
/etc/cron.d/update-motd:*/10 * * * * root [ -x /usr/sbin/update-motd ] && /usr/sbin/update-motd 2>/dev/null

I believe what should really be happening is myth-status should be run by update-motd every 10 minutes instead of independently. Here is what I did to make that happen:

# rm /etc/cron.d/mythtv-status
# cd /etc/update-motd.d/
# ln -s /usr/bin/mythtv-status 50-mythtv-status

Test it out...

# /usr/sbin/update-motd
# cat /etc/motd
Linux casey 2.6.28-11-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 17 01:57:59 UTC 2009 i686
...typical motd stuff...

MythTV status for localhost
===========================
...typical mythtv-status stuff...

0 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.

End Update.

Checked on vmware and it wasn't running. Usual problem:

# /etc/init.d/vmware start
VMware Server is installed, but it has not been (correctly) configured
for the running kernel. To (re-)configure it, invoke the
following command: /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl.

Usual fix:

# /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

I took all the defaults. Afterwards, don't forget to fix /etc/vmware/config.

I then checked /usr/share/apt-cacher/apt-cacher-report.pl to see if I needed to patch it and it had been fixed in the distribution - yeah!

Well, I think that's it. Will update this post if I run into any more problems.

Update: This system also acts as my apt-cacher, and when I went to upgrade the next system I got "104 Connection reset by peer" errors. Turns out I had to use the new /etc/apt-cacher/apt-acher.conf file:

# cd /etc/apt-cacher
# mv apt-cacher.conf apt-cacher.conf.8.10
# cp apt-cacher.conf.dpkg-dist apt-cacher.conf
# /etc/init.d/apt-cacher restart
Restarting Apt-Cacher: apt-cacher.

For the record, here's the diff:

# diff apt-cacher.conf.8.10 apt-cacher.conf


26c26
< # optional setting, binds the listening daemon to one specified IP. Use IP --- > # optional setting, binds the listening daemon to specified IP(s). Use IP
40c40
< allowed_hosts="192.168.1.0/24,"> allowed_hosts=*
43c43
< # And similiarly for IPv6 with allowed_hosts_6 and denied_hosts_6. --- > # And similarly for IPv6 with allowed_hosts_6 and denied_hosts_6.
49c49
< # This thing can be done by Apache but is much simplier here - limit access to --- > # This thing can be done by Apache but is much simpler here - limit access to
112a113,117
> # This sets the interface to use for the upstream connection.
> # Specify an interface name, an IP address or a host name.
> # If unset, the default route is used.
> #interface=
>
125,126c130,131
< # To enable data checksumming, install libdbd-sqlite3-perl and set this option < # to 1. Then wait untill the Packages/Sources files have been refreshed once --- > # To enable data checksumming, install libberkeleydb-perl and set this option
> # to 1. Then wait until the Packages/Sources files have been refreshed once
133c138
< # apt-cacher server is beeing relocated (via apt-get's error messages while --- > # apt-cacher server is being relocated (via apt-get's error messages while
140,143c145,147
< # also the only method to use FTP access to the target hosts. The syntax is simple, the part of the beginning to replace, followed by a list of mirror urls, all space separated. Multiple profile are separated by semicolons < # path_map = debian ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/debian ftp2.de.debian.org/debian ; ubuntu archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu ; security security.debian.org/debian-security ftp2.de.debian.org/debian-security < path_map =" debuntu"> # also the only method to use FTP access to the target hosts. The syntax is
> # simple, the part of the beginning to replace, followed by a list of mirror
> # urls, all space separated. Multiple profile are separated by semicolons
146a151,163
> # path_map = debian ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/debian ftp2.de.debian.org/debian ; ubuntu archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu ; security security.debian.org/debian-security ftp2.de.debian.org/debian-security
>
> # Permitted package files - this is a perl regular expression which matches all
> # package-type files (files that are uniquely identified by their filename).
> # The default is:
> #package_files_regexp = (?:\.deb|\.rpm|\.dsc|\.tar\.gz|\.diff\.gz|\.udeb|index\.db-.+\.gz|\.jigdo|\.template)$
>
> # Permitted Index files - this is the perl regular expression which matches all
> # index-type files (files that are uniquely identified by their full path and
> # need to be checked for freshness).
> #The default is:
> #index_files_regexp = (?:Index|Packages\.gz|Packages\.bz2|Release|Release\.gpg|Sources\.gz|Sources\.bz2|Contents-.+\.gz|pkglist.*\.bz2|release|release\..*|srclist.*\.bz2|Translation-.+\.bz2)$
>

Evernote under Ubuntu with wine

2009-04-26T21:41:00.003-04:00

I've been using EverNote for a while. It's nice on my Mac with the native client, and I have been using it via the web interface from my Ubuntu laptop. Looks like others have had success running it under wine, so I thought I'd give it a try.

I started by downloading the windows binary from http://www.evernote.com/about/download/

Then I ran the installer under wine:

% cd ~/Downloads/
% wine Evernote_3.1.0.1139.exe

There was a lot of warnings printed to the shell, but the install worked (I chose the "Express" option BTW).

EverNote started up. The first thing it does is sync and the message telling you it's syncing is a small message in the lower right, which is easy to overlook it turn giving the false impression it's hung. But after a couple minute it finished and I saw all my notes.

I've played with it a little so far. The video is a little sluggish, but still more spry than the web interface, so I'm happy.

Installing TweetDeck on Ubuntu

2009-04-26T11:43:00.003-04:00

I was interested in a Twitter client I could use cross-platform so I decided to try out TweetDeck. Here's my install process on Ubuntu.

I started by installing Adobe Air:

% wget http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/latest/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
% chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
% sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Then I went to install TweetDeck. I could not get it to work from the TweekDeck homepage (I would click on the download button but nothing would happen), but it did work for me through the Adobe site. The installer ran and it just worked.

It did mention it would install Adobe Air in the process, so it is possible I could have skipped the first part of this post.

Had to re-patch apt-cacher-report.pl

2009-04-25T14:01:00.005-04:00

Looks like around April 15 a new version of apt-cacher got pushed out, which overwrote my previous fixes. The file apt-cacher-report.pl didn't change though, so I just re-applied the same fixes and saved a copy of the patched script in case it happens again.

BTW, here are the latest numbers. apt-cacher has saved me 10GB in traffic over the past 6 months.

cache efficiency

	Cache hits	Cache misses	Total
Requests	31818 (65.15%)	17015 (34.84%)	48833
Transfers	10.641 GB (72.34%)	4.068 GB (27.65%)	14.71 GB

LifeHacker Top 10 Ubuntu Downloads

2009-04-25T13:37:00.001-04:00

Nice list.

Upgrading Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop VM to 9.04

2009-04-25T11:55:00.006-04:00

Short version: Don't try upgrading a 8.04 Ubuntu Desktop VM with only 4GB of disk to 8.10 - there isn't enough disk space.

I decided to start playing with Ubuntu 9.04 by upgrading a 8.04 Ubuntu Desktop VM I had. Since it was two version behind I followed the upgrade directions to bring it up to 8.10 first. A key bit in the directions is opening Software Sources and selecting "Normal releases" under the Updates tab, otherwise Update Manager won't show the update version.

I fired up the Update Manager, upgraded a number of packages, and then fired up the upgrade to 8.10. Unfortunately it died with the following message:

The upgrade aborts now. The upgrade needs a total of 649M free space on disk '/'. Please free at least an additional 243M of disk space on '/'. Empty your trash and remove temporary packages of former installations using 'sudo apt-get clean'.

So I did as it suggested and ran 'apt-get clean', which seemed to free up ~720MB of disk space:

# apt-get clean
# df -k
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 3920768 2993528 729644 81% /
...

Now I trued Update Manager again, but it failed again with a similar message:

The upgrade aborts now. The upgrade needs a total of 975M free space on disk '/'. Please free at least an additional 306M of disk space on '/'. Empty your trash and remove temporary packages of former installations using 'sudo apt-get clean'.

So now I need 975MB of space. I give up.

Lesson learned, give Ubuntu more than 4GB if you think you might want to upgrade it.

New VM checklist

2009-04-24T23:49:00.002-04:00

Things to do in a new Ubuntu VM after I create it:

Install a apt-cacher proxy. This involved editing /etc/hosts to add the caching host and then creating /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/90local-proxy with contents of: Acquire::http::Proxy "http://cache-host:3142";
Install vmware-tools.

That's it for now.

Upgrading Ubuntu Desktop from 8.10 to 9.04 - wireless woes again.

2009-04-24T23:10:00.028-04:00

Turning now to upgrading my Ubuntu laptop from 8.10 to 9.04 using the Network Upgrade method. I started by checking to make sure I'm up to date:

# apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Then I ran System/Administration/Update Manager, hit Upgrade and followed the directions.

The irst time through I saw the following, which turned out to be caused by a misconfigured apt-cacher on my apt-cacher system (which I had just upgraded):

Third party sources disabled

Some third party entries in your sources.list were disabled. You can re-enable them after the upgrade with the 'software-properties' tool or your package manager.

Followed by:

Error during update

A problem occurred during the update. This is usually some sort of network problem, please check your network connection and retry.

W:Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jaunty/restricted/i18n/Translation-en_US.bz2 Error reading from server - read (104 Connection reset by peer)
, W:Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jaunty/multiverse/i18n/Translation-en_US.bz2 Error reading from server - read (104 Connection reset by peer)
, W:Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jaunty-updates/restricted/i18n/Translation-en_US.bz2 Error reading from server - read (104 Connection reset by peer)
, W:Failed to fetch http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jaunty-security/restricted/i18n/Translation-en_US.bz2 Error reading from server - read (104 Connection reset by peer)
, E:Some index files failed to download, they have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

After fixing apt-cacher, I ran System/Administration/Update Manager again and it went much more smoothly. Questions asked during the upgrade and my answers:

Replace /etc/services? Yes

...

Could not install 'b43-fwcutter'
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1

This turned out to be the sources of wireless woes (more about that later).

Then a couple scary messages I think related to the b43-fwcutter failure.

Could not install the upgrades
The upgrade is now aborted. Your system could be in an unusable state. A recovery will run now (dpkg --configure -a).

...

Upgrade complete

The upgrade is completed but there were errors during the upgrade process.

...

Then I went ahead and did a...

#reboot

Booting the system did a "Routine check of drives" took several minutes

And then when it came up, I had no wireless, like last time. I plugged into wired ethernet and that worked - so that's better than last time. First thing I tried was re-enabling third party sources and seeing if there was a new Network Manager. I edited /etc/apt/sources.list and uncommented the following lines:

# Latest version of Network Manager
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/ubuntu jaunty main # disabled on upgrade to jaunty
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/ubuntu jaunty main # disabled on upgrade to jaunty

# Dropbox
deb http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu jaunty main # disabled on upgrade to jaunty
deb-src http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu jaunty main # disabled on upgrade to jaunty

#WineHQ - Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex"
deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt jaunty main # disabled on upgrade to jaunty

# SKYPE
deb http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/ stable non-free # disabled on upgrade to jaunty

And then I ran:

# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade

But the only packages that were upraded were nautilus-dropbox and wine. So no luck there.

Ok, going back to b43-fwcutter, I tried the following:

# /usr/share/b43-fwcutter/install_bcm43xx_firmware.sh
...
# reboot

And that did the trick!

Now I just did the usual vmware re-configure:

# /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

I accepted all the default. Afterwards, don't forget to fix /etc/vmware/config.

At this point everything seems good...

Upgrading Ubuntu server VMs from 8.10 to 9.04

2009-04-24T23:07:00.021-04:00

After my first attempt to upgrade a Ubuntu VM desktop image didn't work work due to lack of disk space, I decided to try my Ubuntu server VMs, which I had previously upgraded to 8.10.

I started by backing up the virtual machines (basically shut them down and tar'ed them up). Then I followed the direction for doing a network upgrade for Ubuntu servers. BTW, this took a while, I should have done it inside a screen session.

# apt-get install update-manager-core
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
update-manager-core is already the newest version.

Presumably I did that during the 8.10 upgrade, so on to step 2:

# do-release-upgrade
Checking for a new ubuntu release
Done Upgrade tool signature
Done Upgrade tool
Done downloading
extracting 'jaunty.tar.gz'
authenticate 'jaunty.tar.gz' against 'jaunty.tar.gz.gpg'

...a few minutes go by here...

1 package is going to be removed. 23 new packages are going to be
installed. 270 packages are going to be upgraded.

You have to download a total of 188M. This download will take about
15 minutes with your connection.

Fetching and installing the upgrade can take several hours. Once the
download has finished, the process cannot be cancelled.

Continue [yN] Details [d]y
Fetching

...25 minutes of downloading go by here...

At this point installs started and I answered various questions. I won't mention all of them, just hit the highlights...

I kept my version of the following files:

/etc/apache2/ports.conf and /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades
smb.conf

I went ahead and said "yes" to "17 packages are going to be removed."

Then I went ahead and answered yes to reboot and when the VM came back up, all looked good.

$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=9.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=jaunty
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 9.04"

VMWare tools were even running:

$ ps auxwww | grep vmware
root 2448 0.3 0.1 2204 660 ? Ss 22:21 0:02 /usr/sbin/vmware-guestd --background /var/run/vmware-guestd.pid

That's it.

Upgrading another VM, I saw the following message, which I thought was interesting. I went ahead and said "y":

Continue running under SSH?

This session appears to be running under ssh. It is not recommended
to perform a upgrade over ssh currently because in case of failure it
is harder to recover.

If you continue, a additional ssh daemon will be started at port
'9004'.
Do you want to continue?

whatismyip quit working for ddclient... change to checkip.dyndns.com

2009-04-24T22:11:00.004-04:00

Suddenly ddclient started generating errors trying to determine my local IP address:

/etc/cron.daily/ddclient:
WARNING: cannot connect to whatismyip.org:80 socket: IO::Socket::INET: connect: Connection timed out
WARNING: unable to determine IP address

Pointing a browser at whatismyip.org:80 seemed to confirm the site is down - just kept getting connection refused.

Well, time to find an alternative for whatismyip. Poking around with google, I found this page which described using checkip.dyndns.com. Following those directions I edited /etc/ddclient.conf and replaced the following line:

use=web, web=whatismyip.org

With:

use=web, web=checkip.dyndns.com/, web-skip='Current IP Address: '

And then ran ddclient again to check:

# /etc/cron.daily/ddclient
#

No output, all seems well....But no, it isn't. Visiting DynDNS indicates I still haven't updated my information recently. Remembering my previous experience with ddclient hanging, I checked for a hung process and sure enough, there was one:

# ps auxwww | grep ddcl
root 15725 0.0 0.0 7548 3032 ? S Mar29 0:00 ddclient - read from whatismyip.org port 80
root 30771 0.0 0.0 3240 804 pts/2 S+ 21:26 0:00 grep ddcl

So I killed it:

# kill -9 15725

And reran ddclient (I found I hat to use the -force flag to get it to do anything):

# /usr/sbin/ddclient -force

And all was good.

Trying out 'unattended upgrades' to replace cron-apt

2009-03-29T14:55:00.000-04:00

A while back I posted about a problem I was having with my auto update process sometimes getting hung up reinstalling a kernel update over and over. A reader left a comment about not having a similar problem with the "unattended upgrades" paclage.

I poked around the net, but could not find a lot of information about this package. The best information I found was this blog post on vanutsteen.nl, which was enough to go on.

At this point I've installed unattended upgrades on one of my virtual machines. I haven't noticed any difference so far, but I haven't had a kernel upgrade such as the one that caused my problems, so I'm in a waiting mode now.

Here is what I did to install unattended upgrades, based on the vanutsteen.nl post.

First, install the package and got rid of cron-apt:

# apt-get install unattended-upgrades update-notifier-common
# apt-get remove cron-apt

Then I edited /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades and uncommented the following line:

"Ubuntu intrepid-updates";

Then I edited /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic to look like:

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages "1";
APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "1";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";

That's it. I'll post again when I come to some conclusion about unattended upgrades vs cron-apt.

Redoing auto-updates to reduce email

2009-03-29T13:44:00.000-04:00

I've gotten a little tired about the amount of email I receive daily from my automatic daily package updates, particularly now that I've installed logwatch, which provides me with much of the same information.

I have two types of machines that I want to update:

Virtual machines that I just want to auto update and I don't want to hear about it unless there is an error. Yes, I understand I risk configuration problems, but so far this hasn't been a problem so I'm happy living on the edge.

My key server and my laptop. On these machines I do the conservative download the packages and once a week, on the weekend, I sit down and manually install them. (If some critical security update occurs, I assume I will hear about it via other channels and jump in manually).

On all systems: make cron-apt quiet
I started by editing cron-apt configuration on all my systems and configuring it so it only sends email on errors by changing the MAILON value to "error":

# vi /etc/cron-apt/config
# grep ^MAILON /etc/cron-apt/config
MAILON="error"

Key Server and Laptop
Then I turned to my server system and laptop. I want to run cron-apt daily and then once per week send me a reminder to update (assuming there is something to update, which generally there is). I could just run cron-apt weekly, but this way if there is a critical security update, it will already be downloaded and I just have to install it.

To run cron-apt dailly, I add it to /etc/cron.daily:

# ln -s /usr/sbin/cron-apt /etc/cron.daily/

Then I created the following script to send me a weekly reminder me to install the upgrades (based on the script from this page):

# vi /etc/cron.weekly/show-upgrades
# chmod +x show-upgrades

And here is the script:

#!/bin/sh
tmpFile=`mktemp`
apt-get --simulate dist-upgrade > $tmpFile 2>&1
if test $? -ne 0 ; then
   echo "Error running apt-get --simulate dist-upgrade:"
   cat $tmpFile
   rm -f $tmpFile
   exit 1
fi
grep Inst $tmpFile > /dev/null
if test $? -eq 0; then
   echo "Upgrades are pending. Run 'apt-get dist-upgrade' to install."
   grep Inst $tmpFile
   echo
   echo "Full output:"
   cat $tmpFile
fi
rm -f $tmpFile
exit 0

Virtual Machines
Now, turning to my virtual machines. What I wanted here was automatically daily upgrade of all new packages with no output unless there was an error. This involved editing to the auto-update script I had created previously:

# vi /etc/cron.daily/auto-update

Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/sbin/cron-apt
tmpFile=`mktemp`
/usr/bin/apt-get -y dist-upgrade > $tmpFile 2>&1
if test $? -ne 0 ; then
     echo "Error doing '/usr/bin/apt-get -y dist-upgrade':"
     cat $tmpFile
fi
rm -f $tmpFile

host clock rate changes again

2009-03-29T09:36:00.004-04:00

Updated April 16, 2009: And the answer is running 'vmware-config.pl', which I did recently after a kernel update, causes the 'host.useFastClock = FALSE' line to disappear from /etc/vmware/config.

Original post follows...

Argh, once again my syslog on my VMWare server was getting filled up with host clock rate change messages:

# tail /var/log/syslog
Mar 29 08:31:46 casey kernel: [1894820.064260] [925]: host clock rate change request 54 -> 58
Mar 29 08:31:57 casey kernel: [1894831.040153] [925]: host clock rate change request 58 -> 24
Mar 29 08:31:57 casey kernel: [1894831.040272] [925]: host clock rate change request 24 -> 54
Mar 29 08:31:59 casey kernel: [1894832.676158] [925]: host clock rate change request 54 -> 58

Once again "host.useFastClock = FALSE" was missing from /etc/vmware/config

Once again, I added it and restarted vmware (/etc/init.d/vmware restart).

Once again, this cleared up the problem.

I decided to add a daily check for this line to try and figure out why it disappears:

# vi check-vmware-config
# cat /etc/cron.daily/check-vmware-config
#!/bin/sh
grep "useFastClock" /etc/vmware/config > /dev/null
if test $? -ne 0 ; then
echo "WARNING: useFastClock line not found in /etc/vmware/config"
fi
# chmod +x /etc/cron.daily/check-vmware-config

Nothing to do now but sit back and wait....

ddclient woes

2009-03-29T09:09:00.004-04:00

I previously setup automatic updates of my dyndns account. This had been working fine, until this morning when I got the following email from DynDNS:

Your account vwelch at DynDNS.com is due to expire in 5 days.

DynDNS.com expires accounts that have no activity during a 30 day period.

So I logged into my server and checked to see what was going on. First thing I notices is I had a lot of ddclient processes running, hung reading from whatismyip.org:

# ps auxwww | grep ddclient | wc
23 386 2486
# ps auxwww | grep ddclient
...
root 22048 0.0 0.1 6196 4184 ? SN Mar10 0:00 ddclient - read from whatismyip.org port 80
root 24041 0.0 0.1 6196 4224 ? SN Mar24 0:10 ddclient - read from whatismyip.org port 80
root 24791 0.0 0.1 6196 4180 ? SN Mar17 0:00 ddclient - read from whatismyip.org port 80
root 26332 0.0 0.1 6196 4224 ? SN Mar11 0:04 ddclient - reading from whatismyip.org port 80
root 28622 0.0 0.1 6196 4224 ? SN Mar25 0:09 ddclient - read from whatismyip.org port 80

My guess here is that at some point there was a network problem that gummed verything up. I started by killing off all of these hung processes:

# killall -9 ddclient
# ps auxwww | grep ddclient
root 15680 0.0 0.0 3236 796 pts/1 S+ 08:12 0:00 grep ddclient

Looking at the daily cron script I had previously written, use of the '-daemon' flag seems wrong since I'm running it regularly from cron. When the script runs, I want it to do its thing and exit. So I took the -daemon flag out, leaving /etc/cron.daily/ddclient looking as follows:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/ddclient -syslog

After this, I ran the script and turned my browser to DynDNS and saw that my Last Updated field was current.

Using cronic to reduce "cram" (cron spam)

2009-03-18T21:04:00.004-04:00

I'm working on reducing the about of email I'm getting from my cron jobs. One thing I stumbled across is cronic. I used it as following to quiet my cron jobs.

First, to install it:

# wget -O /usr/local/bin/cronic http://habilis.net/cronic/cronic
...
# chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/cronic

Now to use it, edit your cron scripts to use cronic as a wrapper. Before:

# cat /etc/cron.daily/backup-web-server
#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/backup-web-server.py /etc/backup-web-server.conf

And after:

# vi /etc/cron.daily/backup-webserver
# cat /etc/cron.daily/backup-web-server
#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/cronic /usr/local/bin/backup-web-server.py /etc/backup-web-server.conf

That's it. Now unless your cron job either has output to stderr or returns non-zero, it will produce no output.

Fixing apt-cache-report.pl

2009-03-13T16:35:00.004-04:00

Update: Looks like this is fixed as of Ubuntu 9.04

I previously reported apt-cache-report was not working. In this post I will set about fixing it.

What I discoved is the apt-cacher log format has changed. Old log:

# gzip -dc /var/log/apt-cacher/access.log.6.gz | head -1
Thu Oct 30 22:01:39 2008|192.168.1.12|MISS|189|security.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_hardy-security_Release.gpg

New log:

# head -1 /var/log/apt-cacher/access.log
Tue Mar 10 01:45:59 2009|19924|127.0.0.1|EXPIRED|189|archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_intrepid-updates_Release.gpg

So the new format has an extra column (second column, I have no idea what it is) and rearranged a little. I started in changing /usr/share/apt-cacher/apt-cacher-report.pl to compensate for this. Not that it still needed to be able to parse the old logs, so some logic was involved to distinguish.

# cd /usr/share/apt-cacher/
# cp apt-cacher-report.pl apt-cacher-report.pl.orig
# vi apt-cacher-report.pl
# diff -c apt-cacher-report.pl.orig apt-cacher-report.pl


*** apt-cacher-report.pl.orig   2009-03-13 15:35:14.000000000 -0500
--- apt-cacher-report.pl        2009-03-13 17:04:45.000000000 -0500
***************
*** 109,121 ****
 {
       #$logfile_line =~ s/ /\+/g;
       @line = split /\|/, $logfile_line;
!       $req_date = $line[0];
! #     $req_ip   = $line[1];
!       $req_result = $line[2];
!       $req_bytes  = 0;
!       $req_bytes  = $line[3] if $line[3] =~ /^[0-9]+$/;
! #     $req_object = $line[4];
!
       $lastrecord = $req_date;
       if(!$firstrecord) {
               $firstrecord = $req_date;
--- 109,133 ----
 {
       #$logfile_line =~ s/ /\+/g;
       @line = split /\|/, $logfile_line;
!       if (scalar(@line) == 5)
!       {
!               # 5 columns == old format
!               $req_date = $line[0];
! #             $req_ip   = $line[1];
!               $req_result = $line[2];
!               $req_bytes  = 0;
!               $req_bytes  = $line[3] if $line[3] =~ /^[0-9]+$/;
! #             $req_object = $line[4];
!       } else {
!               # Assume new 6 column format
!               $req_date = $line[0];
!               # I don't know what $line[1] is
! #             $req_ip   = $line[2];
!               $req_result = $line[3];
!               $req_bytes  = 0;
!               $req_bytes  = $line[4] if $line[4] =~ /^[0-9]+$/;
! #             $req_object = $line[5];
!       }
       $lastrecord = $req_date;
       if(!$firstrecord) {
               $firstrecord = $req_date;

Now to test things, by rerunning apt-cacher:

# /etc/cron.daily/apt-cacher
...this takes a while (~5 min)...

And then I browsed to http://localhost:3142/report/ and now I see an updated report:

summary

Item	Value
Report generated	2009-03-13 17:04:50
Administrator	root@localhost
First request	Thu Oct 30 22:01:39 2008
Last request	Fri Mar 13 16:46:42 2009
Total requests	37119
Total traffic	11.487 GB

cache efficiency

	Cache hits	Cache misses	Total
Requests	24007 (64.67%)	13112 (35.32%)	37119
Transfers	8.018 GB (69.8%)	3.468 GB (30.19%)	11.487 GB

If anyone knows where I should submit this patch to, please drop me a comment.

Fixing MythTV Database: Table './mythconverg/credits' is marked as crashed

2009-03-07T10:22:00.007-05:00

My MythTV box became unresponsive earlier this week, prompting a power cycle. It seemed to come back up OK, except a cron job was spitting out the following email every 10 minutes:

DBD::mysql::st execute failed: Table './mythconverg/credits' is marked as crashed and last (automatic?) repair failed at /usr/share/perl5/MythTV/
Program.pm line 195.
DBD::mysql::st fetchrow_array failed: fetch() without execute() at /usr/share/perl5/MythTV/Program.pm line 196.

I tried backing up the database manually and got a similar error:

#/etc/cron.weekly/mythtv-database
mythconverg.credits
warning : Table is marked as crashed and last repair failed
warning : 1 client is using or hasn't closed the table properly
error : Found 123809 keys of 124267
error : Corrupt
mysqldump: Got error: 144: Table './mythconverg/credits' is marked as crashed and last (automatic?) repair failed when using LOCK TABLES

Using google turned up the solution. But I didn't find the optimize_mythdb.pl script where the poster indicated. I did find it elsewhere, copied it over and set permissions on it:

# mkdir /usr/share/mythtv/contrib
# cp /usr/share/doc/mythtv-backend/contrib/optimize_mythdb.pl /usr/share/mythtv/contrib
# chmod 755 /usr/share/mythtv/contrib/optimize_mythdb.pl

At this point I was able to run the script as the poster indicated:

# /usr/share/mythtv/contrib/optimize_mythdb.pl
Repaired/Optimized: `mythconverg`.`archiveitems`
Analyzed: `mythconverg`.`archiveitems`
....snip...

Now the backup script ran cleanly:

# /etc/cron.weekly/mythtv-database
#

The last thing I did, as the comments in the optimize_mythdb.pl script suggest, was add the script to the daily anacron list (update March 15, 2009: anacron apparently doesn't run scripts with a .pl suffix, so need to link this to a filename without the suffix):

# ln -s /usr/share/mythtv/contrib/optimize_mythdb.pl /etc/cron.daily/optimize_mythdb

Multumedia volume keys not working...

2009-02-14T17:45:00.004-05:00

Ever since I messed around with sound to get Skype and my USB headset working, my multimedia keys on the front of my laptop hadn't been working. The on-screen graphic would appear but nothing I did actually effected playback volume, basically exactly as this page described it:

If after assigning as described above, your VolumeUp/VolumeDown/Mute keys seem to work (i.e. you see a popup window with a slider in the middle of the screen that reacts on those key presses), but the playback volume actually remains unchanged, you may also have to setup what mixer tracks (channels) these keys should be bound to. Refer to this section below.

So, following the advice in the section referred to I opened System/Preferences/Sound and on the Device Tab I found the selectino for Default Mixer Tracks. It was set to "Logitech USB Headset (Alsa mixer)", I changed it to "Capture: ALSA PCM on front:0 (Intel ICH6) via DMA (PluseAudio Mix..." and now all works well.

Installing Apache and PHP on my Ubuntu laptop and configuring a virtual host

2009-02-07T13:30:00.015-05:00

I wanted to do some web development, so here's the process I used to install apache w/php and configure a virtual host on my Ubuntu laptop.

First, I followed these old directions as a starting point for installing Apache and php. But I found that the extra repositories were already added, Apache was already installed and after installing php5, libapach2-mod-php5 was already install, so all I really had to was:

# apt-get install php5

I test php functionality by creating a quick test file:

# vi /var/www/test.php
# cat /var/www/test.php

And pointing my browser at http://localhost/test.php and seeing "Hello World".

On thing I noticed is that I was getting the following error when restarting:

# apache2ctl restart
apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName

I fixed this by adding a ServerName directive to the Apache configuration (I actually don't think it matters what name you give):

# vi /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
# grep ServerName /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
ServerName localhost

Now, to install the virtual host so that I can test using code in my home directory. There are a number of sites out there if you google "apache vhost" and I didn't find any particularly good, so here is what I did.

For the sake of these directions, I'm going to use the name vhost.example.com and I'm going to put the name into /etc/hosts. This will allow me to see things exactly as they will appear on the live web site.

First I edit /etc/hosts and add an entry for the vhost:

# vi /etc/hosts
# tail -1 /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 vhost.example.com

Now it's time to edit the apache configuration:

# vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/myvhost.conf
# cat /etc/apache2/sites-available/myvhost.conf
NameVirtualHost vhost.example.com

<VirtualHost vhost.example.com>
DocumentRoot "/path/to/vhost/directory"
</VirtualHost>

<Directory /path/to/vhost/directory>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>

Depending on what you need to do, you may not need the block. I have some local php configuration, so I did.

Now enable the vhost:

# a2ensite myvhost.conf
Enabling site myvhost.conf.
Run '/etc/init.d/apache2 reload' to activate new configuration!# apache2ctl restart

One last snag, probably particular to how I handled my php, but I had the following .htaccess file in my vhost root:

AddHandler php-html .html
Action php-html /php/process.php

Which caused the following error whenever I tried to access the directory:

Invalid command 'Action', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

To fix this, I enabled the actions module:

# a2enmod actions
Enabling module actions.
Run '/etc/init.d/apache2 restart' to activate new configuration!

Now, just restart Apache:

# apache2ctl restart

And point my browser at http://vhost.example.com and everything worked.

Update 2/21/09: If you want to be able to run 'php' from the command-line, you should also install the php5-cli package (kudos):

# apt-get install php5-cli

apt-cacher report not updating

2009-02-01T10:03:00.006-05:00

Update Mar 13, 2009: I've now fixed apt-cacher-report.pl

I noticed this morning the amounts of hits and data transferred in my apt-cacher report are not updating. See report below, the date has changed but the values in the 'cache efficiency' table have not since my original install. Something is broken some where, either I'm not using the cache or it's not reporting correctly.

Don't have time at this moment to investigate, but will update this post when I do...

Updated: I started by killing apt-cacher to verify the clients were using it...

# /etc/init.d/apt-cacher stop
Stopping Apt-Cacher: apt-cacher.

And, yes, this caused 'apt-get update' on my client to return all sorts of 'Count not connect...' errors, so I know my previous configuration was working:

# cat /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/90local-proxy
Acquire::http::Proxy "http://proxy-host:3142";

So I restarted apt-cacher ("/etc/init.d/apt-cacher start") and looked at the server side harder.

First, I checked to see if there was anything in the cache, and there was lots of stuff including new packages as of today, including wine, which is only on one of my clients and not the server, which would seem to indicate things are working as I should expect:

# grep cache_dir /etc/apt-cacher/apt-cacher.conf

# cache_dir is used to set the location of the local cache. This can
cache_dir=/var/cache/apt-cacher

# du -s /var/cache/apt-cacher

1966256 /var/cache/apt-cacher
# ls -lt /var/cache/apt-cacher/packages | head -3
total 1947272
-rw-r--r-- 2 www-data www-data        0 2009-02-01 09:05 wine.budgetdedicated.com_apt_dists_intrepid_main_binary-i386_Packages.gz
-rw-r--r-- 2 www-data www-data        0 2009-02-01 09:03 wine.budgetdedicated.com_apt_dists_intrepid_Release

Ok, the issue would seem to be reporting. I checked relevant options in apt-cacher.conf and didn't see any issue.

# grep generate_reports /etc/apt-cacher/apt-cacher.conf
generate_reports=1

So I started looking a little harder at the apt-cacher logs and the /usr/share/apt-cacher/apt-cacher-report.pl script that generates the reports, and noticed a problem. Here's what a line in my logfile looks like:

# head -1 /var/log/apt-cacher/access.log
Sun Feb 1 08:22:01 2009|15927|192.168.1.125|MISS||ppa.launchpad.net_network-manager_ubuntu_dists_intrepid_Release.gpg

And here is the section of the apt-cacher/apt-cacher-report.pl script that parses it:

$req_date = $line[0];
# $req_ip = $line[1];
$req_result = $line[2];
$req_bytes = 0;
$req_bytes = $line[3] if $line[3] =~ /^[0-9]+$/;
# $req_object = $line[4];

If you don't understand PERl, basically there is a mismatch. The script is looking for the result (HIT or MISS) in the third column (column 2 starting from 0), but the IP address is there. It expects the number of bytes in column 4, but they are in column 2. So this would seem to be the problem, but why this discrepancy?

Update: See a later post for the fix.

Current apt-cacher report output (made narrow to fit into blow):

summary

Item	Value
Report generated	2009-02-01 09:02:18
Administrator	root@localhost
First request	Thu Oct 30 22:01:39 2008
Last request	Sun Feb 1 08:22:05 2009
Total requests	27678
Total traffic	1980.17 MB

cache efficiency

	Cache hits	Cache misses	Total
Requests	2569 (9.28%)	25109 (90.71%)	27678
Transfers	955.718 MB (48.26%)	1024.452 MB (51.73%)	1980.17 MB

Regenerating Apache SSL certificate for 10 years

2009-01-31T14:30:00.005-05:00

I noticed the SSL certificate I had previously generated for Apache had expired, so I set about generating a new one. This time I wanted to generate a really long-lived (10 year) certificate so I didn't have to deal with this again in a year.

I started by cleaning out the old certificate (you'll get an error later if you don't do this):

# rm /etc/apache2/ssl/*

Now I edited the Openssl configuration file to bump the lifetime to 10 years (3650 days):

# cp /usr/share/ssl-cert/ssleay.cnf /usr/share/ssl-cert/ssleay.cnf.orig
# vi /usr/share/ssl-cert/ssleay.cnf
# diff -c /usr/share/ssl-cert/ssleay.cnf /usr/share/ssl-cert/ssleay.cnf.orig
*** /usr/share/ssl-cert/ssleay.cnf 2009-01-31 13:37:24.000000000 -0600
--- /usr/share/ssl-cert/ssleay.cnf.orig 2009-01-31 13:36:58.000000000 -0600
***************
*** 7,13 ****
[ req ]
default_bits = 1024
default_keyfile = privkey.pem
- default_days = 3650
distinguished_name = req_distinguished_name
prompt = no
policy = policy_anything
--- 7,12 ----

Now I went ahead and generated the new certificate. The hostname was already filled in, so I just had to hit return at the only prompt.

# make-ssl-cert /usr/share/ssl-cert/ssleay.cnf /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem

Finally I took a peak at the generated certificate to make sure it had the 10 year lifetime. Looking at the "Not Before" and "Not After" fields in the output below shows the lifetime.

# openssl x509 -noout -text -in /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem
Certificate:
Data:
Version: 1 (0x0)
Serial Number:
9e:cd:82:bd:cb:03:19:d7
Signature Algorithm: sha1WithRSAEncryption
Issuer: CN=your.hostname.here
Validity
Not Before: Jan 31 19:37:42 2009 GMT
Not After : Jan 29 19:37:42 2019 GMT
Subject: CN=your.hostname.here
Subject Public Key Info:
Public Key Algorithm: rsaEncryption
RSA Public Key: (1024 bit)
Modulus (1024 bit):
00:c5:5a:c0:c9:d0:d8:e7:d9:69:ac:04:74:13:4f:
62:d5:7d:70:4f:47:60:a1:42:d7:26:6f:e1:ff:11:
fc:94:e7:70:6c:48:b7:46:87:62:14:81:91:59:f2:
43:d0:1c:76:5f:27:47:6a:f0:d6:e3:8d:2b:5f:9c:
53:56:12:56:cc:a4:0e:62:2c:a5:16:0a:e6:72:11:
a2:ea:89:a1:3c:82:9d:02:d8:01:4a:e3:25:b7:5f:
47:4b:bc:7a:98:ba:57:f0:15:17:74:fd:e5:8d:6a:
fd:cc:37:b2:a0:08:e8:a9:35:9b:2a:1a:9e:75:b1:
7d:dd:69:a4:ca:87:a4:ac:33
Exponent: 65537 (0x10001)
Signature Algorithm: sha1WithRSAEncryption
1a:e9:96:fb:02:c5:86:fa:4d:3b:84:3e:fb:88:b9:db:00:fe:
a7:89:15:bb:a0:af:72:13:2f:d3:0e:a5:ff:59:00:cb:ca:67:
e6:6e:3c:24:92:9b:0d:2d:d5:46:77:7d:a3:7f:68:b3:7d:d7:
38:09:bb:48:e9:96:17:ba:02:e4:59:48:06:66:9a:ee:9b:bc:
64:6e:c9:ea:da:57:18:f7:bb:21:b1:61:38:1a:3a:31:4c:0f:
f0:b5:6c:05:8f:4b:30:76:bb:68:b0:f2:a7:8e:ae:07:c5:7e:
16:f5:86:78:4f:2a:b0:b7:fe:21:be:a9:79:ee:89:6d:07:4a:
68:a9

Cron-apt and reboot needed...

2009-01-31T14:14:00.003-05:00

I've noticed that when cron-apt upgrades the kernel and I don't get around to rebooting the system that day, it will keep "reinstalling" the new kernel each night it runs until I reboot the system.

Not sure what to do about this at the moment. Guess it doesn't really hurt anything. Since there doesn't seem to be any way of automatically detecting if a reboot is needed, the only option would seem to be always reboot nightly.

Going to think about this for a while. If anyone has any suggestions, please comment away.

Kernel updates and VMWare

2009-01-31T14:01:00.003-05:00

I've noticed every time my kernel is updated, I have to rerun '/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl' before VMWare will start. So far I've always been able to just take the default options.

MythTV and disk management

2009-01-31T08:42:00.002-05:00

Just a quick note that I've watched MythTV manage the disk space I've allocated it and it seems to do a good job without any help from me. Logwatch sends me a daily email with the disk allocation, so I watch how MythTV handles things. I have allocated two disks partitions to MythTV, and while they are constantly almost full (with logwatch giving me the warning you see below), MythTV deletes old stuff deletes old recordings before anything becomes a problem.


--------------------- Disk Space Begin ------------------------

 Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  ...
 /dev/sda6             183G  170G  3.0G  99% /mnt/data
 /dev/sdb3             220G  203G  6.6G  97% /mnt/data2
 
 /dev/sda6 => 99% Used. Warning. Disk Filling up.
 /dev/sdb3 => 97% Used. Warning. Disk Filling up.

 ---------------------- Disk Space End -------------------------

Ubuntu Pocket Guide Available as a Free Download

2009-01-26T21:46:00.007-05:00

Via Lifehacker, the Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference is available for free as a PDF download (or you can buy it from Amazon for ~$10).

I've given it a quick scan and it looks like a great little reference guide.

Cloning a Ubuntu VM

2009-01-25T17:48:00.001-05:00

I haven't yet found a good set of directions on the net for cloning a Ubuntu VM. These directions are for cloning a 8.04 Ubuntu server VM (it happens to also be running in a Ubuntu server, but these should work for any linux server).

These directions assume your VMs use static IP addresses and you want to clone an existing VM called "myvm" to a new VM called "mynewvm" with its own IP address.

Make sure "myvm" has no snapshots, as this method won't work on a VM with snapshots (the disk rename step will fail).

Also make sure you close the original VM in VMWare-Server or you may get file-locking problems.

Ok, first change to the directory where the original VM is stored and copy the directory (this will take a few minutes):

cd /usr/lib/Virtual Machines
cp -ax myvm mynewvm

Now rename the disk:

cd mynewvm
/usr/bin/vmware-vdiskmanager -n myvm.vmdk mynewvm.vmdk

Now rename the configuration file and change the name of the VM in the file:

mv myvm.vmx mynewvm.vmx
sed -i "s/myvm/mynewvm/" mynewvm.vmx

Now in VM-Ware server, select "File" then "Open" and "Browse". Select the "mynewvm" directory and the "mynewvm.vmx" file in that directory. The new VM should appear in the Inventory list.

Select the new VM and boot it. At this point it won't appear on the network. You'll need to log into the console as root and do the following:

rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

At this point, you could reboot the VM and it will come back up with original IP and hostname, which will cause a conflict if the original VM is also on the network, so you might just want to go ahead and do the following while you're hear:

Change the hostname by editing /etc/hostname.

Then edit /etc/network/interfaces and change the 'address' line to reflect the new IP address you want the VM to have.

Finally, etc /etc/hosts, change the line for '127.0.1.1' to reflect the new hostname and add (probably at the end of the file, but really where ever you want) a new line for the new hostname, e.g/:

192.168.1.50  mynewvm

That should do it. Now just reboot the VM and it should come back up with the new IP and hostname.

Installing Eclipse on 8.10 Desktop

2009-01-19T10:35:00.001-05:00

Straight forward following these directions. I already had the OpenJDK Java Runtime installed. The Eclipse download took about 30 minutes.

Installing Skype on 8.10 Desktop and getting it to work with Logitech Headset

2009-01-18T14:13:00.008-05:00

Installing Skype on a Ubuntu 8.10 desktop turns out to be a piece of cake, getting it to work with my Logitech USB Headset was a little harder.

Installation of Skype was easy following these directions. First, I edited /etc/apt/sources.list to include the Skype repository:

# vi /etc/apt/sources.list
# tail -3 /etc/apt/sources.list
# SKYPE
deb http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/ stable non-free

Then I did the repository install and installed skype:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install skype

At this point Skype was installed and appeared under Applications -> Internet -> Skype

But when I tried to make a call Skype reported "Problem with Audio Playback" and nothing worked.

Long story short, these directions finally worked for me, specifically, here are the devices I used:

Sound in: Logitech USB Headset (pluhw:Headset,0)
Sound out: Logitech USB Headset (hw:Headset,0)
Ringing: Logitech USB Headset (hw:Headset,0)

During the time I worked on this problem I restarted pulseaudio, I don't know if this helped or not, but I'll mention it just in case:

# killall pulseaudio
# /etc/init.d/pulseaudio start

Following is more details on things I saw and what didn't work.

If I run System -> Preferences -> Sound, I see both ALSA and OSS versions of the Headset, but only the OSS version works (the ALSO version returns the following error when I try to test it: "audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink: Could not open audio device for playback.")

Trying to record with Applications -> Sound & Video -> Sound Recorder does not work.

"alsamixer -c 1" showed Logitech USB Headset, but I couldn't get anything further to work.

I tried these directions but I saw the same problem others did in that when I tried to remove pulseaudio, apt-get/aptitude wanted to remove ubuntu-desktop and I stopped there.

Here is the output from a couple commands:

# cat /proc/asound/cards 
 0 [ICH6           ]: ICH4 - Intel ICH6
                      Intel ICH6 with STAC9752,53 at irq 16
 1 [Headset        ]: USB-Audio - Logitech USB Headset
                      Logitech Logitech USB Headset at usb-0000:00:1d.3-2, full speed

# cat /proc/asound/devices
  2:        : timer
  3:        : sequencer
  4: [ 0- 4]: digital audio playback
  5: [ 0- 3]: digital audio capture
  6: [ 0- 2]: digital audio capture
  7: [ 0- 1]: digital audio capture
  8: [ 0- 0]: digital audio playback
  9: [ 0- 0]: digital audio capture
 10: [ 0]   : control
 11: [ 1- 0]: digital audio playback
 12: [ 1- 0]: digital audio capture
 13: [ 1]   : control

Installing a Tomato Router

2009-01-09T18:38:00.024-05:00

This post is off the topic of Ubuntu and on the topic of networking that supports my Ubuntu systems, but I figure that's fair game (hey, it's my blog).

I have gotten really frustrated with the reliability of my existing wireless access points (a Airport express and a Linksys WAP54G). Both would fail regularly, requiring a power cycle to make them functional again.

So, as a big open source advocate, I thought I'd give Tomato a try. I followed these directions at Lifehacker. For a router I ordered a Linksys-Cisco WRT54GL (chosen from the list of Tomato-supported devices).

At this point, let me jump ahead here and give you a heads up. I was not able to use Firefox from my Ubuntu box to upgrade the firmware (or do much of anything) on the WRT54GL. Anytime I tried to apply a change on any of its web pages, I got a "Connection Interrupted" error. I turned to google and found other people who had encountered this problem. Like them I had to use Konqueror to do the firmware installation. Konqueror was installed on my Ubuntu system easily enough:

# apt-get install konqueror

The other thing to do before you start is make sure you know all the configuration details of your current router as you might need them to configure the new router. In my case, my ISP (Comcast) required the WAN port have a specific MAC address. I suggest you just print the administration screens for reference.

I downloaded the latest version of the Tomato Firmware (Version 1_23.7). I followed these directions to install 7Zip to unpack this archive (it looks like there is now also a .zip version if you want to skip this step):

# apt-get install p7zip-full

And then I unpacked the archive:

% 7z e Tomato_1_23.7z
7-Zip 4.58 beta Copyright (c) 1999-2008 Igor Pavlov 2008-05-05
p7zip Version 4.58 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,1 CPU)

Processing archive: Tomato_1_23.7z

Extracting whr_install.bat
Extracting WR850G.bin
Extracting WRT54GS.bin
Extracting WRT54GSv4.bin
Extracting WRT54G_WRT54GL.bin
Extracting WRTSL54GS.bin
Extracting readme.htm
Extracting tomato.trx

Everything is Ok

Files: 8
Size: 16854823
Compressed: 2844464

Now I was ready to upgrade the router to the Tomato firmware. Before I started I plugged my laptop into wired network and disabled wireless (right-click on network applet and de-selected "Enable wireless").

Then I disconnected my old NAT router and put the WRT54GL in it's place. Your network will go away at this point but you should still be able to connect to the router by entering http://192.168.1.1 into your browser.

Even though my router was fresh out of the box, I went ahead and reset it to make sure. I fired up Konqueror (Firefox won't work for this...) and connected to the router at http://192.168.1.1 (by default the username is blank and the password is "admin").

Then under "Administration"/"Factory Default" I selected "Yes" and "Apply" to reset all the settings. Then I did a hard reset by holding the reset button on the back of the router for 30 seconds.

Ok, now I was ready to upgrade. I connected back to the router and selected "Administration"/"Firmware Update". I selected the file "WRT54G_WRT54GL.bin" from the upacked Tomato archive (see readme.htm from the Tomato archive if you have a different router) and started the upgrade. It took about two minutes to complete.

Now I logged into my brand new Tomato router. I pointed my web browser (you can change back to Firefox now) at http://192.168.1.1 and logged in using the username "admin" and password "admin" and I was in.

First things I did were the following:

Under "Administration" I set a new password (and I do strongly suggest you do this first).
I wasn't getting an IP address on the WAN side. I had to set my WAN MAC address to what my old router had been. I did that under "Advanced"/"MAC Address" by setting the value of "WAN Port". After applying that, I now had Internet connectivity on my wired connection.
Now, under "Basic"/"Network" I set the wireless SSID and Security (WPA2 Personal and shared key, aka password). After that was applied I disconnected my laptop's wired connection and was able to connect to the Internet through my wireless. Success!

The only other thing I did was under "Basic"/"Network" I set the Static DNS servers to those of OpenDNS.

I'll report back after a while on how the new router is doing.

My Mythbuntu box hung and host clock rate change requests again...

2009-01-02T21:30:00.000-05:00

I went to remotely log into my mythbuntu box today and found it was hung....

A quick power cycle and it came back up, now to poke around the log and figure out why...

Last message in kern.log and syslog wasn't very useful:

Dec 31 13:14:54 casey kernel: [2612801.476210] [3224]: host clock rate change request 36 -> 26

Hmmm, besides the fact my log files are filled with host clock rate change requests, which I've seen before, no clue as to why the system was hung.

Anyway, to fix the host clock rate change message, I checked /etc/vmware/config and yep, "host.useFastClock = FALSE" was missing. So I re-added it and restarted vmware ('/etc/init.d/vmware restart').

I still have no idea what caused the box to hang though.

USB devices not appearing in VMs

2008-12-13T09:15:00.002-05:00

Hmmm, I went to use a USB device in my Win XP win and it wasn't showing up (Under VM/Removable Devices/USB Devices). This sure seems familiar but I can't find a blog post about it. A quick google turned up this hint which I really remember doing before. In fact I have a /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh.dpkg.old file with the changes applied, so I know I did.

However when I re-applied those changes I got an error running the script (see end of post).

Poking around a little more I found this advice which seemed cleaner, except it was a little flawed, when I tried adding the line as given to /etc/fstab, it didn't help and I noticed that if I actually tried to invoke the line, I got the following error:

# mount /proc/bus/usb
[mntent]: line 10 in /etc/fstab is bad

The "usbfs" on the begining seemed wrong to me, so I dropped that, resulting in the following line:

/dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0

Then I restarted VMWare ("/etc/init.d/vmware restart") and my USB devices appeared!

Changes I made to /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh:

# diff -c mountdevsubfs.sh.orig mountdevsubfs.sh
*** mountdevsubfs.sh.orig 2008-12-13 08:19:38.000000000 -0600
--- mountdevsubfs.sh 2008-12-13 08:20:25.000000000 -0600
***************
*** 39,44 ****
--- 39,51 ----
   # Mount /dev/pts. Master ptmx node is already created by udev.
   #
          domount devpts "" /dev/pts devpts -onoexec,nosuid,gid=$TTYGRP,mode=$TTYMODE
+  #
+  # Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work so USB devices appear in VMWare
+  #
+  mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
+  domount usbfs "" /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
+  ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
+  mount --rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb
  }
  
  case "$1" in

Error from I got from those changes:

# /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh start
Usage: mount -V                 : print version
       mount -h                 : print this help
       mount                    : list mounted filesystems
       mount -l                 : idem, including volume labels
So far the informational part. Next the mounting.
The command is `mount [-t fstype] something somewhere'.
Details found in /etc/fstab may be omitted.
       mount -a [-t|-O] ...     : mount all stuff from /etc/fstab
       mount device             : mount device at the known place
       mount directory          : mount known device here
       mount -t type dev dir    : ordinary mount command
Note that one does not really mount a device, one mounts
a filesystem (of the given type) found on the device.
One can also mount an already visible directory tree elsewhere:
       mount --bind olddir newdir
or move a subtree:
       mount --move olddir newdir
One can change the type of mount containing the directory dir:
       mount --make-shared dir
       mount --make-slave dir
       mount --make-private dir
       mount --make-unbindable dir
One can change the type of all the mounts in a mount subtree
containing the directory dir:
       mount --make-rshared dir
       mount --make-rslave dir
       mount --make-rprivate dir
       mount --make-runbindable dir
A device can be given by name, say /dev/hda1 or /dev/cdrom,
or by label, using  -L label  or by uuid, using  -U uuid .
Other options: [-nfFrsvw] [-o options] [-p passwdfd].
For many more details, say  man 8 mount .
ln: creating symbolic link `/dev/bus/usb/devices': File exists

Installing logwatch

2008-11-20T22:36:00.002-05:00

I recently installed logwatch on all of my systems using these directions. Basically I just ran the following on reach system:

# aptitude install logwatch

Since I already had email to root forwarded to me, no other configuration was necessary. Now I get a nice daily email summary from each system.

NameVirtualHost *:80 has no VirtualHosts

2008-11-03T21:45:00.005-05:00

After upgrading to 8.10 I saw the following error on an Apache reload:

# apache2ctl restart
[Sun Nov 16 13:36:23 2008] [warn] NameVirtualHost *:80 has no VirtualHosts

Updated Nov 16, 2008: My first solution (below) didn't work, correct solution now immediately follows...

Looks like the problem was I had to NameVirtualHost statements, one in /etc/apache2/ports.conf and one in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.

To fix the problem, I simply commented on the declaration in /etc/apache2/ports.conf:

grep NameVirtualHost /etc/apache2/ports.conf
#NameVirtualHost *:80

Old solution I posted, that turned out, did not work.

To fix this, I added a ServerName directive, as follows:

<virtualhost *:80>
    ServerName hostname
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

Upgrading my laptop to Ubuntu 8.10 - network manager applet woes!

2008-11-02T09:54:00.011-05:00

After upgrading my Ubuntu servers to 8.10, I turned my attention to my Ubuntu laptop running Ubuntu desktop. I used the Network Upgrade for Ubuntu Desktops.

The upgrade went smoothly, though it took a few hours (much longer than the server upgrades) and seemed to go in spurts (perhaps because of apt-cacher?). I did get one pop-up message I noted for later:

Third party sources disabled

Some third party entries in your sources.list were disabled. You can re-enable them after the upgrade with the 'software-properties' tool or your package manager.

I installed new versions of:

/etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh

Files I kept:

/etc/services

55 obsolete packages were removed.

Afterwards, I rebooted and the fun began as the system couldn't connect to my wireless network. First thing I noticed was the following message in /var/log/messages:

Nov 1 16:31:32 von-laptop kernel: [ 470.051333] input: b43-phy0 as /devices/virtual/input/input14
Nov 1 16:31:32 von-laptop kernel: [ 470.256065] b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 351.126 (2006-07-29 05:54:02)
Nov 1 16:31:32 von-laptop kernel: [ 470.256080] b43-phy0 warning: You are using an old firmware image. Support for old firmware will be removed in July 2008.
Nov 1 16:31:32 von-laptop kernel: [ 470.256085] b43-phy0 warning: You must go to http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware and download the latest firmware (version 4).

Following the directions pointed to by the log message I ran the following command which installed new wireless drivers.

# /usr/share/b43-fwcutter/install_bcm43xx_firmware.sh

I rebooted and the driver message disappeared, but didn't fix the original problem and I still wasn't getting on the network.

So, next I connected to my wired network. Or at least I tried. Evening after plugging into my cat5 ethernet, I still wasn't getting a network connection. Very weird.

After poking around some I realized that the system was actually connecting to the wireless network, it's just that it wasn't getting an IP addresss via DHCP correctly. If I ran 'dhclient' manually, I got on the network just fine. Only problem was every few minutes the network manager tried to reconnect me, so I had to kill it ('killall nm-applet') to stay connected.

Next I tried upgrading to the latest network manager (as I did previously). I added the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list. Note these are the same lines I had before that the upgrade commented out, but with "hardy" changed to "intrepid".

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/ubuntu intrepid main

And upgraded via apt-get:

# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade

Which installed new versions of libnm-glib0, libnm-util0, and network-manager. And then I rebooted... and my network came back up!

Ok, lesson learned is apparently I need to be prepared to keep up to date with the network manager applet separately.

Update: One annoyance still remaining, my firefox is all messed up. Google toolbar and all my other extension buttons are gone. To get them back I had to disable the "Ubuntu Firefox Modifications" and then I was able to restore everything.

Getting VMWare back up and running under 8.10

2008-11-01T11:00:00.000-05:00

After upgrading to 8.10 VMWare wasn't working. I started by following these directions to install VMWare server.

Following that, I upgraded vmware-tools on each vm using these directions (I couldn't find any explicitly for 8.10).

Note that you'll want to do this from the console, as you'll lose networking during the process.

I ran into the following problem at one point:

Error: Unable to execute "/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl.

Following the advice in this thread, I ran vmware-tools-distrib/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl and though it returned a few errors itself, it cleared up the problem.

Things seemed to work OK, except the vmhgfs and vmxnet drivers both failed to build. I don't care about vmhgfs since I don't use shared folders, but vmxnet (the "fast network interface") sure sounds handy. So I hope to come back to this.

Upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10

2008-11-01T09:49:00.027-05:00

Ok, upgrading from 8.04 to 8.10. I started with my servers and followed the directions at Network Upgrade for Ubuntu Servers.

update-manager-core was already installed. I edited /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades and set "Prompt=normal", changing from "lts".

Then I tried running 'do-release-upgrade' and ran into my first problem:

# do-release-upgrade
Checking for a new ubuntu release
Failed Upgrade tool signature
Done Upgrade tool
Done downloading
extracting 'intrepid.tar.gz'
authenticate 'intrepid.tar.gz' against 'intrepid.tar.gz.gpg'
exception from gpg: GnuPG exited non-zero, with code 131072
Debug information:

gpg: WARNING: unsafe permissions on homedir `/tmp/tmpc88EwD'

gpg: can't open `/tmp/tmpc88EwD/intrepid.tar.gz.gpg'
gpg: verify signatures failed: file open error

Authentication failed
Authenticating the upgrade failed. There may be a problem with the network or with the server.

I suspected this has something to do with my use of apt-cacher. Poking around the net I found this bug which backed that up and provided a patch to apt-cacher.

Back on my caching system, I did the following to apply the patch:

# cp /usr/sbin/apt-cacher /usr/sbin/apt-cacher.orig
# vi /usr/sbin/apt-cacher
# diff /usr/sbin/apt-cacher.orig /usr/sbin/apt-cacher
111c111,112
<                  'Translation-.+\.bz2'
---
>                  'Translation-.+\.bz2',
>                    '[:alpha:]*\.tar\.gz\.gpg$'

And then I had to restart apt-cacher:

# /etc/init.d/apt-cacher restart
Restarting Apt-Cacher: apt-cacher.

Then back on my upgrading system, I ran 'do-release-upgrade' again and it worked fine.

On various systems, I installed the new version of:

/etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01ubuntu

I kept my versions of the following files:

/etc/apache2/apache2.conf
/etc/apache2/sites-available/default
/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
/etc/smb.conf
/etc/services
/etc/smb.conf
/etc/apt-cacher/apt-cacher.conf

I removed 19-20 obsolete packages and then answered "y" to reboot at the end. When the system came back up, all looked good:

$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=intrepid
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 8.10"

For my mythbuntu box, I followed the same network upgrade procedure as above. 54 obsolete packages were removed.

Still to go is getting VMWare back up and working and upgrading my Ubuntu laptop. Those will follow in separate posts.

Installing apt-cacher

2008-10-30T21:38:00.007-05:00

In preparation for upgrading to 8.10 I decided to install a apt-cacher on my home network. Basically I followed the directions at the link in the prior sentence with some tweaks as described below.

First, install:

# apt-get install apt-cacher

Then configure the deamon to always be on by editing /etc/default/apt-cacher and changing AUTOSTART=0 to AUTOSTART=1:

vi /etc/default/apt-cacher

Then I edited /etc/apt-cacher/apt-cacher.conf to restrict access to my local network. I also added the path_map directive, though I'm pretty sure I'm not using it right now.

# cd /etc/apt-cacher
# cp apt-cacher.conf apt-cacher.conf.orig
# diff apt-cacher.conf.orig apt-cacher.conf
40c40
< allowed_hosts=*---> allowed_hosts=192.168.1.0/24, 127.0.1.1
141a142,143
> path_map = debuntu repository.debuntu.org ; ubuntu archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu; ubuntu-updates archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu ; ubuntu-security security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
>

Ok, first addition to the directions here. Later when the anacron job /etc/cron.daily/apt-cacher ran, I got the following errors:

Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/share/apt-cacher//apt-cacher-lib.pl line 169, <$listpipe> line 244.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/share/apt-cacher//apt-cacher-lib.pl line 169, <$listpipe> line 245.

I found this bug report describing the error. Following the report, I edited /usr/share/apt-cacher/apt-cacher-lib.pl as described in the bug report.

Ok, now you are ready to fire up apt-cacher. The missing log messages happen the first time and then went away.

# /etc/init.d/apt-cacher restart
Restarting Apt-Cacher: apt-cacherWarning: /var/log/apt-cacher/access.log missing. Creating.
Warning: /var/log/apt-cacher/error.log missing. Creating.
.

At this point you should be able to point your web broser at http://cache-host:3142/ (replace "cache-host" with the actual IP or hostname of your host) and see the apt-cacher status page. You can also visit http://cache-host:3142/report/ to get a report of how well your cacher is doing, though it won't have any interesting content until it's been running for a day.

Then I imported existing package from /var/cache/apt/archives/ to apt-cacher repository:

# /usr/share/apt-cacher/apt-cacher-import.pl /var/cache/apt/archives

Ok, now to configure the client systems, including the system on which apt-cacher is running, I followed the advice from EWB's comment and created /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/90local-proxy on each system (again, replace cache-host with your actual IP address or hostname):

# vi /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/90local-proxy
# cat /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/90local-proxy
Acquire::http::Proxy "http://cache-host:3142";

Now you can do a apt-get update. Expect this to take a while the first time you run it.

# apt-get update

That's it. Just sit back and enjoy the caching.

Update: After upgrading 5 systems (1 server, 3 VMs and my laptop) to 8.10 using the cacher, here the stats from the report for the day showed it saved me 48% of my apt-get traffic (956MB out of 1980MB).

WPA on Dell Inspiron 6000: No luck

2008-10-27T22:26:00.005-05:00

My other system is a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop on which I also have Ubuntu 8.04 running. I tried moving my wireless to WPA today and had no luck getting the laptop working. Every time I entered the WPA passphrase, it would try to connect for 10 seconds and then prompt for the passphrase again.

I tried these directions to no avail.

I tried following the directions here and installing the latest and greatest network manager, but to no avail.

I tried disabling the Gnome Network Manager and following these directions, but no luck either.

This guy apparently just thinks I'm an idiot.

Anyone got WPA working on a Dell Inspiron 6000 with Ubuntu 8.04? Getting wireless working was a snap, but WPA is eluding me so far...

In case it maters, I have d a Broadcom BCM4318:

% lspci | grep Wireless
03:03.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

Update: Well the youtube guy was right, I'm an idiot :-) Turns out I must have had a cut'n'paste error when I set the password on my WPA network, so it worked from the machine I set it on (pasted the same password), but somehow I transcribed it wrong into my KeePass database. Once I got the right password, things work fine.

Turning off screen saving (one more time)...

2008-10-25T09:32:00.009-04:00

I've been wrangling with the screensaver and DPMS on my Mythbuntu box (see here and here).

At this point I've got DPMS off but still have one nagging issue - some screensaver is kicking on and I have to press a button on the remote to get it to turn off. Better than having to hit a key on the keyboard, but still not what I want - I just want to turn on the monitor and see my MythTV dammit.

First, I figured out that I could disable DPMS with the ~/.xsessionrc file, e.g:

$ cat ~/.xsessionrc
xset s noblank
xset s off
xset -dpms

Now, that should turn off the X screensaver too, but seems like something is still running. Ah, poking around I find I have gnome-screensaver running:

$ ps auxwww | grep gnome-screensaver
user 6086 0.0 0.1 15420 4908 ? Ss Oct19 0:32 gnome-screensaver

Poking around the net, I came across this thread, and I followed the directions to kill the gnome-screensaver:

$ killall gnome-screensaver
$ ps auxwww | grep gnome-screensaver
user 32499 0.0 0.0 3004 764 pts/1 R+ 08:34 0:00 grep gnome-screensaver

After that I played around a little and that did the trick - no more screensaver kicking on! So, following the directions a little further down in the thread I turned it off permanently:

$ gconftool-2 --type boolean -s /apps/gnome_settings_daemon/screensaver/start_screensaver false

So at this point I think I finally have all the screensavers, DPMS, etc. turned off on my MythBuntu box using the directions above.

Update 11/3/2008: Well, the gconftool-2 command above didn't persist through a reboot. So following these directions, I did the following (will update when I've confirmed if it worked or didn't):

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/gnome-screensaver/idle_activation_enabled false

Update 1/10/2009: Well, the above didn't work. Next I tried directions in this post. First, I ran "gconf-editor" from a command-line. Then I selected "Apps" and "gnome-screensaver". Under the options for "gnome-screensaver" I deselected the option for "idle_activation_enabled".

After that, I rebooted and re-ran gconf-editor to make sure the "idle-activation_enabled" variable was still de-selected and it was. I've been watching my mythtv system idle now for over an hour and no screensaver. Success finally.

Creating ssh-only account

2008-10-19T13:56:00.003-04:00

I wanted to create some accounts that could only be accessed via ssh key authentication. These would be accessed via cron jobs on another system for backing things up. Here's my process.

On the target host, create the account:

# useradd -m web-server-backup

You can verify this account has no password by the prescence of the "!" in the second field in /etc/shadow:

# grep web-server-backup /etc/shadow
web-server-backup:!:14171:0:99999:7:::

Now, back on the system that will be accessing the account, create a ssh key pair. Since this will be running unattended from cron, I will leave the password empty (i.e. just hit return):

# ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/root/.ssh/id_rsa):
Created directory '/root/.ssh'.
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): just hit return
Enter same passphrase again: just hit return
Your identification has been saved in /root/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
d3:ac:99:5f:9c:30:69:98:ad:ab:e9:e5:ef:34:38:bf root@web-server

Copy the public key you just created into your clipboard:

# cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEArh6BSw0F1Li/Oh1GbqF6uTv34P4e0Ow7NMco962aHe070vGjlyqIE3CrOU9d3/ztoL7QgalegWj7WfWQ44I8Jz0WGTzLcssYhvluaHzBp5z8QKVvmSpj39f43kAYP0b2GdUwGZL9AER72MRZSxmaybzGoVK12bPr6t18gaAWl9c3b1Ng8MFbp7vvNptfb6NwikfOaL4vTqRfNuVWv6vxaw3xfE+8iuI8ubckUCqrNfayVmfgCmxNS5o9GauHSAZdXhH1xDkZ0ikjo4SAjYz83/eyNdrwef6GTQj+FXwsaiGSpz9B0IOWt613+MhI/uoXRTO2jNzJstBcQa19GbX0Hw== root@web-server

Now on the target account, create ~/.ssh:and copy the public key into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys:

# sudo -u web-server-backup -i
$ mkdir ~/.ssh
$ chmod 700 ~/.ssh
$ cat > ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEArh6BSw0F1Li/Oh1GbqF6uTv34P4e0Ow7NMco962aHe070vGjlyqIE3CrOU9d3/ztoL7QgalegWj7WfWQ44I8Jz0WGTzLcssYhvluaHzBp5z8QKVvmSpj39f43kAYP0b2GdUwGZL9AER72MRZSxmaybzGoVK12bPr6t18gaAWl9c3b1Ng8MFbp7vvNptfb6NwikfOaL4vTqRfNuVWv6vxaw3xfE+8iuI8ubckUCqrNfayVmfgCmxNS5o9GauHSAZdXhH1xDkZ0ikjo4SAjYz83/eyNdrwef6GTQj+FXwsaiGSpz9B0IOWt613+MhI/uoXRTO2jNzJstBcQa19GbX0Hw== root@web-server
$ chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Now back on the accessing account, you should be able to access the target account without a password. The first time you do this you will be prompted to trust the host key of the target system, so you should do this once to make this process without prompt.

# ssh -l web-server-backup file-server date
The authenticity of host 'file-server (192.168.1.12)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 4c:7a:f0:ba:0f:60:45:4b:b8:f1:cc:17:88:59:74:f0.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'file-server,192.168.1.12' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
Sun Oct 19 13:06:52 CDT 2008

Now it should work seamlessly:

# ssh -l web-server-backup file-server date
Sun Oct 19 13:08:19 CDT 2008

sbackup without GUI

2008-10-12T19:58:00.007-04:00

I recently wanted to install and run sbackup without using the GUI interface (this was on my mythbuntu system and I didn't want to interrupt my show). Not that the sbackup package unfortunately requires X11 and Gnome, so you can't use it on a lean server system.

Start by installing it:

# apt-get install sbackup

The configuration is in /etc/sbackup.conf, edit this file. Basically you want to set your target and then under [dirconfig] set what paths you want backed up.

# cp /etc/sbackup.conf /etc/sbackup.conf.orig
# vi /etc/sbackup.conf
# diff /etc/sbackup.conf.orig /etc/sbackup.conf
8,9c8,9
< target=/var/backup
< #target=ssh://user:pass@example.com/home/user/backup/
---
> #target=/var/backup
> target=ssh://casey-backup@file-server/mnt/backups/casey
37,38c37,38
< /usr/local/=1
< /var/=1
---
> /usr/local/=0
> /var/=0

You can test your configuration by running /usr/sbin/sbackupd (this returns nothing for me, which apparently indicates success):

# /usr/sbin/sbackupd

Now install a cron job to run it (this one runs it every night at 12:30):

# cat /etc/cron.d/sbackup
30 12 * * * root test -x /usr/sbin/sbackupd && /usr/sbin/sbackupd

MythMusic

2008-10-12T19:04:00.005-04:00

Just a quick entry about getting music playing working on MythBuntu. Basically just follow the directions at the MythTV MythMusic page.

Some configuration I did:

Under Utilities/Setup->Setup->Media Settings->Music Settings ->Player Settings->screen 1 check "show entire music tree"
On screen 3 set up some vizualizers
Under Utilities/Setup->Setup->Media Settings->Music Settings ->Ripper settings->screen 2, set the following:
- Encoding: Lame (MP3)
- Default Rip Quality: Medium
- Enable "Use variable bitrates"

That's it for playing.I still can't import CD's at this point - it causes mythtv-frontend to crash! Looks like this bug.

Auto-updates under mythbuntu

2008-10-12T18:48:00.003-04:00

Seems like mythbuntu doesn't install any sort of auto-update process, so I did the following to set one up.

First, I installed cron-apt:

# apt-get install cron-apt

Then, I created the following cron job:

# crontab -e
# crontab -l | tail -1
0 1 * * * /usr/bin/cron-apt && /usr/bin/apt-get -y dist-upgrade

Adding more space for MythTV

2008-10-12T17:24:00.005-04:00

I noticed that my mythtv data directory was almost full:

# df | grep data
/dev/sda6 190957912 176125932 5208248 98% /mnt/data

Since I had 256GB of disk I wasn't using, I decided to add that as a second data directory for MythTV. So I mounted this partition as /mnt/data2 and then created /mnt/data2/mythtv

I then made sure mythtv owned the new directory:

# chown mythtv:mythtv /mnt/data2/mythtv

Then I added this directory to the default MythTV storage group, which was the usual MythTV menu hell:

Select "Utilities/Setup"

Select "Setup"

Select "MythBuntu" and enter root password when prompted

Select "MythTV Configuration"

Select "Launch MythTV Setup"

Select "Storage Directories"

Select "Default"

Select "Add New Directory"

Enter the name of the new directory (e.g. "/mnt/data2/mythtv")

Hit Escape 3 times to start exiting out

At this point I was presented with a warning that *none* of my mythtv data directories were writable. After double checking that I entered it right and that the directories were actually writable by themythtv user, I selected "No, I know what I'm doing"
Continue to exit out of menus by selecting "OK"

I canceled running mythfilldatabase

At this point things seemed to hang for 20-30 seconds with me just starting at a blank MythTV background. I think you just wait it out. I hit escape a couple times, but don't know that actually did anything.

Select "Quit"

Hit Escape until you get back to the top-level MythTV menu and then select "Information Center"

Select "System Status"

Under "Machine" you should now see the second directory listed.

More memory and another hard disk...

2008-10-05T13:10:00.004-04:00

Running the VMs, I was concerned about memory, being that the system only had a GB, which doesn't got far with VMs running. Looking in the system I saw it had two free slots, so I found 2 GB cheap and intstalled them and all looked good after booting:

$ dmesg | grep Memory
[ 19.312226] Memory: 3041212k/3079040k available (2177k kernel code, 36516k reserved, 1006k data, 368k init, 2161536k highmem)

I also installed another hard drive. I had already filled to the two bays at the bottom front (the original drive plus one more), but I found that a third drive could be put into an open bay under the CD-rom drive. I don't see any way of nicely adding a fourth though...

Upgrading Mediawiki

2008-10-03T07:33:00.006-04:00

There was an announcement of a security update to mediawiki, so I upgraded. Here are the steps that worked for me, based on the directions at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading_MediaWiki.

Download the latest version:

# cd /tmp
# wget http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.13/mediawiki-1.13.2.tar.gz

Stop Apache:

# /etc/init.d/apache2 stop

Backup the database:

# mysqldump --all-databases --xml -p > db-backup.xml
Enter password:
root@web-server:~# ls -l db-backup.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6008760 2008-10-03 06:34 db-backup.xml

Backup my current wiki directory:

# cd /var/www
# tar cvfz wiki-backup.tar.gz wiki/

Installed the new software:

# tar xvfz /tmp/mediawiki-1.13.2.tar.gz -C wiki/ --strip-components=1

I didn't have AdminSettings.php, so I created that, setting values for wgDBadminuser and wgDBadminpassword:

# cd wiki
# cp AdminSettings.sample AdminSettings.php
# vi AdminSettings.php

Ran update.php:

# cd maintenance/
# php update.php
MediaWiki 1.13.2 Updater

Going to run database updates for wikidb-mw_
Depending on the size of your database this may take a while!
Abort with control-c in the next five seconds...0
...have ipb_id field in ipblocks table.
...snip...
Deleting old default messages (this may take a long time!)...Done
Checking site_stats row...ok.
Purging caches...done.
Done.

Restart Apache:

# /etc/init.d/apache2 start
* Starting web server apache2
...done.

And fired up a web browser and tested. Everything looked good.

Redirecting / to /mythweb

2008-09-29T23:45:00.002-04:00

Minor tweak to make connections to http://host/ on my mythweb host redirect automatically to mythweb. Add the following to the beginning of /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/mythweb.conf (before the Directory declaration):

RedirectMatch ^/$ /mythweb/

And restart Apache:

# /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Configuring automatic update of IP address in DynDNS and OpenDNS

2008-09-29T22:55:00.010-04:00

Updated March 29, 2009: Removed '-daemon 300' flag from /etc/cron.daily/ddclient script.

I wanted to configure automatic updating of the dynamic IP address assigned by my ISP to both OpenDNS and DynDNS. I did this using ddclient.

Directions for configuring ddclient for OpenDNS can be found here and directions for DynDNS can be found here.

Here's what I did:

# apt-get install ddclient
I went ahead and entered configuration for DynDNS during the install when prompted.
# vi /etc/ddclient.conf
# cat ddclient.conf
# Configuration file for ddclient
#
# /etc/ddclient.conf

pid=/var/run/ddclient.pid
ssl=yes
protocol=dyndns2
use=web
server=members.dyndns.org
login=dyndns-login
password=dyndns-password
my-addr.dyndns.org

##
## OpenDNS.com account-configuration
##
use=web, web=whatismyip.org
server=updates.opendns.com
protocol=dyndns2
login=opendns-login
password=opendns-password
OpenDNS-Network-Label

# chmod 600 /etc/ddclient.conf
# vi /etc/cron.daily/ddclient
# cat /etc/cron.daily/ddclient
#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/ddclient -syslog

# chmod +x /etc/cron.daily/ddclient

Installing Samba on Ubuntu Server

2008-09-28T15:23:00.018-04:00

Previously I had installed Samba via the Ubuntu desktop, but now I wanted to do it on Ubuntu server.

First, I installed samba:

apt-get install samba

At the end of the install on my VMWare host system, I got the warning below:

--------- IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR XINETD USERS ----------
The following line will be added to your /etc/inetd.conf file:

## netbios-ssn     stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/sbin/tcpd  /usr/sbin/smbd

If you are indeed using xinetd, you will have to convert the
above into /etc/xinetd.conf format, and add it manually. See
/usr/share/doc/xinetd/README.Debian for more information.
-----------------------------------------------------------

I didn't end up having to do anything special, but wanted to mention it anyways.

Next, I edited /etc/samba/smb.conf to look like the one below. (You'll want to replace "username" with an actual username or list of usernames.)

 
[global]
   workgroup = WORKGROUP
   server string = %h server (Samba, Ubuntu)
# This will prevent nmbd to search for NetBIOS names through DNS.
   dns proxy = no

# This tells Samba to use a separate log file for each machine
# that connects
   log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m

# Cap the size of the individual log files (in KiB).
   max log size = 1000

# Do something sensible when Samba crashes: mail the admin a backtrace
   panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d

# "security = user" is always a good idea. This will require a Unix account
# in this server for every user accessing the server.
   security = user
   encrypt passwords = true
   passdb backend = tdbsam
   obey pam restrictions = yes
   invalid users = root
# This option controls how nsuccessful authentication attempts are mapped 
# to anonymous connections
   map to guest = bad user
   socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192

[tmp]
   comment = tmp
   path = /tmp
   valid users = username
   writable = yes
   create mask = 0644
   directory mask = 0755

You can validate your smb.conf file by running 'testparm', e.g:

# testparm -s
Load smb config files from /etc/samba/smb.conf
Processing section "[music]"
Loaded services file OK.
...

Restart Samba:

# /etc/init.d/samba reload
* Reloading /etc/samba/smb.conf smbd only
...done.

Add samba users via smbpassword:

smbpasswd -a username

That's it.

BTW, one tidbit, if you get "Error code -6602" on the client, this is caused by a non-existent path in /etc/samba/smb.conf.

mythtv-status missing config errors

2008-09-28T14:08:00.004-04:00

The following cron job, running as root, kept emailing me output complaining about "No config found":

[ -x /etc/init.d/mythtv-status ] && /etc/init.d/mythtv-status reload > /dev/null

Replicating it from the commandline worked:

# mythtv-status > /dev/null
No config found; attempting to find mythbackend via UPnP.

After playing around a bit, I figured out it was coming from the MythTV Perl module:

# perl -e "require MythTV"
No config found; attempting to find mythbackend via UPnP.
No backends found. Please copy /root/.mythtv/config.xml from a working MythTV installation instead.
Compilation failed in require at -e line 1.

Copying ~/.mythtv/config.xml from the mythtv account to the root account solved the problem.

Locking, but not expiring, root

2008-09-28T11:18:00.008-04:00

I don't want to allow direct root login (not just via ssh as described here but via console or any other way. Basically I want to make it so everything has to go through sudo. (Why? Because I like the fact everything is traceable back to given user.)

I had previously tried using 'passwd -l' as root to lock that account, but that seems to have the unwanted side effect of causing root's cron jobs to fail, as I see the following message in syslog whenever a roon cron job comes time to run:

CRON[11591]: User account has expired

The solution I found is as follows. Before you do this you want to make sure you have the ability to do things as root via sudo, or you will lock yourself out (see here for directions on this).

First, I undid what I did before and unlock the account (skip this if you didn't previously lock the root account):

# passwd -u root
Password changed.

Then edit /etc/shadow by hand and change root's password field to "!", e.g.:

# grep root /etc/shadow
root:!:14145:0:99999:7::1:

Just to make sure test the setup by running 'ssh -l root localhost' and try logging in. You shouldn't be able to.

/dev/vmon: host clock rate change request syslog messages

2008-09-28T11:15:00.005-04:00

On my VMWare host system I was seeing frequent (2-3/minute) syslog messages like the following that was making my syslog really hard to view:

/dev/vmmon[12315]: host clock rate change request 26 -> 30

Searching around on the net, a number of other people have seen this problem. I tried several things before finding one that worked for me.

First that that didn't work for me, based on this thread, I tried removing powernowd ('apt-get remove powernowd') but that offered no change.

Next thing that didn't work, based on this blog page, I followed the advice on this vmware knowledge based page:

# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "MHz"
cpu MHz : 2400.000
# vi /etc/vmware/config
# tail -3 /etc/vmware/config
host.cpukHz = 2400000
host.noTSC = TRUE
ptsc.noTSC = TRUE

and restarted vmware ('/etc/init.d/vmware restart'), but no luck.

Finally, what worked, even though it wasn't supposed to solve my problem, was, based on this page, I added the following to/etc/vmware/config:

host.useFastClock = FALSE

and restarted vmware ('/etc/init.d/vmware restart'). And that did it! No more syslog message about clock rate changes.

To clean up, I re-installed powernowd ('apt-get install powernowd') and that didn't seem to have any ill effects. I left all the changes to /etc/vmware/config.

Changing the mythweb password

2008-09-27T17:15:00.002-04:00

The Mythbuntu installation of mythweb uses htdigest instead of htpassword, with a domain of "MythTV":

# htdigest /etc/mythtv/mythweb-digest MythTV mythtv
Adding user mythtv in realm MythTV
New password:
Re-type new password:

Getting outgoing email working

2008-09-27T15:56:00.005-04:00

I wanted outgoing email to work (should have done this a while ago). I basically followed these directions with one importance exception. When I ran "dpkg-reconfigure postfix" and it asked "Other destinations to accept mail for (blank for none):" I made this field "localhost, localhost.localdomain" - the default included the FQDN I entered for "mail name" which caused all email to that FQDN to be tried to delivered locally, which I didn't want.

This page was useful for figuring out by ISP's SMTP server.

If you have problems, look at the logs in /var/log/mail.*

Once I was sure everything was working, I added .forward files for all the users to redirect to my normal, external email account.

MythBuntu MythTV Tweaks

2008-09-24T21:06:00.009-04:00

After getting MythBuntu installed, I did the following tweaks to MythTV:

Disabling DPMS (screen power saver): Previously I did it with the session manager, but Mythbuntu doesn't have the equivalent. So based on this thread, I did the following:
$ vi ~/.xsessionrc
$ cat ~/.xsessionrc
xset s noblank
xset s off
xset -dpms
Now restart desktop so changes take effect
$ sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart
Updated Oct 24, 2008: I later also disabled the gnome-screensaver
I was still getting commercials during playback of recorded shows. Poking around it seemed like all the options for commercial remove were select, but then I found under Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings -> Playback on screen 8 "Automatically Skip Commercials" which I set to "Automatically Skip"
I wanted my familiar Blootube theme back. I found this under Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> Appearance on screen 1.
I wanted channel changing during live TV to take effect immediately. This was done with a combination of two options: Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings -> General screen 1, select "Change channels immediately without select", and Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings -> Playback OSD screen 1, unselect "Always use Browse Mode"
Under Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings -> Playback, screen 2, I set "Action on playback exit" to "Save Position and exit" and "Prompt at end of Recording".
Configured MythFillDatbase to run automatically. Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings -> General screen 6, enable "Automatically run mythfilldatabase". For "Arguments" I used "--refresh-all --quiet" and for "Log Path" I used "/tmp/mythfilldatabase.log". Everything else I left as is.
Next I wanted to get the extra buttons on my remote working. So under Utilities/Setup -> Edit Keys I bound keys to the various screens I wanted shortcuts to under "JumpPoints". (Hint: to jump to the "Watch Recordings" screen, use the "TV Recording Playback" action as the target.)

A hint, run "irw" as root and press keys on your remote to figure out their names, e.g. the following shows me pressing the Blue and Go keys:
# irw
00000000000017a9 00 Blue Hauppauge_350
00000000000017a9 01 Blue Hauppauge_350
00000000000017a9 02 Blue Hauppauge_350
00000000000017bb 00 Go Hauppauge_350
00000000000017bb 01 Go Hauppauge_350
00000000000017bb 02 Go Hauppauge_350

The I edited ~/.lirc/mythtv and bound the remote commands to those keys (the "config" option).
$ cd ~/.lirc
$ cp mythtv mythtv.orig
$ vi mythtv
$ diff -c mythtv.orig mythtv
*** mythtv.orig 2008-09-24 21:05:35.000000000 -0500
--- mythtv 2008-09-24 21:39:34.000000000 -0500
***************
*** 733,738 ****
--- 733,774 ----
begin
remote = Hauppauge_350
prog = mythtv
+ button = Blue
+ config = d
+ repeat = 0
+ delay = 0
+ end
+
+ begin
+ remote = Hauppauge_350
+ prog = mythtv
+ button = Videos
+ config = r
+ repeat = 0
+ delay = 0
+ end
+
+ begin
+ remote = Hauppauge_350
+ prog = mythtv
+ button = TV
+ config = l
+ repeat = 0
+ delay = 0
+ end
+
+ begin
+ remote = Hauppauge_350
+ prog = mythtv
+ button = RED
+ config = m
+ repeat = 0
+ delay = 0
+ end
+
+ begin
+ remote = Hauppauge_350
+ prog = mythtv
button = 7
config = 7
repeat = 0

Next I tried restarting lirc:

sudo /etc/init.d/lirc restart

But that just caused my remote to stop working with mythtv all together, so I rebooted and all worked fine.

Wow, if it is possible for something to have too many options, MythTV is guilty...

Mythbuntu install

2008-09-21T12:03:00.011-04:00

Ok, I had previously gotten my MythTV configuration messed up, so I decided I had been itching to try Mythbuntu, I would start with a fresh installation.

Here I the steps I took:

Downloaded Mythbuntu 8.04.1 and burned to a CD.

Booted CD and ran the Mythbuntu installer.

I used the Manual partitioner and partitioned my 250GB disk into a 50GB partition for the OS and a 200GB partition for program storage. (This worked out, at the end I'm still only using <2GB of the 50GB partition.)

Did the Advanced Install and took the default for everything except:
- I disable the Samba Service.
- I set passwords on mythweb and mysql servers.

I enabled a "Hauppage TV card" remote.

It then did it thing and then launched Mythtv-setup (I already have a schedules direct account). In mythtv-setup I did the following:

Under "Capture Cards", I added a new capture card. As I did previously I used MPEG-2 encoder card (PVR-x50, PVR-500) for my WinTV-PVR 250.

Under "Video Sources", I added my Schedules Direct lineup. It retrieved my lineup just fine.

Under "Input Connections", I set the Tuner 1 video source to Schedules Direct and fetched the channels from listings source.
Under "Storage Groups", I added the directory to the 200GB partition to the Default group.

I exited from mythtv-setup and mythfilldb ran. It then restarted, ejecting the CD for me.

After the system came up, the MythTV fronend started. I could see a full program guide under Manager Recordings/Schedule Recordings/Program Guide which was good.

But "Watch TV" didn't work; the screen would just blank and then come back to the menu. Hmmm, there was a little popup in the corner about restricted drivers. I exited MythTV and clicked on the little "driver icon" in the upper right of the desktop. A menu came up wanting to know if I wanted to enable "NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver". I enabled and it tried to install nvidia-glx-new_169.12 but got a 404 error.

I opened a Terminal and run 'sudo apt-get update' and then tried the driver enable again and it worked. I then rebooted.

Damn. Watching TV still didn't work.

Under Setup/Mythbuntu, there is a Propriety Drivers section and I installed the NVIDIA configuration utility and ran it. Ran fine, and I didn't do anything with it. But it just locked up my display when I tried to quit it.

Ah, after reading the advice here and looking in /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend, that provided the missing clue:

2008-09-22 21:52:33.292 TFW, Error: Opening file '/mnt/data/mythtv/1002_20080922215232.mpg'.
eno: Permission denied (13)

The directory /mnt/data was where I had mounted the 200GB partition and then I had created mythtv but I (i.e. the user I had provided during installation) owned it. Apparently, the mythtv user needed to own it.

# chown mythtv:mythtv /mnt/data/mythtv/

And now Watch TV worked!

Some minor administration followed:

Reset static IP address using directions here. Note that as soon as I changed /etc/networks/interfaces, the eth0 network went away and I had to run '/etc/init.d/networking restart' to restore it.

Installed some utils I like:
apt-get install screen cvs

Ran '/usr/bin/apt-get -y dist-upgrade' to update everything.

Ran 'apt-get autoremove' to clean up

And a reboot after all of that...

Ok, everything seems to be basically working at this point except for some minor tweaks with the remote and channgel changing with mythtv. But I got a bunch of recordings scheduled and that's enough for tonight.

Testing web server with nikto

2008-09-14T18:01:00.003-04:00

I wanted to give my web server a quick test for any major security problems. nikto was recommended to me as a good way to do that. I downloaded and installed (unpacked really) it:

# cd /tmp
# wget http://www.cirt.net/nikto/nikto-current.tar.gz
# tar xvfz nikto-current.tar.gz
# mv nikto /usr/local/nikto-2.03

And then I ran it against my webserver. Seems like a number of software packages are out of date, but are the freshest in the Ubuntu repositories. All together, nothing I'm concerned about.

# /usr/local/nikto-2.03/nikto.pl -h web-server
- Nikto v2.03/2.04
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
+ Target IP: 192.168.1.11
+ Target Hostname: web-server
+ Target Port: 80
+ Start Time: 2008-09-15 16:58:59
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
+ Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.3 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.8g
- Root page / redirects to: /wiki/
+ Apache/2.2.8 appears to be outdated (current is at least Apache/2.2.9). Apache 1.3.39 and 2.0.61 are also current.
+ PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.3 appears to be outdated (current is at least 5.2.6RC4)
+ mod_ssl/2.2.8 appears to be outdated (current is at least 2.8.31) (may depend on server version)
+ mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.8g - mod_ssl 2.8.7 and lower are vulnerable to a remote buffer overflow which may allow a remote shell (difficult to exploit). http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CAN-2002-0082.
+ OSVDB-3268: GET /icons/ : Directory indexing is enabled: /icons
+ OSVDB-3233: GET /icons/README : Apache default file found.
+ 3577 items checked: 6 item(s) reported on remote host
+ End Time: 2008-09-15 17:00:48 (109 seconds)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
+ 1 host(s) tested

Test Options: -h web-server
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Installing VMware sevrer on Ubuntu server

2008-09-14T17:25:00.004-04:00

I had previously installed vmware-server 1.0.7 on by ubuntu laptop, so now I went to install it on my server system, but I ran into the following when vmware-config.pl was running:

None of the pre-built vmmon modules for VMware Server is suitable for your
running kernel. Do you want this program to try to build the vmmon module for
your system (you need to have a C compiler installed on your system)? [yes]

Using compiler "/usr/bin/gcc". Use environment variable CC to override.

Your kernel was built with "gcc" version "4.2.3", while you are trying to use
"/usr/bin/gcc" version "4.2.4". This configuration is not recommended and
VMware Server may crash if you'll continue. Please try to use exactly same
compiler as one used for building your kernel. Do you want to go with compiler
"/usr/bin/gcc" version "4.2.4" anyway? [no]

Ok, so off to the web for help and I came across this thread. I tried installing gcc-4.2.3 as suggested, but no luck:

# dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/gcc_4%3a4.2.3-1ubuntu6_i386.deb
(Reading database ... 188652 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace gcc 4:4.2.3-1ubuntu6 (using .../gcc_4%3a4.2.3-1ubuntu6_i386.deb) ...
Removing old gcc doc directory.
Unpacking replacement gcc ...
Setting up gcc (4:4.2.3-1ubuntu6) ...

root@casey:/tmp/vmware-server-distrib# ls -l /usr/bin/gcc*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 2008-09-14 16:28 /usr/bin/gcc -> gcc-4.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 206692 2008-03-11 04:37 /usr/bin/gcc-4.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 193372 2008-09-10 14:14 /usr/bin/gcc-4.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 16312 2008-03-11 04:32 /usr/bin/gccbug-4.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2018 2007-06-04 19:59 /usr/bin/gccmakedep
root@casey:/tmp/vmware-server-distrib# gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.2.4 (Ubuntu 4.2.4-1ubuntu1)
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

So, I went with the comment from ztirffritz and build with gcc 4.2.4. So far it seems to be working.

Connect to Server and Bookmarks

2008-09-14T17:10:00.003-04:00

In case you haven't discovered Ubuntu's "Connect to Server" feature you should. If you are administering, or even accessing multiple systems, it's a big help. Basically you can make any remote host you have ssh access to appear as a Nautilus (i.e. file browser) folder on your local system.

Under "Places" click on "Connect to Server". For "Service type" select "SSH". Under Server put in the remote hostname. You can probably leave Port and Folder empty. If your User Name differs on the remote system, put that in under "User Name". If you want to save it as a Bookmark for easy future connections, click "Add Bookmark" and give it a name.

Click connect. If you are running SSH-Agent and have your keys set up appropriately, you'll need to enter nothing further, you should just get a open window showing the filesystem on the remote machine. Otherwise you'll be prompted for a password.

BTW, you can access and edit your bookmarks on any open Nautilus window under the Bookmarks menu.

Installing VMware server 1.07

2008-09-14T16:57:00.003-04:00

I saw there was a new version (1.07) of vmware-server available, so I went ahead and pulled it down and installed it.

One thing I quickly figured out was you can't skip running /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl - if you do that you won't find the VMWare Server Console in your Applications menu. I did just take the default answer for everything.

Once that was done I tried firing up the Console, but it wouldn't start. No error message, it would just appear in the task list and then disappear. Trying to run it from the commandline resulted in the following error:

# /usr/bin/vmware
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)

Ok, time to google and, as usual, the net comes through.

# cd /usr/lib/vmware/lib
# mkdir bak
# mv libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1 bak

And all seems good now.

Reverse proxying with Apache

2008-09-14T15:16:00.003-04:00

I had a network-attached webcam that I want to reverse proxy through apache to take advantage of its https support. The camera is at 192.168.1.253. Here are the steps I took:

# a2enmod proxy proxy_http
# vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/webcam-proxy
# cat /etc/apache2/sites-available/webcam-proxy
ProxyRequests Off

<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>

ProxyPass /webcam http://192.168.1.253/
# a2ensite webcam-proxy
# /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Time synchronization in VMs

2008-09-14T13:48:00.006-04:00

This post is the wrong way to go about things, see this article for details, but basically what you want to do is make sure you have the following in the VM's .vmx file:

tools.syncTime = "TRUE"

I'm noticed some serious time drift in my VMs (almost a day over a couple of weeks). Since I'm not running VMWare tools (I'm not running X), I needed a way to keep things in sync.

According to this page, time is synchronized at boot, which seems to be true, but isn't enough in my case.

So as suggested on the page, I installed ntp, but apparently the ntp-simple package no longer exists:

# apt-get install ntp-simple
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package ntp-simple is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
ntp
E: Package ntp-simple has no installation candidate

So I installed ntp instead:

# apt-get install ntp

Then I edit /etc/ntp.conf to use all the North American servers:

# vi /etc/ntp.conf
# grep ^server /etc/ntp.conf
server ntp.ubuntu.com
server 0.north-america.pool.ntp.org
server 1.north-america.pool.ntp.org
server 2.north-america.pool.ntp.org
server 3.north-america.pool.ntp.org

Running MythWeb remotely

2008-09-03T22:59:00.012-04:00

DO NOT FOLLOW THESE DIRECTIONS: They've messed with my MythTV install, causing it to become unstable and forget all its recording scheduling information.
I strongly suspect it has to do with the database tweaking I did at the end, but I'm not going to try and fix it. I'm just going to run MythWeb locally, probably on a fest mythbuntu install.

This describes my installation of MythWeb on a server (192.168.1.11) that was separate from the system running my MythTV front end, back end and mysql database (192.168.1.10)

First, on the mythtv system, configure MySQL to accept remote connections:

# grep bind /etc/mysql/my.cnf
bind-address = 0.0.0.0
# /etc/init.d/mysql restart
* Stopping MySQL database server mysqld [ OK ]
* Starting MySQL database server mysqld [ OK ]
* Checking for corrupt, not cleanly closed and upgrade needing tables.

Now create a mythweb user in the mysql database. Replace "XXXXXXXX" here with an actual password you'll use again later. (I think you could get away with skipping this step and then using the mythtv user later. I'm also not sure you need to "grant all" permissions.)

# mysql --user=root -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 163
Server version: 5.0.51a-3ubuntu5.2 (Ubuntu)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> grant all privileges on mythconverg.* to mythweb@192.168.1.11 identified by 'XXXXXXXX';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.06 sec)
mysql> select host,user from user;
+--------------+------------------+
| host | user |
+--------------+------------------+
| 192.168.1.11 | mythweb |
| casey | root |
| localhost | debian-sys-maint |
| localhost | mythtv |
| localhost | root |
+--------------+------------------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.04 sec)

Mythweb uses the MasterServerIP value from the settings table to find the backend. In my case this was set to 127.0.0.1, which was fine if Mythweb is on the same system, but breaks things if they are are different systems. So change that to tell mythweb where to find the mythtv back end:

mysql> update settings set data='192.168.1.10' where value='MasterServerIP';
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.02 sec)
Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 Warnings: 0

mysql> select data from settings where value='MasterServerIP';
+--------------+
| data |
+--------------+
| 192.168.1.10 |
+--------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec

Ok, now on web server system install mythweb:

# apt-get install mythweb

And tell mythweb where to find the mysql database. Replace 'XXXXXXXX' here with the password for the mythweb user you created in the mysql database previously. (If you skipping creating the mythweb user earlier, this is where you would put in your mysql mythtv login and password instead.)

# cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
# vi mythweb.conf
# grep db_ mythweb.conf
setenv db_server "192.168.1.10"
setenv db_name "mythconverg"
setenv db_login "mythweb"
setenv db_password "XXXXXXXX"
# apache2ctl restart

And things should be working. Don't forget to require authentication.

Backups...

2008-09-02T23:09:00.006-04:00

I'm trying sbackup for backups. We'll see how it goes.

Update: this seems to be going great. I was using NFS, but I'd like to get away from that and since I notice sbackup supports scp, I've create a backup user and am trying it with that new account.

Update(2): sbackup appeared to have hung on me, as I got email from cron: "E: Another Simple Backup daemon already running: exiting" I did a "ps auxwww | grep sbackupd" and kill the process (a python script actually) and will check on it tomorrow...

Installing NFS

2008-09-02T22:49:00.002-04:00

Used the directions here. Nothing more to say.

What I did was to mount a USB drive attached to the VM Host system inside the VM Guest and then export it via both NFS and Samba, esentally making the USB drive available across my home network. I'm a little concerned about performance, but we'll see how it goes.

Disabling Monitor Power Saver

2008-08-25T21:27:00.010-04:00

Update October 25, 2008: I've made improvements on what I describe in this post - please see this later post.

So after upgraded to Hardy Heron I'm having an annoying problem that the system keeps putting the monitor into power save mode after a couple hours. This is a problem because I turn on the monitor with my remote but I still have to go hit a key on the keyboard to then use MythTV. Not ideal. It's definitely power saving (as opposed to a screen saver) since the monitor goes into a power-off mode with the power LED blinking.

First thing I did was check System/Preferences/Power Management. But both "Put computer to sleep when inactive for:" and "Put display to sleep when inactive for:" were set to Never.

So, I tried the directions here for installing bum. A couple of notes:

After installing the Bootup Manager, you'll find it under System Administration
The Gnome-Power-Manager is just called Power Manager.

Then I rebooted and still no luck, after a couple of hours the monitor is asleep again.

Poking around on the web, I found this useful page on screen blanking under X. I verified that I can reproduce the screen blanking I'm experiencing with the following command:

% sleep 1; xset dpms force off

So, I poked a little deeper at my settings. I believe the "0" values indicate that X shouldn't be turning the monitor off:

% xset q
...
DPMS (Energy Star):
Standyby: 0 Suspend: 0 Off: 0
DPMS is Enabled
Monitor is On
...

But I pushed ahead and next I tried turning off dpms:

% xset -dpms

That seemed to do the trick! Several hours have passed and the screen is still awake.

Ok, now how do I make it permanent. I launched System/Preferences/Sessions. Then I clicked on "Add". For Name I put "Disable DPMS", for Command "xset -dpms" and left Comment blank. Clicked on OK and then Close and then I rebooted the system (I probably could have just logged out and back in, but I like to make sure things work from a boot).

And that seems to have worked, at least 'xset q' now shows DPMS as disabled. Hopefully that ends this tale.

Installing VMWare server

2008-08-19T17:59:00.013-04:00

So, I wanted to play with virtual machines. I installed VMWare-server following the directions here. I ended up installing VMware-server version 1.0.6 and this was on my Ubuntu 8.04.1 Desktop system.

BTW, the apt-get approach did not work for me.

I then proceeded to download Ubuntu 8.04.1 Server and installed it in a new VM. (BTW, I did try installing a Ubuntu appliance, but I had problems with eth0 not showing up, which in retrospect I suspect might have been solved if I had followed the directions here.)

Installing VMWare Tools into the VM was also tricky. I suspect because it had a 2.6.24-19-server kernel and most of the directions out there are for older kernels. The directions I did find that worked are here.

That's it. Have to say, I'm fairly impressed so far.

Upgrading from 7.04 to 8.04

2008-08-17T13:50:00.010-04:00

Following directions at:
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading

Start with upgrade to 7.10:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GutsyUpgrades

That worked flawlessly. Then I basically repeated that step, running the Update Manager again, to upgrade to 8.04.

This time, it didn't go so well. The update froze at

Generating locales...
en_AU.UTF-8...

Fortunately, this thread on the Ubuntu forums shorted things out for me.

So now things seems to be up and running for the most part...

One thing that is obviously broken is the remote control - aka LIRC. No surprise, it breaks every time the wind blows I'm sorry to say.

I reinstalled LIRC per directions here. Except, my lirc device was /dev/lirc/0 instead of /dev/lirc0. This effected some of the testing and also meant I had to change /etc/lirc/hardware.conf:

REMOTE_DEVICE="/dev/lirc0"

REMOTE_DEVICE="/dev/lirc/0"

Then a reboot (always seems necessary with lirc) and that seems to be working.

Ok, Apache doesn't seem to be running. But I think it's time to look into a VMWare appliance...

Locking down the web server

2008-08-14T15:37:00.006-04:00

My next step was to lock down the web server to prevent any anonymous access.

First was to tweak /etc/apache2/apache2.conf (see this previous post for more information:

<Directory /var/www/>
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Casey Web"
AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/basicauth
Require valid-user
</Directory>

Second, I tweaked mediawiki to not allow anonymous access to any page by editing /var/lib/mediawiki1.7/LocalSettings.php. I changed the following line:

$wgWhitelistRead = array ("Main Page", "Special:Userlogin", "Wikipedia:Help");

to:

$wgWhitelistRead = array ("Special:Userlogin");

Adding SSL support to Apache2

2008-08-09T17:27:00.010-04:00

I wanted to increase security and add https support to my Apache2 install. Poking around I found directions here. Which I basically followed:

# apt-get install ssl-cert
# mkdir /etc/apache2/ssl
# make-ssl-cert /usr/share/ssl-cert/ssleay.cnf /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem
# a2enmod ssl
# cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/ssl
# vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/ssl
# diff /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/ssl

1,2c1,2
< NameVirtualHost *
< <VirtualHost *>
---
> NameVirtualHost *:443
> <VirtualHost *:443>
4a5,7
>       SSLEngine On
>       SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem
>

# a2ensite ssl
# /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
# cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/default.orig
# vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
# diff /etc/apache2/sites-available/default.orig /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

1,2c1,2
< NameVirtualHost *
< <VirtualHost *>
---
> NameVirtualHost *:80
> <VirtualHost *:80>

But then I ran into this problem:
# /etc/init.d/apache2 start

* Starting web server (apache2)...
[Sat Aug 09 17:28:50 2008] [warn] The Alias directive in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/001-mediawiki at line 1 will probably never match because it overlaps an earlier Alias.
(98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs
...fail!

Which I fixed by commenting out the Listen directive in ports.conf:
# vi /etc/apache2/ports.conf
# cat /etc/apache2/ports.conf

#Listen 80

That got things working.

While I was playing with Apache configuration, I went ahead and fixed a warning about a undefined server name:

# vi /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
# grep ServerName /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
ServerName casey.vwelch.com

LIRC (remote) not working

2008-07-30T22:04:00.003-04:00

I rebooted my Ubuntu system and suddenly the remote wasn't working. I poked around and noticed lirc was not running.

# ps auxwww | grep lirc
root     14915  0.0  0.0   2884   752 pts/0    R+   21:09   0:00 grep lirc
#

Poking around in the logs, it looked like lirc was dying when lircmd was started (I verified this by starting them sequentially):

# tail /var/log/daemon.log
Jul 30 21:00:43 casey lircd-0.8.2-CVS[6792]: lircd(userspace) ready
Jul 30 21:00:48 casey lircd-0.8.2-CVS[6792]: accepted new client on /dev/lircd
Jul 30 21:00:48 casey lircd-0.8.2-CVS[6792]: could not get file information for /dev/lirc
Jul 30 21:00:48 casey lircd-0.8.2-CVS[6792]: default_init(): No such file or directory
Jul 30 21:00:48 casey lircd-0.8.2-CVS[6792]: caught signal
#

So I downloaded LIRC 0.8.3 (I had been running 0.8.1) from the project download page and build according to directions at: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/LIRC_on_Ubuntu_Edgy_Eft

Then the daemon seemed to start fine, though I still had to reboot to get the remote working.

# /etc/init.d/lirc start
Starting lirc daemon: lircd lircmd.
# ps auxwww | grep lirc
root     14842  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    21:07   0:00 [lirc_dev]
root     14909  0.0  0.0   2876   552 ?        Ss   21:09   0:00 /usr/sbin/lircd --device=/dev/lirc
root     14911  0.0  0.0   1636   236 ?        Ss   21:09   0:00 /usr/sbin/lircmd
root     14915  0.0  0.0   2884   752 pts/0    R+   21:09   0:00 grep lirc
#

Fixing the auto-updating

2008-05-10T13:49:00.006-04:00

A while ago I set up automatic updating of patches. Well, today I took a look and it didn't look like things were working (running 'apt-get dist-upgrade' produced a big, long list of stuff that needed to be installed).

I added "-y" to the "apt-get" command in /etc/cron.daily and that seemed to fix things:

# vi /etc/cron.daily/auto-update
# cat /etc/cron.daily/auto-update
#!/bin/bash
/usr/sbin/cron-apt
/usr/bin/apt-get -y dist-upgrade

Updated mythfilldatabase cron job

2008-04-26T16:35:00.007-04:00

Based on this post I changed my crontab entry to:

0 6 * * * /usr/bin/mythfilldatabase --refresh-all --quiet

Updating MythTV to use Schedules Direct

2007-09-08T14:53:00.002-04:00

I needed to upgrade to MythTV 0.20.2 to use Schedules Direct. I started by following the directions in http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=536555 to upgrade.

Then to use Schedules Direct I following the directions at
http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/2007-August/191369.html , with my annotations as sub-bullets:

Go to Schedules Direct and create lineups from the identical provider with the identical set of channels as your existing labs account. [Hint: if you see channels you would like to add or delete, keep them the same for now and fix those problems after converting].
Shutdown all myth processes.

Exit the frontend.
Execute:
/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend stop

Backup your mysql database as described in the HOWTO.

Execute:
mysqldump -u mythtv -pmythtv mythconverg -c > mythtv_backup.sql

Run mythtv-setup. Select your existing video sources to change the grabber and login info, "Retrieve Lineups", select the corresponding lineup name then "Finish".
Run mythfilldatabase checking the log to see that things worked correctly.
Restart myth processes.

I just rebooted.