Using Tomato router for DynDNS updates

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...

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

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.