Debian/Ubuntu Tips & Tricks

How-To: encrypted partitions over LVM with LUKS

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 13:49:48 -0700

Even though new distros installers tend to support filesystem encryption out of the box, most of the time, it might be interesting to actually understand how it works, mainly when it happens that your system fails to boot :).

Most literature found on the Internet tend to cover how to set up LVM over a partition encrypted with LUKS, this tutorial takes another approach and will explain how to create LUKS encrypted partitions over LVM. The reason for this.... I wanted to have unencrypted partitions :D.

Terminator 0.9 is out

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:53:56 -0700

In introduced terminator in a previous article as multi-view terminal.

Since then, terminator as quite evolved, with plenty of new features that were highlighted in Terminator 0.9 beta 1 post.

How-To: Remote syslog logging on Debian and Ubuntu

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:47:30 -0700

syslogd is the Linux system logging utility that take care of filling up your files in /var/log when it is asked to.

On a standard system, logging is only done on the local drive. But syslog can be configured to receive logging from a remote client, or to send logging to a remote syslog server.

Some of the use cases could be:

A machine which filesystem goes read-only
Log replication

this tutorial will explain how to set up both the server, to receive message from a remote client, and the client to emit messages to a syslogd server.

How-To: Set up a LAN gateway with DHCP, Dynamic DNS and iptables on Debian Etch

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:04:28 -0700

Linux is a perfect platform to act as a router/gateway.

In this tutorial, I will explain how to set up a Linux box to operate as a network router. The box will provide the following services:

DHCP server to provide the ip addresses to the machines in the LAN
DNS server to resolve domain names
Gateway with IP tables to give access to the Internet.
Firewall with IP tables.

The resulting machine will have quite a small footprint: about 600M, and except if your network is intensively used, a low spec computer can be recycled to do the job.

As the machine is going to operate as a router/firewall

How-To: copy files over the network and preserve file permissions and informations with ssh and rsync

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:02:00 -0700

When copying files over the network, the files informations can be modified.

When using cp, one can avoid this issue by using the -a which will do the copy in archive mode, meaning that it will keep the links, preserve mode, ownership and timestamps and the copy is recursive.

the solution to this over the network is rsync alongside with ssh.

How-To: Intel Wireless 4965 AGN with Ad-Hoc network + WEP

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:20:07 -0700

The Intel wireless card 4965 AGN does not work properly on ad-hoc networks since hardy and kernel 2.6.24 or around, network-manager can't get it to use the mode ad-hoc and a standard configuration like:

$ sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid myessid mode ad-hoc channel X key s:mykey13charss
$ sudo dhclient wlan0

will fail to get an ip except a long battle at dhclient'ing around.

I managed to get a process to get things working faster.

Terminator 0.9 beta 1

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:19:06 -0700

Terminator 0.9, an application that allow you to have multiple terminal within the same window, is getting close to be released. FeatureFreeze has been started since a couple of weeks.

The bugs opened against terminator milestone 0.9 are being closed.

A big bunch of new features and enhancements come shipped with this new release.

A package is available from Launchpad PPA. You can grab the .deb there. Feedback to terminator bug tracker on launchpad are welcome.

Transmission 1.22 .deb for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:19:54 -0700

transmission, a lightweight bittorrent client version 1.22 was released on the 14th of June 2008.

A .deb package is available for Ubuntu Hardy i386 and amd64 from the debuntu repository.

Subtitleeditor 0.21.1 for Ubuntu Hardy Heron

Thu, 29 May 2008 16:53:26 -0700

Subtitled movie lovers, here it comes, subtitleeditor 0.21.1 is out.

Transmission 1.21 for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron

Thu, 29 May 2008 16:53:26 -0700

transmission 1.21 is out.

Transmission is a fast, easy, and free multi-platform BitTorrent client with a focus on being lightweight yet feature-filled.

How-To set up a serial console on Debian

Sat, 03 May 2008 08:14:19 -0700

This tutorial will go over the steps to go through in order to set up a serial console on Debian Linux.

Debian uses sysvinit to handle the booting process, amongst the different task, and as such, there is a few differences between most of the tutorial that you might find on the internet regarding how to set up a serial console.

A Serial Console becomes handy when running a headless server (i.e no keyboard and screen) or if you cannot connect a a server because of a network issue.

How-To set up a serial console client

Sat, 03 May 2008 08:14:19 -0700

In the 2 previous articles, I explained how to set up a serial console on Ubuntu and Debian.

This tutorial will now show how to connect to those serial console using another machine using a software called minicom.

How-To set up a serial console on Ubuntu

Sat, 03 May 2008 06:15:57 -0700

This tutorial will go over the steps to go through in order to set up a serial console on Ubuntu Linux.

Unlike most other distros, Ubuntu uses upstart instead of sysvinit and as such, there is a few differences between most of the tutorial that you might find on the internet regarding how to set up a serial console.

A Serial Console becomes handy when running a headless server (i.e no keyboard and screen) or if you cannot connect a a server because of a network issue.

How-To: Import/Export GPG key pair

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:22:31 -0700

This tutorial will show how you can export and import a set of GPG keys from one computer to another.
This way, you can sign/encrypt the same way one different computer.

How-To: Customizing SSH client

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 07:56:39 -0700

SSH is great. There is so many thing you can do with it other than just a remote secure shell like X forwarding, port forwarding, authenticate using a private/public key, compress the transmitted stream....

If you have different account that you use on an every day basis, it becomes quickly cumbersome to type those lengthly command lines.

One could work around this by using aliases, the right way would be to use ~/.ssh/config

This tutorial will show some customization examples that should cover most ssh use cases.

How To: fixing Evolution after home directory changed (Failed to append to mbox)

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 09:49:24 -0700

Lately, I change my main user's username and homedir location. As a result, some application like evolution were kindda broken.

This tutorial will explain how to change some of evolution settings manually in order to fix any issues left from the name change.

How To: booting another Grub from Grub

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 14:49:35 -0700

Chainloading an operating system allows grub to boot an opearating system's boot loader. This is commonly used to boot Windows for instance.

I personnaly use it to be able to have my "production" system's grub on the MBR, and address other distros'grub install on their root partition. The advantage is that kernel updates are real easy to handle. Each testing distro modifying their own grub won't interfere with my main OS bootloader.

This tutorial will explain how to configure grub's menu.lst from the main OS to boot other OSes bootloader through an example.

Terminator: A multi-view terminal

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 08:46:10 -0800

Terminator gives the possibility of having multiples terminal within the same window.

As such, it makes it easier to handle multiple terminal sessions as for instance, working in one console and monitoring another one without constantly switching from a window to another.

Linux Test Drive now taking beta users

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 08:44:37 -0800

After a number of years in development Linux Test Drive is becoming a reality, from the page:

LTD is a project that has been in development for the last three years. LTD allows the user to determine which distribution best fits their needs utilizing the Linux Distribution Chooser, and then once that is determined, give the user the ability to "test drive" that distribution directly over the Internet, without the need to download. We are currently taking pre-beta registrations for the LTD system.

How-To: email notification upon available package updates with cron-apt

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 08:59:41 -0800

cron-apt is a tool run by a cron job at regular interval that will check for package updates and optionally do some actions.

cron-apt will by default download the packages without installing them.

This tutorial will explain how to set up cron-apt in order to have it send an email to a specified address when updates are ready to be installed.

How-To: getting VMware-server 2.0 beta MUI Remote Console to work with Firefox

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 10:09:45 -0800

Lately, I have been trying vmware-server 2.0 beta build 63231. It worked pretty well, but for the fact that the Remote Console to the VM was not working through the MUI.

This article will describe the step to take in order to get it working.