customising life

Long winded title, but you may find the outcome very useful.

With more time at work to spend on things other than .NET coding, I decided it would be great to setup one of my PCs as a company intranet server. In fact I was directed to do something like this a while ago, but didn’t get the time.

My department does a lot of project work, and thus needs a central location for relevant files. We already have one on our Windows 2003 server, which I is an extremely tempremental beast, but we could benefit from having some sort of content system around these files. That would allow managers and directors to log into our network from anywhere in the world and get the information they want. Browsing through dozens of folders isn’t easy or flashy (flashy is good).

So I set about setting up my old Xubuntu box as a local server (it won’t be facing the outside world). It’s got a AMD3200 CPU and 512MB RAM, which should be quite sufficient.

The first important step is to get a server actually setup. The process I followed, sometimes blindly, was contained in the great Perfect Setup - Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 Server [Howto Forge]. Following the steps you can’t go wrong.

If I could make several points about the installation they would be;

The guide does mention this but I want to reiterate it. After installing the OpenSSH server and configuring the network (Steps 4 and 5), log into the server machine from another PC. I didn’t realise just how useful this would be until I was constantly changing between computers on my KVM switch.

Coupled with the fact that most application windows handle mouse scrolling without taking the focus, you can have the HowTo running in a web browser, while entering in the commands into a terminal window connected to the server via SSH. It’s as simple as

ssh <servername> -l <username>

OR

ssh <username>@<servername>

Setting up the server so that it would be seen on the Windows Active Directoy Domain as server1.companyname.com and not it’s IP address was a little harder. Well actually it was very easy to do, but it took a long time to find out what needed to be done. At this point in time I was not interested in SAMBA or authenticating the server on the domain, all I wanted was for people to be able to access the server by it’s hostname not it’s IP.

The solution was actually very simple. In the Windows 2003 server in it’s Computer Management section is an area for DNS. You need to add a new host to the domain; then simply enter in the computer’s hostname and IP address.

Simple!

Next I’m planning to setup SAMBA so I can share files/folders on the domain and install a content management system on the server.

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I went back to Edgy.

Sorry for the misleading title.  I just couldn’t get anywhere with Feisty, and I’d had enough.
Down-grading was an issue-and-a-half too; a week full of frustration.

I went for my Ubuntu Edgy CD, but after installing was unable to log into a GNOME session, the screen froze before anything had loaded. I tried the same thing with my Xubuntu Edgy CD and was able to log into a XFCE session, but not a GNOME one.

After squeezing my home folder into some backup space, I re-installed this time starting with the /home folder fresh. This time there was no problem getting into GNOME so I assumed there was some configuration issue.

After copying back most of my /home folder, save any .gnome, .gnome2, etc folders, I proceeded to re-install all the programs I need, only to find the same freeze on starting a GNOME session.

Rather than re-installing (I was getting pretty hot around the collar), I worked my way through each configuration file; finally resting on my ALSA sound configuration file; .asoundrc.

I don’t know what’s wrong with it, as it hasn’t changed since I got my sound card working a while back. I do miss surround sound, but for now I’m just happy to have a working, non-freezing PC.

My problems with Feisty and it’s tendency to freeze on me, got to the point where I wasn’t prepared to sit on my butt any longer; I have to solve this.

Without re-installing (which may not work anyway)

Using the handy System Log(from the System -> Administration Menu), I found something disturbing in my kern.log

May 7 19:44:56 osiris kernel: [ 623.592000] BUG: soft lockup detected on CPU#0!
…
May 7 21:21:20 osiris kernel: [ 6414.444000] BUG: at drivers/pci/search.c:270 pci_get_subsys()

One for each of the freezes I had that night. There’s more, if I could find somewhere to host the log.

I would love to know what to do with this. I’ve started looking through Launchpad, for a similar issue. I’ve come across many bugs that mention ’soft lockups’, so I don’t know where my issue stands in relation to them.

Following another Feisty Freeze saga, has given me at least one common element to investigate; NVIDIA card/driver.

Yay! Finally a post!

I was really looking forward to the release of Feisty, and leaving Xubuntu for good old Ubuntu. Having a decent PC meant that most of my previous Xubuntu installs eventually ended up just like Ubuntu so I decided to install Ubuntu this time round.

The installation of Feisty was painless but not worry free.

Everything was smooth sailing until the appearance of the new partitioner. I made my first mistake when I re-assigned a partition from /media/sda1 to /. I didn’t notice that the partitioner automatically resized the partition to just over it’s current usage.

Strangely for other, more full partitions, this wasn’t a problem.

The last strange part was when the installer moved to unpacking and installing the base install; the entire window was minimised to the smallest size, without the option to resize it. Not panicking I left it alone for around 20mins, where it changed into a dialog informing me it had successfully installed and wished to reboot my PC.

The next unpleasantry (though not of Ubuntu’s making) was upon rebooting where I was greeted with a Frankenstein looking desktop as some, not all of my previous configurations had translated from Xubuntu to Ubuntu. The background was as I left it, but the panels were floating in the middle of the screen and all jumbled up. Deciding it was time for a real fresh start I moved my Home folder to another partition and started from scratch.

Onto the good points, and there were some that really had me smiling.

Firstly the Restricted Drivers Manager was a great help. Even though I’ve done it many times, installing the NVIDIA drivers always seems to cause me pain. The Restricted Devices Manager did it all for me, and the Desktop Effects were soon enabled. A definite plus.

Network Manager was also looking up as it had detected my two wired ethernet ports as well as my D-Link wireless card, and even sussed out the local Wireless Access points.

Sadly my card uses the RT61 chipset, which Network Manager seems to only work with when using no key or WEP. I am hopeful that future releases can work better with this card.

But by far and away the best thing with Feisty, is it can get my sound card, a SBLive 7.1 using the CA0106 driver to play sound in 5.1 (which I got working back in Breezy) AND allow multiple applications to use the sound card at once, which I could do with Edgy but only with stereo sound. I only found out as I had some tunes playing and accidentally started a video in Firefox and to my astonishment, heard sound.

Sadly I end with one final and fairly major problem. Feisty seems to freeze on me, unexpectedly and seemingly randomly. Once it froze while logging on, once after opening the Trash, once while …, once while … I can’t work it out.

This may be the closest I can get to an explanation

I had to spend most of Saturday morning rounding up some final ancillary parts (keyboard, wireless, bluetooth) for my parents PC, and by lunch time I was itching to get this thing done. I rocked up with their new PC with Ubuntu pre-installed and they were both quite impressed.

I think they have plans for it to be their personal entertainment centre in their study, as the TVs in their house are always occupied.

It took some explaining to them about the concept of free/open-source software, and how to use Ubuntu in general. It was most likely over my Dad’s head, but I think Mum was getting some of it. He’s more than happy, he can watch his music DVDs, listen to his songs, and browse the web. I think that’s where it ends for him at the moment. He did however like GNUbik being a Rubik’s Cube nut.

Setting up Evolution was annoying with his Yahoo! mail account. Yahoo! don’t offer POP forwarding unless you have a premium account :(. I was quite keen on him using Evolution as it has the in-built tasks, vFolders and the claimed ability to sync with a mobile phone over bluetooth (I haven’t found any good sources on how to do this). In the end I opted for Thunderbird and the WebMail extension.

I accidentally forgot to install their HP printer, and got an email on Monday; they were inserting the Windows drivers CD but it wouldn’t start. Whoops! I was able to walk them through it over the phone, which was a thankfully painless exercise. Their bluetooth is also causing some problems, however my adapter works fine, so I’ll have to see about swapping them at some point.

I did however get one interesting query from Mum, which I’d never really thought about before. Ubuntu (and derivatives) recognise when a USB/memory card is inserted, and you can simply open the media and browse the contents using whatever file manager. When you are done you can just yank it out. Yet, there is still the option, to mount and then unmount the device. She mainly asked this of me because in Windows XP, you generally click that little green arrow in the system tray to ’safely remove’ the device.

So what’s the standard? Just plug in the USB and open to get to your files? Or mount and the unmount the USB?