kennywest

Vinyl records have been there for ages. My dad still has a couple of old records but he has no turntable anymore to play them. This is because _I_ claimed his turntable a long time ago, which he thought had become old fashioned. I started buying vinyl records about 12 years ago. I remember saving all my pocket money and buying the latest records with it, instead of visiting pubs with friends. I remember everyone thinking vinyl records belonged to the past and MP3's and CD's were taking over. In fact, this was not true. DJ's playing at parties and clubs never stopped buying records and from my experience, about 80% of their music came from plain old vinyl and a tiny 20% from other media like CD's or MP3's. The reasoning behind this is simple, if you wanted something new, something not popular (yet), you bought it on vinyl. If it became popular, some record company would probably be so kind to put it on some CD and sell it. But then again, ages, if not decades ( :) ) ...

NVIDIA has had the best drivers for Linux users for several years. Since early releases of KDE 4, however, some nasty artifacts appeared when running some Gnome based applications (like Open Office and Thunderbird) on systems with NVIDIA cards. These bugs have been reported to NVIDIA but haven't been addressed until now. According to this very long thread, the latest beta drivers from NVIDIA (180.x) the nasty artifacts should have disappeared. I compiled and installed this latest driver and indeed, the panel corruption when, for example, composing a new mail in Thunderbird does no longer appear. Finally, people running KDE 4 with NVIDIA cards are no longer nvidia-victims :)

In an earlier post I was talking about how I've been using mondo as preferred backup solution for quite some time. However, I have never used it to restore stuff, since I've never broken any install before and hardware hasn't failed on me yet. Since I wanted to replace the smaller 10GB hard drive, I've installed in the Wyse, with a bigger 500GB one, this would be an ideal case to try and restore everything with mondo . So I created a backup of the 10GB drive with mondo to an NFS share on another PC (using the script posted earlier). Next, burned the resulting ISO to a CD and finally booted from the CD and interactively restored my data. mondo has 2 main restore modes; interactive and nuke. Since my new drive was bigger than the original drive, mondo suggested to drop to interactive mode, which allowed me to create a whole new partition scheme (which is nice). The only thing that failed was grub installing itself on the master boot record. I'm not sure why, maybe...

Ubuntu has been a fantastic operating system for my desktop and has been my preferred Desktop OS for more than 3 years now. The cool thing about Ubuntu is it's Debian based. So you install once and dist-upgrade to every new release without ever having to reinstall the whole thing. The downside is a dist-upgrade in Ubuntu sometimes fails leaving you with a very b0rken system. That's why I stick with LTS releases for now, because I have little spare time to reinstall my desktop every few months or so. Nevertheless there are brave people out there always keeping track of the latest, more or less stable, version and don't mind the dist-upgrade problems. Anyway if your install is broken after a dist-upgrade (or any upgrade) it's always nice to have a backup at hand. In search of the ideal, most flexible, backup tool out there I found mondo . So, people, stop asking for a backup tool for Linux on forums, this one will suite your needs. Unlike some other tools, mondo creates ...

I like to have my users, that will be logging in on different types of machines on the network, stored in a central place. The ideal solution for this is an LDAP repository and configuring Samba to talk to this repository and configure it as a Primary Domain Controller. This solution will enable users running Linux to authenticate using pam_ldap and users running Windows (NT and up) authenticate against a Samba Domain Controller. Linux users can also join their machines on the Samba domain, and create shares accessible to other users known by the Domain Controller. This setup caused me a second headache, since the Samba server running on Ubuntu Hardy could not join the Samba Domain Controller running on Etch. This is because there is a compatibility issue between Samba 3.0.28a (Hardy) and Samba 3.0.24a (Etch). I had to fetch some more recent source packages here and compile and build them on Etch. This is not a procedure for the faint of heart, so if you haven't upgraded to Lenny ...

If you're still following these series of posts and installed Debian Etch on your firewall, please go back and install Lenny instead. The problem with Etch is that it has a lot of old, outdated, software packages, containing bugs that _will_ cause you headaches. While configuring cups should be a breeze, there are a number of bugs requiring you to do some manual interventions on the server side. First there is a compatibility issue which causes cups to hang when configuring printers using Firefox 3. Due to export regulations, Debian does not ship Open SSL by default, causing cups to hang while generating SSL keys. The new admin interface now requires HTTPS, so you will need to install Open SSL by hand. The default configuration for cups, generated bu Debian's package management, also contains a few flaws. All the above things are probably resolved in Lenny, so you might want to consider upgrading to Lenny. I chose to stick with Etch and here are the things I did to get cups up ...

The Wyse will be used as my gateway to the internet. There are a lot of out of the box Linux (and BSD) firewall distributions out there. Some of them run from a bootable CD, others can even run from a single floppy. The problem with these distributions is they don't have all the necessary software I need. Next to the firewall software, I will need the following additional services: samba: to use as server for potential windows machines on the network LDAP: to serve as central storage for user accounts and their metadata cups: to use as centralized printing server for all kinds of machines on the network other services I might have forgotten (like subversion, squid, dansguardian, ....) I have to admit, though, that Endian comes close to what I need, but I just like to do stuff all myself :) My old Etch firewall was running some custom firewall script I created by hand, but this time, I wanted to use a tool called fwbuilder to create the script. fwbuilder is a GUI available for mo...

In a previous post I showed how to install a Domain Name Relay Daemon to serve as a caching DNS server. Since the firewall will get its address from the DHCP server from your ISP, there's one small configuration we still need to do. In /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf we need to uncomment (or add, if its not there) the following line: prepend domain-name-servers 192.168.1.254; This will make sure the firewall itself will query the name server on the firewall to resolve host names on the local network and the Internet. The firewall should also run a DHCP server for the internal network. The internal network addresses range from 192.168.1.1/255.255.255.0 to 192.168.1.253/255.255.255.0 . So, first we need to install a DHCP server: # apt-get install dhcp3-server Next, use the following configuration for /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf : allow bootp; ddns-update-style none; subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { default-lease-time 600; max-lease-time 7200; option subnet-mas...