April 2006 archive

Vmware Server on Ubuntu 5.10

I decided to try VMware Server instead of just VMware Player on my new system. Installing either seems to be a little tricky on Ubuntu. The reason is, they've worked hard to make Ubuntu installable with only one CD image, and in order to do so they've left of a lot off the developer tools. Apparently you need these to install the vmwarez. Ubuntu users seem to take good notes, here's some help for installing vmware on Ubuntu. Worked for me.

Server is pretty slick. It looks like you can use it to create your own vmware images, install the vmware tools in an image, and do snapshots too. Very nice.

Posted by Bryan on April 28, 2006 | Filed under: Geek | 0 comments

Why the Switch to Ubuntu?

My good friend Nolan asked why I switched to Ubuntu, or more general, how did I choose my linux distribution? Easy, I just used the linux distribution chooser!

OK, not really. Here's the long story. I first used Caldera OpenLinux, mainly because the company was practially just down the street from where I lived. Then I switched to RedHat because there was a lot more help online, since way more people used it. Then I found Mandrake. I didn't need any online help, most everything just worked, and it has this fabulous control center with fairly intuitive GUIs for configuring more advanced stuff that I had never tried, like firewalls and internet connection sharing and the like. It also made installing rpms much much easier because it had this awesome tool called urpmi that automatically downloaded dependencies and installed them for you. There was even a urpmi repository that had all the really good stuff like windoze media player and quicktime codecs, libdvdcss, and some mozilla plugins. Ahhh, life was good with Mandrake, even after they changed their name to Mandriva.

However, lately everyone on the internet has been talking about this new distribution called Ubuntu. I checked out the website, and gave it a try on my old laptop. I liked it, and the online documentation was very thorough--it more than made up for Mandriva's flashy GUIs. Any question I had was answered there. I was impressed...

... and here's where I should mention the one nagging thing about Mandriva that bothered me. It was that it was difficult and scary to upgrade from one release to the next. The upgrade option on the CDs never quite worked, so I'd have to back everything up, and do a fresh install, and then restore from the backup, and reconfigure all my config files, and it was a pain. I've always been jealous of the Debian users. Debian has the original packaging tool that automatically downloads and install depencies, apt. Apt is so awesome, I've always read, that to upgrade from one Debian release to the next you just change your repositories from your current release to the next one, type 'apt-get upgrade' (or something like that), and like magic it brings you up to the next release. This is what I want. Plus, Debian was created by a guy named Ian Murdock. How cool is that? I never switched to Debian though, because it was so rough around the user experience edges and notorious for being difficult to install (the joke is, since apt is so great, you only ever have to install Debian once. Why bother to make a nice installer?).

So back to Ubuntu. Ubuntu is based on Debian, it has an easy installer, a real focus on home desktop usability, great online docs, and the famous apt packaging tool. As long as it does everything else that Mandriva has always done for me, the switch should only be positive.

I was having trouble however, getting Ubuntu to do the firefox plugins and media codecs like Mandriva could do. The killer test was always the quicktime movie trailers. I couldn't get Ubuntu to play them, until I found Automatix. Automatix is by far the coolest Linux utility ever. It takes a fresh Ubuntu install and automatically adds all the firefox plugins you need: java, codecs, media players, acrobat reader, flash, etc.; plus dvd players and rippers, cd and dvd burning software, mp3 players, Nvidia drivers, torrent clients, windoze fonts, and everything else a Linux distribution needs but isn't quite licensed to distribute. All of it. You just run it, reboot, and you are there. It is so sweet. It only works on Ubuntu, and it finally made up my mind.

Well, there you go, Nolan. If you ever have time to read all that, I hope it helps you decide (and remember, usually your best friend's favorite distro is the one you can most easily get help with).

Posted by Bryan on April 26, 2006 | Filed under: Geek | 2 comments

April '06 Activities

It's been a few weeks since the last bit of family news. I've finally cleaned up the pictures we took this month and put them online. I figured they could use a little explanation too.

OK, let's see. The weekend after the hawk visited us we went down to Jantzen Beach in Portland. I sold our broken DVD player on Craigslist and the guy who bought it wanted to meet me there (don't worry, he knew it was broken, he wanted the parts). We rode the carousel after the Craigslist transaction at the McDonalds there and looked at some cribs. We also left our lights on while inside and had to get a jumpstart on our van from a nice woman in the parking lot.

Isaac's soccer season started this month. He's on a team with 4 boys and 4 girls. They don't keep score and there are no goalies. His coach is the mom of one of the boys and they have a lot of fun. The first two games it rained and was pretty cold. They let him keep his coat on, thankfully. Last Saturday was beautiful and the game was much more fun for everyone. Isaac totally digs running around in his cleats and shin guards.

With the return of the sun Ily took the boys to the zoo. They saw the new warty pigs exhibit. Micah is still talking about the "piggies."

In another Craigslist adventure, we bought a new crib. This craigslist thing works out OK for us, better than we've done with Ebay. This was being sold by a family just north of Vancouver who is moving. Ily wanted something with smooth wood that was sturdy. Something that would resist the wrath of Micah the Mauler. He bent the frame on the garage-sale crib that we used for Isaac and him, but so far this one has withstood his curiosity. The most the boys have done to it is attach a rescue hero to the bottom.

Posted by Bryan on April 24, 2006 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments

Easy File Sharing with Samba

Setting up file sharing on my new Ubuntu install was super easy, I just followed these samba instructions. Now I can access my files from my windoze work laptop when I'm on my home network.

Posted by Bryan on April 23, 2006 | Filed under: Geek | 0 comments

Dynamic DNS and ddclient

Because I've been too cheap to pay for a real domain name, or a static IP address, I've been using the wonderful free services of DynDNS.org to bring you this website. I use ddclient to keep DynDNS updated, but somehow I messed it up last night when configuring it for Ubuntu, and murdockfamily.homelinux.org has been unavailable all day. I know, your world had ended without it. I'm sorry! I've learned something from this though, and here are my new ddclient tips.

If your webserver is behind a router, like mine, then you need to have ddclient visit a webpage to get the router's IP address. To make ddclient do this, it's configuration file needs to have this line in it:

use=web, web=checkip.dyndns.org/, web-skip='IP Address'

My mistake was that I also had the normal 'use' line in the config file, after that one:

use=if, if=eth1

so ddclient was using the IP address reported by my ethernet card, my local network IP. None of you have access to that one though :-/. To debug ddclient, you can run it from the command line as root with the verbose output enabled like so:

ddclient -daemon=0 -debug -verbose -noquiet

That gives you a pretty good idea of what it's doing and how you can fix it. At least, that's all I needed this evening.

Posted by Bryan on April 21, 2006 | Filed under: About This Site Geek | 2 comments

Subversion Network Setup

In a previous entry I explained how I set up subversion on my linux box. At the end I left a reminder to myself to write down how to set up network access to the repositories before I forgot. Well, I forgot, and now that I'm migrating everything over to Ubuntu 5.10, it's time to re-learn. Here's my notes on how to do it.

I will again be using the subversion book. Specifically chapter 6. I also got help this time around from a blog entry about setting up subversion with apache on Ubuntu.

Alright, under Prerequisites in the svn book it lists what you need to install. These are all easily obtainable through apt (since I'm on Ubuntu):

aptitude install libapache2-svn

(I already had apache2 and subversion installed. I'm assuming the above would have grabbed those too though, if they weren't already installed, because apt is cool like that).

The above will install the modules needed for apache2 and add all the needed LoadModule commands. It also creates a configuration file in /etc/apache2/mods_benabled/dav_svn.conf. I commented out everything that was in this since I want my subversion repository served by one of my virtual hosts. Wherever you put it, you need something like this:

<Location /repos>
    DAV svn
    SVNPath /path/to/svnrepository


# how to authenticate a user

    AuthType Basic

    AuthName “Subversion repository”

    AuthUserFile /path/to/svnrepository/svn-auth-file

    Require valid-user

</Location>

Then do:

/etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Now you need to setup the http authentication password file. The book explains it well:

$ ### First time: use -c to create the file
$ ### Use -m to use MD5 encryption of the password, which is more secure
$ htpasswd -cm /path/to/svn-auth-file harry
New password: ***** 
Re-type new password: *****
Adding password for user harry
$ htpasswd -m /path/to/svn-auth-file sally
New password: *******
Re-type new password: *******
Adding password for user sally

At this point you should be able to browse the svn repository, after entering your username and password, by pointing your web browser to http://www.example.com/repos/project/ (assuming your hostname is www.example.com, of course). You should also be able to checkout code, like so:

svn co http://www.example.com/repos/project/trunk/ project

That's it!

Posted by Bryan on April 20, 2006 | Filed under: Geek | 0 comments

Migration from Mandriva to Ubuntu

The promise of easy OS upgrades with Ubuntu has lured me to make the switch. It was a pain to upgrade Mandrake versions last time I did it. People always talk about how easy it is with Debian/Ubuntu. I've been pretty impressed with the online help for Ubuntu too, way better than I've seen for any other Linux distribution. So I'm making the painful switch. If you see the website not working, you now know why. I've realized, more than halfway through this, that it was much easier to upgrade from one version of Mandriva to the next than it is to go from Mandriva to Ubuntu. Package names and configuration file locations and defaults are all just different enough to make it a very manual process. How sweet it will be go upgrade from Ubuntu Breezy Badger to Ubuntu Dapper Drake with a few apt commands (and it better work!!!!)!

Here's a few web pages that have helped me out so far:

Posted by Bryan on April 17, 2006 | Filed under: About This Site Geek | 2 comments

Dump for Backups

Not willing to wait any longer (two whole days already!?!) for a fixed mondo rpm, I tried to compile it myself. No luck, make complained about no target for the man pages or something. So in the meantime, I'm looking at good ol' dump. It looks kind of handy, and I think I could get it to almost do what mondo promises with a little scripting. It wants to backup whole filesystems. It will do a sub-directory, but if you do that it won't do differentials. You can have it exclude files and directories, but you have to supply it the inode numbers of what you want it to exclude. Apparently a simple file or directory name isn't good enough for dump, you have to use stat yourself. Also, it won't split the backup file up like mondo, unless it runs out of tape. That means that if you are backing up to CDs, you'd have to manually use split and mkisofs to get ready to burn.

Here is the test backup command I'm running right now (bzipping with level 9 is very slow on my box, remind me not to do that again):

dump -j9 -0af /mnt/home/backup2/dump-test /home/bryan/Documents

OK, finally finished. It's simple to restore stuff:

restore -ia -f /mnt/home/backup2/dump-test

It starts a little shell, you can use 'cd' and 'ls' to see what's been backed up. You then use 'add' to add files to the extraction list. An 'ls' will then put a star next to the files and directories to be extracted. When you are all ready type 'extract' and it extracts to the directory you were in when you typed the above command. Then 'q' to quit. Not bad.

Posted by Bryan on April 10, 2006 | Filed under: Geek | 0 comments

Mondo Bug

I finally got to where I'm confident mondo is going to work for my backup needs, and I got the command-line that I want all figured out to backup just the stuff I need. Here it is, for posterity's sake:

 mondoarchive -O -i -I "/home /etc" -d '/mnt/home/backup2' -E '/home/pub /home/bryan/.mozilla/firefox/6ytxpczd.default/Cache /home/bryan/backgrounds /home/bryan/downloads /home/bryan/glazba /home/bryan/roms /home/bryan/src /home/bryan/tmp /home/bryan/video /home/bryan/vmware/Browser-Appliance /home/bryan/vmware/test' -g -s '700m'

The '-I' option I'm using is straight from the mondoarchive man page. However, mondo gives this error message when I try the above:

Fatal error... ERROR ! You specified a directory to include which doesn't exist
---FATALERROR--- ERROR ! You specified a directory to include which doesn't exist

Huh!?! I tried various and sundry other combinations and coulnd't get it to work. I finally glanced over at the mailing list archives and found that, just today, this was identified as a bug. At least I know I'm not going insane. Bruno (a fellow HPer, by the way) says the fix is in svn, but I think I'll wait until someone builds some rpms for me.

Posted by Bryan on April 8, 2006 | Filed under: Geek | 0 comments

A Differential Backup with Mondo

I broke out the mondo man page. To verify my little backup, and see what has changed since I made it, I ran this:

mondoarchive -V -i -I "/home/bryan/Documents" -d '/mnt/home/backup3' -g -s '700m'

I had made a little change in a text file, and it flagged it and told me. I just noticed that it says the -I switch is ignored if you are just verifying. Oh well.

Now, to do the actual differential backup I ran this command:

mondoarchive -O -i -D -I "/home/bryan/Documents" -d '/mnt/home/backup3' -g -s '700m'

For backing up one little text file it still took a while because it seemed to re-generate the boot disk. I think I saw an option in the manual to not do that, but it was highly recommended that you don't use that option. Anyway, looking at the backup directory, it seems to have overwritten the full backup iso with the differential. The restore only restores the changed file (and some empty directories, hmm). So, don't save the differential in the same place as the original? How do I tell it which is the orignial backup to start from when doing the differential then?

OK, a little digging around and I discovered some emails that explain how the differential backups are done: Mondo Differential backup, Mondo Differential/Incremental BU?, and this one helped a bit too, Mondo Differential backups on two different sets. Basically, the file list and timestamp of the last backup is stored in /var/cache/mondo-archive/, so you can specify any destination you want and it knows what to base the differential off of. I still need to try this, but my 2 year old is pulling on my away at the moment.

Posted by Bryan on April 7, 2006 | Filed under: Geek | 0 comments

A Small Backup with Mondo

I tried backing up just the Documents directory in my home directory with mondo. It went much much faster, of course, but at the end it wouldn't restore. Weird. So I tried again and used less compression this time. It gave a strange error message at the end:

Boot+data floppy creation failed. However, FYI, you may burn /root/images/mindi/mondorescue.iso to a CD and boot from that instead if you wish.

But the restore still worked fine. I think I got the same error the first time too. The differences the second time were, I used the default iso file name of mondorescue, and I used minimum compression. Why didn't the boot disk creation work? Maybe it couldn't make the boot disk because I didn't back up anything under /. Who knows.

I guess if I stick with mondo I'll have to double check each backup and make sure it works.

I just ran the exact same mondoarchive again, hoping it'd be smart and do a differential, but it doesn't seem to be. I guess I'll have to break out the man page and use the command-line for that one.

Posted by Bryan on April 6, 2006 | Filed under: Geek | 0 comments

Home Backup with Mondo Rescue

I'm playing with Mondo Rescue for backing up my hard drive. Here are some quick notes of the experience so far.

I ran a basic mondoarchive "gui" session, and accepted all defaults, except that I excluded /mnt from the backup. It asked for a max iso size, I didn't ever plan to burn these to anything, but I put in 700 MB because I didn't know what else to do. I backed up to hard drive (the unused hd on my system). It spent about 13 hours working, created 50 isos and then quit. I didn't see it quit, and from the log it looks like it gave up with the message "too many isos." No kidding.

Now I'm attempting to restore a single file. I typed mondorestore. The "gui" started up and told me to insert the boot disk. I just hit enter and it went to a menu asking what to restore from. I chose harddrive. It asked for the path to my isos. I gave it the path and it took off and after some work it showed me a file list from which I could select what I wanted to restore. I dug down and selected a single rpm file from my downloads directory (something that never should have been backed up, but oh well). It then asked me where to restore to, so I gave it a path on the (previously) unused hard drive. It's now chugging through all 50 isos looking for the file, telling me, "This may take some time." No kidding! OK, I was watching and it finished with an error in the middle of trying to do something with my large files:

# mondorestore
---FATALERROR--- Mommy!

However, it did restore the one file I asked it to!

I'm feeling pretty darn good about mondo at this point. It seems super easy to use, and does what I want. I think I'll be able to skip backing up some key directories, such as my music, and get a manageable set of stuff so it won't have to create too many isos and have these problems.

Things to try just to be sure:

Posted by Bryan on April 5, 2006 | Filed under: Geek | 0 comments

Wild Kingdom in the Backyard

"Look at that bird on our fence!" exclaimed Ily from across the living room. "And what is it eating?" I'd never heard her that excited about a bird. Isaac and I got up off the couch, peered between the blinds and saw it sitting right there on the backyard fence. A bird that was eating, eww, another bird. I told Ily that it must be a hawk, but she thought it looked too small to be a hawk. "It's a hawk," Isaac assured us. I ran and grabbed the camera and started shooting pictures and a video between the blinds through the window. It sat there picking away at it's kill, looking around between bites to make sure it was safe. Somehow it didn't notice us all gawking through the window, or the occasional flash from the camera when it decided it didn't have enough light.

The little digital camera wasn't able to zoom in as close as I'd like, and the auto focus wasn't doing to well through the glass either. I didn't want to scare it away, it was too fascinating to watch, but I really wanted to get a better picture. I tried to slowly, quietly sneak out the back door, hoping it was too engrossed in it's meal to notice, but as soon as I stepped outside it swooped across our neighbors backyard to the fence on the other side. It paused there to look at me and then flew across the next yard. Oh well, I thought, at least he took his meal with him.

I did get some ok pictures. After searching the internet a bit I found some bird identification websites and pictures that convinced me it must have been a Cooper's Hawk, a hawk that likes to eat other birds (the websites were The Illinois Raptor Center, and the flickr Birds of Prey, discussion and discussion). Identifying what type of bird it was eating is an exercise left to the reader. Maybe it was one of those that likes to eat our strawberries. In fact, I hope the hawk comes back, if only to keep our fruit safe!

Posted by Bryan on April 2, 2006 | Filed under: Family News | 2 comments

Amazing UAV Video from BYU

I got this in my email today:

The BYU MAGICC Lab competed against several other universities and defense contractors, including Stanford and NASA JPL to win the Best Overall Video Award and $2,000 at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Infoteach@Aerospace Video Competition. The winning video (wmv, avi) highlights Ray, one of the many Multiple Agent Intelligent Coordination and Control (MAGICC) Lab unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), independently navigating the BYU campus, negotiating a narrow canyon, and flying in formation with several other MAGICC Lab UAVs.

Watch the video by clicking on either the wmv or avi links above, it's really cool.

Posted by Bryan on April 1, 2006 | Filed under: Geek | 0 comments

General Conference, April 2006

For some reason Comcast isn't showing General Conference on our basic cable this time around. Thankfully BYU TV has an amazing video stream set up with Move Media. Aside from only having an Internet Exploder client, I'm very impressed with the quality of the sound and video. I searched around to find out more about the technology and only found one good reference, from 2003 sadly.

Anyway, conference is always great. It never ceases to amaze that it seems like every speaker talks about problems and questions I've been having lately. The Lord takes care of me.

Posted by Bryan on April 1, 2006 | Filed under: Religion | 0 comments

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