General IT

Ubuntu 11.10, Unity, Gnome 3 and the whole mess

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My main work machine is still on Ubuntu 10.10. I had installed 11.04 on my spare laptop, but hated Unity so much I only ever booted into Gnome Classic. I was hoping things might get better with 11.10, but things are now very much worse. To the point where I'm looking around for other distributions. I suspect, like Linus Torvalds, I might start looking at XFCE.

Anyway, after upgrading my laptop to 11.10, I was disturbed to find it wouldn't boot up: you just sit there looking at a message which says "Waiting for network configuration". I'm fairly techy (and have a spare computer), so I was able to find the answer, which was to drop to a shell and move a bunch of files from /var/run to /run. But imagine a non-techy person trying to cope with this. Congratulations Ubuntu, you just lost market share.

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Cleaning a virus off a Samba Share.

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One of the problems of running a Samba share on Linux is that occasionally one of the Windows machines accessing it will get a virus, and infect all the files on the share. You can use one of the AV tools to do this of course, (Clam AV, AVG and Kaspersky all have them these days) but they're pretty slow generally.

I noticed at one client that the virus was putting exe files into directories, with the same name as the containing directory eg.it would create the file /share/Software/Software.exe.

So the first thing to do is to see who is creating them. Here we go …

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Bandwidth Saving apt-get upgrade

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I  have a main desktop on my home LAN, and a few notebooks, all running Ubuntu. I have a pretty slow Internet connection, so when a kernel update comes out it means running a 50Mb update on all of the machines. It struck me that this isn't the most efficient way of doing things. I experimented with the apt-cacher package, but that had two problems: first it didn't seem to work that well and often crashed on the main desktop; second, whenever I went outside my home LAN it didn't work.

So I did the Linux thing, and made a quick and dirty script that works for me …

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Moving your ecryptfs directory between machines

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On Ubuntu there is an option to create an encrypted directory in your home directory called ~/.Private, which is mounted at ~/Private. To set this up you need to issue two commands:

 sudo apt-get install ecryptfs-utils
 ecryptfs-setup-private

It asks you for a mount password. Log out and log back in again and everything you drop in the Private directory is encrypted and stored in the .Private directory, so that no-one can access your files if, for example, they log in to the machine in Single user mode, or take the hard disk out. So far so good.

But what happens when you move your encrypted files to a different machine? The instructions on this weren't so clear, so I'm just writing down a step-by-step approach to help others who are unsure.

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