General IT

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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ClamAV reporting Outdated version

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Just to remind myself as much as anything, as I've been through this a few times. ClamAV was complaining loudly in the logfiles about not having the most up to date ClamAV. I searched around and was pointed to the Debian Unstable repository to /etc/apt/sources.list (Read the whole article before you add this one …there … Read more