Linux – Page 10 – Everything is Broken

Moving your ecryptfs directory between machines

January 14, 2011 by admin

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.

ClamAV reporting Outdated version

May 4, 2010 by admin

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

Adventures in unbricking a router

April 7, 2010 by admin

Another fantastic illustration of how Linux 'gets the job' done. Although sometimes the operator (ahem) is sometimes a bit slow on the uptake. Anyway, I had a Linksys WRT54G router in which the wireless unit had blown up after a power outage and surge. Gotta love the Philippines. I had dd-wrt on it, but decided … Read more

One Line Guitar Tuner

March 16, 2010 by admin

Every now and then I come across something which makes me marvel at the flexibility of Linux. This is one of these things. I play guitar, and I'd previously written a small script to act as a guitar tuner. I generated some .ogg files of the correct pitch and then wrote a script to loop … Read more

Ubuntu Firefox's Tattletale Search Query

April 23, 2009 by admin

Have you ever noticed that when you type a search term into the search box in the top right of your Firefox browser, that a load of junk gets added to the search term. For example, you search for 'banana' and you get something like this:

http://www.google.com.ph/search?q=banana&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a

Well what you're effectively doing is giving Google a lot of information for free. Which irritates me. All I really need is this,

http://www.google.com.ph/search?q=banana

and if they really want to know more about me, then they're welcome to go digging through their logs.

OK its a minor irritation, but one that we can fix! I understand that Ubuntu does it as part of a deal with Google, but there's no reason why we can't take matters into our own hands and change the defaults.