Ubuntu Linux on

Multi-threaded tar/bzip2

Tue, 20 Jan 2015 15:25:03 +0000

I often find myself banging my head against a wall watching tar compress with a single execution thread. PBZIP2 is the solution to that problem.

Here’s my few recipes for using this:

Compress: tar cf archive.tar.bz2 –use-compress-prog=pbzip2 archive/

Uncompress:�pbzip2 -dvc archive.tar.bz2 | tar x

Enjoy!

Dear Diary: Running Trac and upgrading to Ubuntu Server 14.04

Wed, 17 Sep 2014 17:17:20 +0000

I’m a fairly heavy user of trac. I’ve got various software projects I organize using trac. I decided to upgrade one of my Ubuntu 12.04 servers to Ubuntu 14.04 and of course ran in to the typical apache2 headaches that are born out of this particular transition.

After remembering to rename my virtual host files with .conf extensions (I find that change annoying as hell on its own), I kept running aground with an Internal Server Error message to which I couldn’t even find a hint in my logs, even after cranking up the verbosity.

My Diary: Upgrading Alfresco Installations

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 21:12:05 +0000

Here’s my diary from the “epic” experience of simply trying to upgrade Alfresco installations from 4.2.c to 4.2.f. I found the community documentation to be dated and had minimal confidence in its current validity. Still, it helped. These are my final notes on the process and in actuality there were a lot of wrong turns I made along the way before landing with the below. I spent like 5 hours working this out. Crazy.

My Diary: on running PHP 5.5+ & Apache 2.4 on Ubuntu 12.04

Sat, 22 Feb 2014 12:09:51 +0000

I’ve been working on migrating a Moodle 2.4+ installation from a rickety old Ubuntu 10.04 server on Amazon EC2 to a fresh machine as I can’t seem to update the original server to 12.04, which has newer PHP packages I require to run Moodle 2.6+, which I want specifically due to a user stats plugin I want installed.. So with one thing leading to another, I ran aground recently when I upgraded Ubuntu’s 12.04 Apache2 version to Apache 2.4 (from some PPA). This resulted in my site no longer working, it pretty much just said access denied. This was due to some new Apache security setting that my migrated Virtual Host config lacked.

Apt cache cheatsheet

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 13:29:44 +0000

I’ve been setting up a number of apt-cacher instances on different networks I run Ubuntu boxes on. This is a well documented process. I’m posting the key steps if only for my own reference later.

apt-get install apt-cacher
Edit /etc/default/apt-cacher add AUTOSTART=1.
Edit /etc/apt-cacher/apt-cacher.conf and make sure the allowed_hosts line is explicitly as intended.
Open client (and local server’s) /etc/apt/sources.list and str repl %s/http:\/\//http:\/\/SERVERHOSTNAME:3142\/apt-cacher\//g

Default port is 3142

Good detailed resources:

AirPlay Through pfsense Bridge

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:27:48 +0000

Howdy all, geek-mode enabled.

So I’ve been fighting somewhat to get my AirPlay enabled device (Apple TV) to function perfectly. I use pfsense to run my router and in so doing I’ve got a Wireless and Wired network that are bridged together. I found with the AppleTV that only devices on the same physical media could stream to it, though all devices could “see” it.

After submitting a feature request to Apple over this, I decided I wanted it solved for me anyway and I felt close to the solution. Since I had no logs to go by, I decided to bust out Wireshark to sniff all the involved network traffic. Suffice to say, I was rather entertained to find that when using AirPlay the payloads are flying around in IPv6, not IPv4. Just look at the caption in this post. All those teal packets is iTunes streaming audio to my AppleTV via AirPlay. It’s UDP over IPv6. Neato.

Ubuntu 9.10 remote mounts via sshfs

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:30:34 +0000

Hey just a fast post here.. I’ve been using sshfs on Ubuntu (meh, linux in general) for awhile as a means of securely remotely accessing my files. I’ve taken some steps to add a line to my /etc/fstab file to make this run smoothly…

Though today I ran in to a really weird situation. I found that despite having a uid=xxxx line, the appropriate user wasn’t getting ownership of the mount. In fact, when that user would look at the permissions for the mount, it returned something like “d???? ? ? ?”. Whisky Tango Foxtrot.

YouTube Grabber App

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:06:27 +0000

I’ve whipped up this little YouTube video grabber for myself and I’ve opened it up for the moment. If I see it getting spammed or abused in some way, I’ll probably password protect it, nevertheless, you can check it out here.

What it does

This little app takes a YouTube video link and then adds the reference in a database. A seperate script then polls that database and looks for new URLs. It then uses another script (that I did not write), called yt-download, to fetch each video and dump it to my fileserver.

Upgrade Experience with Ubuntu 9.04

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:24:25 +0000

Ubuntu Logo

Hello World!

While, yesterday was Ubuntu 9.04 day! With the latest official release of Ubuntu Linux, I decided to put one foot in the water and give upgrading my mac pro from 8.10 a whirl. The process went fairly perfectly with one major flaw. Upon rebooting my upgraded system, my video driver for xorg was no longer functioning properly. The solution was to remotely login through ssh, download & install the latest driver (from here) and then reboot again. After that I was greeted with the beautiful new Ubuntu 9.04 login screen and the upgrade was nearly..

Synergy Breeze

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:01:20 +0000

Here’s a little video I whipped up on account that some people STILL haven’t heard of Synergy.. Check this video out if you too are a bit unclear about what the dealio with Synergy is.

Ubuntu Samba Apache Active Directory Authentication

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:16:25 +0000

So I’ve spent some time for something at work figuring out how to get an Ubuntu server to authenticate users with a Windows 2003 Server Active Directory. Using the process I’ve found by combining various sources, my instructions show how to get a machine setup such that users logging in to the shell, accessing a samba share and checking out a website (or sub-directory of one) can all be authenticated using credentials centrally stored in a separate Active Directory server.