Back from vacation

Just got back from my beach vacation, where I enjoyed a week pretty much unplugged and off the cloud (though admittedly not entirely by choice). The rental we were staying in had only three networks in range, with the two strongest protected by encryption (one using WPA, one using WEP), and the one unencrypted network was too far to establish a reliable connection.

Unfortunately, after recently reinstalling Ubuntu on my laptop, I no longer had airsnort installed to help grease my way into a wireless connection, although I never had much luck with airsnort anyways, as my old Cisco Aironet card was only somewhat supported.

Alas, I have been inspired to learn how to use aircrack-ng. While it lacks a pretty GUI that airsnort had, it seems that this set of tools is a bit more robust, faster, and works with both WEP and WPA-PSK keys.

I've installed it on my laptop and had the chance to monkey with it a little bit, although I have yet to successfully crack a WEP key. My goal is to do so by the end of this week.

OSX can't follow symlinks in Samba

Yet another reason Apple offers an inferior product, apparently OS X's Finder cannot follow symlinks in Samba (although Windows and any *nix GUI has no problem). I have yet to test this, but I'm almost positive that using the OS X terminal (essentially bash for BSD), one can follow symlinks, just not through Apple's GUI.

Found this out last night trying to get my roommate/coworker's site up on my server. I ended up just creating a separate Samba share to the symlinked directory.

But hey, OS X is so pretty, who needs it to actually work like any other OS should :-p

More X and Ubuntu

This interview with Mark Shuttleworth, the founder and head of Canonical and financier of Ubuntu, touches upon some of the problems Ubuntu has experienced with X with jaunty. Relevant to my problems in Gentoo, the interview cites issues associated Xorg and intel drivers.

From the article:

derStandard.at: In retrospect: Could you have done something differently to ease the problems people experienced with X in Jaunty?

Shuttleworth: To be clear: There was only one substantial issue with X, which related to hardware from a particular vendor. And as soon as it was clear that there was a problem that vendor stepped up, they provided really good inside, we had access to engineering, there was a real shared desire to resolve that problems. It's also worth that the vendor in question - Intel - is hugely investing in X so it would be wrong to say Intel is causing all this problems cause actually what they do is all this amazing work to make X that much better.

X is still dead...

I've emerged the following from the x11 overlay:

media-libs/mesa-9999
x11-libs/libdrm-9999
x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel-9999
x11-base/xorg-server-1.6.2

I enabled tiling (it was manually disabled before, as specified in this
gentoo-wiki article)

X is definitely more stable than before, I am able to log in to gnome and use
as normal, although sooner or later the GPU locks up again and I am just left
with a pointer and no keyboard.

Fortunately, this box's main purpose is as a server (primarily development :-),
so running X is not critical. For now, I am going to sit tight and just make
sure to continually run updates. I am going to wait a bit longer before I
upgrade to 2.6.31, simply because I need the kernel to be stable (beyond r2)
and do not want to sacrifice that just to get X running a bit smoother.

To see a more documented recap of what all I did with X, check out this gentoo bugzilla page

I started a couple of small projects this weekend. The first was getting SAMBA/cifs working again in the new network environment. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't see/access my SAMBA share on my gentoo box: nothing had really changed within the local network, other than a slightly different routing prefix... Why would that matter?

Then I remembered setting up my stateful firewall and documenting it on this very blog. Of course SAMBA isn't working, as I explicitly allow traffic over one particular Class C subnet, and since that change, all traffic is blocked. So after a quick few edits to my firewall configuration script and to smb.conf, I was again all set up.

The other small project was deploying some of the past sites I have completed on my web server, to act as a mini portfolio. I haven't decided whether I want to get the sites up and running as they do/did in production, or if I should just take screenshots. Right now I'm leaning towards screenshots, as I don't want to have to reconstruct each site's respective database and data.

This week I hope to get the chance to play around with Windows 7 a bit more and try and figure out why Gnome is running so slowly on my FreeBSD VM. I also plan on finally updating my Dell C610 laptop from Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn to 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. This will mark the 5th release of Ubuntu I have used, as I started with the first release, 4.10 Warty Warthog, back in '04. I should take this opportunity to note that without Ubuntu, I would be nowhere near where I am today in terms of experience with Linux. I've always been a fan of Ubuntu's cheesy credo of "Linux for human beings," as it aims to simplify many of the complexities that are typically associated with Linux. Although I had used a few other distros prior to Ubuntu, namely RedHat, SuSE, and Mandrake, it was not until Ubuntu that I felt comfortable with the Linux kernel and using bash. So thank you Canonical for Ubuntu, and thank you to the Debian team for apt-get!

Lastly, this week, I think I'm going to give OSX on a VM another shot.

X is Dead

Just a quick update:

After being away from my systems for a week because I'm in the process of moving, I set up my workstations in the new house, along with two new toys. I had the opportunity to throw Windows 7 up on a VM, but haven't had much time to play with it. So far, I'm more impressed with Win7 than I was with Vista, in terms of usability, notification handling, and its more enterprise-friendly configuration options.

For the past week I've been working on getting my system back up and running- since upgrading to kernel 2.6.29 and a newer intel driver, X no longer starts correctly- basically everything I've experienced is documented in this gentoo bug report. I now have an intimate understanding on configuring Xorg-server, using masked packages, and installing X11-drivers on gentoo. I'm still struggling to get X to work properly, but so far am still having issues with it starting then freezing. As of right now, I have recompiled x11-drivers as well as followed the steps in this Gentoo how-to.

At work, I've finally been granted some Active Directory privileges, so I'm trying to take a crash course in AD group policy. I have learned basic AD administration, such as user and computer creation, managing organizational units, and user privileges. Right now, I'm working on creating group policy to implement auto logoff and something along the lines of Windows SteadyState. I'm also in the process of configuring Mac OSX to authenticate users using the University's LDAP tree. I've also had the opportunity to toy a bit with SmartDeploy, but have yet to actually start deploying workstations with it.

That's it for now, hopefully I'll be able to post a bit more frequently now that my move is almost complete.