After installing the new Ubuntu 9.10 over the weekend, I set about again trying to establish my new DNS server running on the platform. I have found what seems to be a great tutorial for DDNS (i.e. DNS which is updated with DHCP leases) here.

I’m still working through the bugs, but things at least seem to be getting DHCP addresses, so that’s a good start.

A couple of gotchas early one – Ubuntu runs a thing called AppArmor which seems to cause a lot of problems with applications like DHCP wanting to update BIND and all that. The comments on this post at DebianAdmin.com outline the changes that are needed to be made, specifically you have to make one last minor change to /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.dhcpd3:


/etc/bind/ rw,
/etc/bind/** rw,


I’m reworking my home network, and playing with a VirtualBox image of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS that is acting as my DNS server and DHCP server. This is an attempt to deal with the frustrations of my Netgear gear not doing what I want re: IP addressing, and to simplify accessing servers and other devices by name on all my various IP-enabled equipment.

I’m still getting to the bottom of all this DNS stuff, but a couple of key links I don’t want to forget are:

• The Perfect Server at howtoforge.com
• DNS server Setup using bind in Ubuntu from Ubuntu Geek
• Make your DHCP server dynamically update your DNS records on Ubuntu Hardy Heron

I’m just discovering the usefulness of smbclient and this link has a great summary of the commands you can fire through this tool from the terminal.

Probably the most common one I need to do is to use the tarmode to copy whole folders down, like so:


tarmode
lcd /tmp #this switches the local directory
recurse
prompt
mget pdf995/ #this recurses and tars the pdf995 remote directory and puts it in /tmp on the client


This one bugged me for ages, and it’s still not something you can completely remove, but if you are using Ubuntu or a Gnome desktop as, say, a media centre, you may not want to have the Gome panel/bar appearing at all.

The current best solution is to use gconf-editor to set the auto_hide_size of the panel you want to change (under /apps/panel/toplevels/[panel name]) to 1.  Then make sure the “auto hide” option is checked and voila – pretty much gone.

So, there’s this very well documented bug with all versions of Ubuntu where the network connection is dropped before any set Samba shares are unmounted.  This results in annoying “CIFS error 50″ type timeout issues. 

ln -s /etc/init.d/umountnfs.sh /etc/rc0.d/K15umountnfs.sh
ln -s /etc/init.d/umountnfs.sh /etc/rc6.d/K15umountnfs.sh

To get the GCALDaemon up and running at startup in Ubuntu, check out http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4473753&postcount=5

Still trying to find the solution to the damn CIFS error whenever you reboot or shutdown Ubuntu, which is all to do with shutting down the network before trying to unmount the shares. Have been told that the following works:

sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/umountnfs.sh /etc/rc0.d/K15umountnfs.sh
&& sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/umountnfs.sh /etc/rc6.d/K15umountnfs.sh

Will have to wait and see.

You can append the following after vga= on a distro line in /boot/grub/menu.lst to change the font size of the CLI console:

In my upgrading of my laptop to the new Ubuntu Jaunty, I’ve found the PC speaker very, very loud. 

Not to worry.  To shut it up, type modprobe -r pcspkr. And, to make that permanent, add the line /sbin/modprobe -r pcspkr to /etc/rc.local.

Instructions here, but basically, install ssl-cert and then use the command:

sudo make-ssl-cert /usr/share/ssl-cert/ssleay.cnf /etc/ssl/certs/selfsigned.pem

There’s more information at this great site on how to create self-signed certificates and then set up Apache to support them.