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 still having issues with mounting shares over CIFS…well, with unmounting them anyway.

I have a couple of leads though – including this site and the custom script. The script is doing well so far…

I found instructions on how to activate the Wake on LAN on my Shuttle SK41G.

Specially:

Enable WOL in the BIOS. The options for this are in “Power Management Setup”–>”IRQ/Event Activity Detect”. There are two options: “PowerOn by PCI Card” and “Modem Ring Resume”. I’m not sure why, but either option enables WOL when the computer has just been plugged into power, but “PowerOn by PCI Card” is the only one I could get to enable WOL when linux shuts down the computer. (WOL is strange that way…)

Turns out there is some bug – don’t know yet whether it is confirmed as being a Radeon problem or not – that stops fonts from working properly in Jaunty when trying to use MythTV…in any way. You may get all the boxes with no text. Or, you might get just a black rectangle when you try to load the app.

The first step is to ensure you’ve installed msttcorefonts. Then (from this link), workaround by using XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS="1" mythfrontend (or any other myth command).

Can’t wait until they fix this!

After installing the fantastic iPhone skin for XBMC on my Ubuntu machine, annoyingly, http://xbox:8080/iphone doesn’t work because XBMC’s web server expects default.asp to be the first page to go to, and when that’s not there (‘coz the skin uses index.html), it errors out.  And Response.Redirect isn’t known by the server.

Not to worry – the following default.asp page will redirect to the index.html page in less than a second:

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


When the apt-get gives an error about a missing gpg key, there will be a hex code, and you can use the following (sometimes) to add it:


gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv [KEY]
gpg --export --armor [KEY] | sudo apt-key add -


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