LincolnBlogs
From the twisted mind of me!

Yes, you heard it right! Get your backups up to date and your gear ready for the next release of the best Linux distribution available. Grab it here:

OK, ok, so I have been a bit absent lately. I have been mind blowingly busy at work. That aside, I *have* still been vaping and occasionally even answering my emails. SO, that brings me to this:

I have some things I want to review and I thought I’d post a little teaser to know what to watch for. I still have some e-juice flavors to review that AquaVaporCig sent me (delicious stuff by the way). J-Wraps sent me some really cool e-cig wraps to review as well. PaktPub just sent me an e-copy of the CentOS 6 Linux Server Cookbook, which I am really anxious to delve into (loves me some CentOS, I do). I also bought a few e-cig mods like the Vamo, the CCTS, the Draw Tube, Silver Bullet, Provari Mini, Segelei ZMax, Innokin SVD and a couple more on the way. Then there are the accessories like the Kanger Pro Tank, the iClear 30, a Cobra clone and the Kick, by Evolv. Hints and tips along the way, and even a review on Drip Tips! Stay Tuned!

You know, sometimes, just sometimes something fortuitous happens to me. This was one of those times.

I was contacted by my friends over at Pakt Publishing to review their new book on BackTrack. Of course I said sure. Hey, I am a Linux junkie after all! It had actually been quite a while since I had played with BackTrack and this gave me *just* the incentive I needed, but let me tell you a bit about the book…

The book is a “cookbook” style book which gives you “recipes” or guided examples of common problems/scenarios and their fixes. The book is well written, a good reference for a pro, and a great tutorial for the beginner, and by beginner I am assuming that the person *does* have Linux experience, just not BackTrack experience as some command line comfort is pretty much a necessity for this kind of work. The first 2 chapters start you out exactly the way they should, by installing and customizing the distribution. What they don’t tell you is it takes a good while to actually download the distro, but that is beside the point.

Once you actually get things running well, you can follow the book through some really decent examples from Information Gathering all the way through Forensics. The book covers all matter of subject matter and applications in between such as using NMAP, Nessus, Metaspolit, UCSniff and more. I mentioned that this was fortuitous for me and that was because one of the things the book covered was the Hydra program, and, as it turns out, that was the perfect tool for me to use in remediating some password synchronization issues across several hundred servers.

Anyone using a computer should have at least a basic understanding about keeping their valuable data safe, whether that data is for a multi-million dollar company or your own invaluable family photographs. This book goes to great efforts to not only explain how to detect, analyze and remedy such issues, but also gives important background about just how systems become vulnerable to begin with. If only for that reason alone, it’s worth the read. If you are actually a sysadmin, this information is a must. For $23 for the ebook version, it’s a no brainer. Good book. It helped me out and I’ll wager that if you give it a read it’ll do the same for you!

The folks over at Pakt Publishing have asked me to review their new BackTrack Linux book, The BackTrack 5 Cookbook. Stay tuned right here for the review and in the mean time make sure to hit their website for more information!

Just a quickie update post before I forget. I mentioned one of the things I was still waiting for before I would start using Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon Edition in earnest was the keyboard shortcuts needed to be fixed. Well, apparently that is not a priority because they are still broken. A quick search in the Mint forums, however, reveals a stellar work around that can be easily applied. Read more here.

Special thanks go out to ElectricKite for this one!

Woo! It has been a while since I posted about any linuxy things here and I was just going to veg today, but I promised

It’s no secret that I have had a thing for Linux Mint for quite a while. It is a solid reliable distribution that “just works” and, personally, it’s the one I have to piss with the least in order to get it working the way I like. That being said, as I posted about earlier, I noticed a few things on Mint 14 (Cinnamon) that contributed to keeping me off of it for a while. Most have been fixed, like the processor pegging, but the nagging issue with not being able to set custom keyboard shortcuts was a stinker. Honestly, at this point I have been so busy the last fre weeks I haven’t had a chance to see if that has been resolved yet. All that being said, I have this old laptop that I have traditionally run the XFCE edition on because it haqs lower resources. The XFCE edition has always worked a treat on this thing and I finally had the opportunity to upgrade from Mint 13 to 14 and really beat on it a little bit. In fact, that is what I am typing on now.

So just to be clear, I followed the recommended upgrade path, which is to say, clean reinstall. This seems to bother a lot of people but in Mint’s defense, I believe this is the best way to go from distribution to distribution. When you do an in place upgrade (which is possible) it takes tremendously longer imho, and then you are left sometimes with little residual bits and bobs issues to deal with that may or may not spring up on you at an inopportune time. Conversely, the clean install method of backing up your important bits, clean reinstall, and restoring the bits again is really relatively quick and painless. It does count on you having good backups, but, for sure, if you are doing an in place upgrade without good backups, you are lighting the disaster fuse

So, what is new on xfce edition? It doesn’t seem like there are any earth shattering changes here, mostly userland and kernel updates. Everything works really well and very quick, just as it did under 13. I would like to say I am surprised, but I am not. I have come to expect a certain level of quality from the Mint folks and they hardly ever disappoint. That’s why I always recommend their distribution, especially to newbies. People need to have a go-to distro that just works.

If you haven’t tried XFCE before and are contrasting it with Cinnamon or gnome (standard) you would certainly feel right at home and comfortable. While being a good bit lighter than the other DE’s xfce does well with providing you a similar set of programs, look and feel. Instead of a nautilus file manager, you generally have thunar, which works very well and much the same. Other differences are xfterm instead of gnome-terminal – still carries much of the same feel and functionality, etc.. You also have many of the same setup options, such as some ability for composting, screensavers, desktop backgrounds, virtual desktops and the rest of the things you are used to having control over. The menuing system has a bit of a different feel, but it is easily navigable.

As a lighter desktop option, there are still some things, some tweaks that you might need to take care of manually though. I will give you one example. For one reason or another xfce’s default icon text color was black. Well, as you can see from my screenshot, that doesn’t really work well for people like myself who like darker backgrounds (the default bg for Mint is a very light grey). I wanted to change that text color to white so I could, you know, read it While not very hard, it involves editing the .gtk-xfce file in your home directory and changing all the color codes (3 there) from #000000 to #FFFFFF. The resulting file looks like so:

style “xfdesktop-icon-view” {
XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha = 0

fg[NORMAL] = “#FFFFFF”
fg[SELECTED] = “#FFFFFF”
fg[ACTIVE] = “#FFFFFF”
}
widget_class “*XfdesktopIconView*” style “xfdesktop-icon-view”

The rest of the customization, outside of fixing network manager’s dns control, which I think is a horrible idea, is pure userland. There are a bunch of programs that I personally use that make me able to do what I do and I naturally put all my customization into a script to be able to share it. You’ll need to run this as root and not just sudo it to get it to work correctly. To oget to a root account simply open a term and do a “sudo su -” and you’ll br prompted for your password. Once you give it, you are root. Just run this program for all the goodies. One other oddity I found was that after the initial reboot, when you are logging in, you *must* choose xfce as your session type. If you do not, you won’t get a desktop environment Once you choose it once, though, it’ll ask you if you want to make it your default. Yes is a good answer here Then you’ll be a rockin’!

Here is fixmint14.sh

#!/bin/bash

clear

# Test for UID=0
if [ "$(echo $UID)" != "0" ]
then
echo “You must be superuser to run this program. Try ‘sudo su -’ then ‘./fixmint14.sh’”
exit
fi

sed -i -e ‘s/dns=dnsmasq/#dns=dnsmasq/g’ /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

apt-get update
apt-get -y install xterm
apt-get -y install openssh-server ssh
apt-get -y install sshfs
apt-get -y install smbfs
apt-get -y install irssi
apt-get -y install vpnc
apt-get -y install screen
apt-get -y install vlc
apt-get -y install mencoder
apt-get -y install vim
apt-get -y install moc
apt-get -y install subversion
apt-get -y install git
apt-get -y install curl
apt-get -y install php5-cli
apt-get -y install mutt
apt-get -y install clusterssh
apt-get -y install html2text
apt-get -y install autofs
apt-get -y install vncviewer
apt-get -y install dropbox
apt-get -y install sqlite
apt-get -y install links
apt-get -y install rdesktop
apt-get -y install expect
apt-get -y install mysql-client
apt-get upgrade

for service in rsync virtualbox-guest-utils dns-clean pppd-dns saned speech-dispatcher ; do update-rc.d $service disable; done

reboot

Tonight on the TechShow I will reveal some **super secret** information from Clem regarding Linux Mint 14! Tune in tonight, Wednesday November 28th at 8:30pm EDT! Get directions at http://tllts.org.

WTH Mint-14!? Cinnamon runs at 17% cpu (doing NOTHING), Gnome3 at 7.x%, xfce at 2.x% and Fluxbox at 0.x%… GAHHH! FIX ME PLEASE!!!

A long long time ago, I virtualized all my home infrastructure onto an ESXi 4.0 server. It has run perfectly fine, minus one hard drive failure, for quite a few years. Lately, though, I had been wanting to upgrade it because it’s not terribly fast and I have run out of resources to be able to add new VMs. It was running on a dual cpu machine (single core) with 160Gb HDD and 4Gb of ram, and I was just using it all up. No more ram for new stuff.

I decided that I would upgrade the matching spare server I had and try out KVM because I had used it a bit for RedHat training and it worked so well. Of course, Fessenden’s law, as opposed to Murphy’s law, stated simply that “Something will go wrong.” And it did. Over and over again.

First off, let me say that on an enterprise class server system, if it says it needs registered ECC ram, it is NOT kidding. I must have swapped ram around in that server 50 times before I noticed 2 sticks of non-registered ram in there. Once I got over that, I had 8Gb of ram and a new 250Gb HDD and I was ready to rock! Or so I thought.

I decided to use CentOS 6 as my virtualization host OS and that went right on but I soon discovered that my CPU doesn’t support virtualization. Ugh. So I decided that I would switch gears and go with virtualbox instead so that I could continue using my current hardware. I have often used virtualbox on other machines and it is a fantastic platform. I set about getting things running.

When I installed the base OS, I did a minimal install. No GUI, etc.. There is no sense in putting stuff on there you don’t need on a server right? Well, the very first thing I found was that I could not use the virtualbox gui controls because I did not have any X installed. To rectify that:

yum -y install xorg-x11-xauth dejavu-lgc-sans-fonts

You need the auth to be able to forward your X session, and need the fonts to be able to actually see words on your app.

Next I copied all my vmdk files to the new server. This takes a LONG time for old servers to move around 100Gb. Once there, however, I discovered that virtualbox cannot read native vmdk files. Ugh again.

yum -y install qemu-kvm

And then I could convert the vmdks to raw images, and then again to native vdi files for virtualbox.

qemu-img convert machine-flat.vmdk machine.bin
vboxmanage convertfromraw --format VDI machine.bin machine.vdi

I put all my machines together and noticed that virtualbox was complaining about uuid on some of the disk images. To fix that:

vboxmanage internalcommands sethduuid machine.vdi

The first machine I started up was a CentOS 6 machine and that fired right up, however, udev immediately reassigned my ethernet device to eth1. In order to get thatr back where it was supposed to be I had to go into /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and delete the ethernet rules in there and reboot.

Along about this time my server powered off. No idea why. It powered itself back on again about 30 seconds later. I checked everything on the server and it looked fine. Curious, but I kept on going.

Next I tried to start up my remaining Centos 5 VMs. These were problematic. The very first thing I noticed here was that they were barking because I never uninstalled the vmware drivers. I fired them back up on the original server and ran the vmware-uninstall.pl program. I turned them back off and spent hours re copying the over, and then reformatting the vmdk files into vdi.

Starting them back up, I found that, again, they would not run. This time I received the error that it could not locate any LVM partitions. This, it turns out, is because the initrc files did not have the appropriate drivers in them. Fixing this was fun. First off, you need to add a cdrom drive to the vm and put a CentOS rescue cd/dvd there. Boot it up in rescue mode, chroot to the /mnt/sysimage and then fix the /etc/modprobe.conf file:

alias scsi_hostadapter mptbase
#alias scsi_hostadapter1 mptspi
#alias scsi_hostadapter2 ata_piix
alias scsi_hostadapter1 mptscsih
alias scsi_hostadapter2 mptscsih

The entries with the #s are the ones I had to change. Then I needed to rebuild all of the initrd images.

cd /boot
for file in $(ls init* | cut -d'-' -f2,3 | cut -d'.' -f1-6); do mkinitrd -v -f /boot/initrd-$file.img $file; done

After that, the machines came right up! Of course, the host powered right off. Several times over the next day. Grrr.

I figured that there was a hardware issue with the host somewhere and resolved to buy myself a new server. I picked an open box refurb from microcenter that had 8Gb ram, a 750Gb HDD and a nice quad core cpu that supported virtualization. Wohoo! I can now switch to KVM!

I set up the new machine and installed KVM and started copying vmdk files over again and, bingo, kernel panic. I rebooted and the machine would not even get past bios. This went on for a couple days until I took the machine back to microcenter. I picked up a different machine, better quad core with 12Gb of ram and 1Tb HDD and set about getting it running.

This time, success! I set up CentOS 6 and KVM, added the bridged networking and copied over the vmdk files. KVM will read vmdk files but I decided to convert to a more native format, qcow2, the preferred format for qemu, anyhow. that is fairly simple to do.

qemu-img convert -O qcow2 machine-flat.vmdk machine.qcow2


I put all the machines back together again and started them back up. I still had to do the initrd fixes on the CentOS 5 VMs to get them going, but after that all has been running fantastically!

Somewhere along the line here I figured out that my issue with my secondary server powering off was a bad port on my UPS.

KVM is really easy to run and manage for a Linux geek as opposed to VMware 4. The native gui tools do the job just fine, although they are not quite as intuitive to me as VMWare’s VIC. I am quite happy, though, with the switch. I now have more than twice the resources of my initial virtualization environment. Now I am good to go for several more test VMs and the new machine is nice and quiet and doesn’t have to hide under my couch

Sometimes I get lucky and something cool happens to fall in my lap. This happened last week when I ran across a G5 tower dual 1Ghz /8Gb ram that was getting tossed. I decided ti rescue it as I hate to see useful hardware go to waste. As the version of OS X that runs on such beasts is getting long in the tooth AND I happen to be a Linux enthusiast, I decided quickly that this would be a great box to look at the recent offerings of PPC Linux. Here are my thoughts:

Debian:
This happened completely by accident, but Debian was the first distro I tried. You see, the Mint PPC installer will install Debian PPC by default if you don’t specify to install Mint, which I completely forgot to do on my first try. Debian is, well, Debian. I wish I had the foresight to actually get a screenshot, but the installed version on PPC is what I expect it looks like anywhere else as well. Debian is fantastically consistent about that. That being said, Debian and I differ in opinion on what software I generally want to have available under Linux. The Debian folks are very staunch on the “free software only” thing and *I* am one of the guys who thinks I should have the “freedom” to actually enjoy proprietary and non-free software if I want to. As I really wasn’t looking to do a Debian install anyhow, I played for a few minutes and then moved along.

Mint PPC 11:
Now *this* is what I really wanted to try. As a long time admirer and user of Linux Mint, I was thrilled to try it out on the PPC too. Unfortunately I was slightly disappointed. You see, Mint PPC is not an “official” port, per se, so it’s not quite the same. First thing I noticed is it is obviously built straight off Debian, and uses their software “choices”, which I have previously described. Secondly, the default desktop is an LXDE with nautilus. Ok, but a little clunky feeling to me. It wasn’t long before I was wanting to check out what else was out there, and so I did.

YellowDog 6.2:
Years ago, when Dann and I first started the Lehigh Valley Linux User Group, YellowDog Linux was quite a contender. Shortly thereafter, they made their presence really big in Japan and I sort of didn’t hear much from them anymore. Well, it appears they are still going strong and offering what turns out to be a really nice and robust PPC Linux distribution. Honestly, in retrospect, this is the one I would settle on as my second choice. There is plenty of support and plenty of packages available and it runs rock solid stable. If you are at all familiar with RedHat, CentOS or Scientific Linux this would be an no-brainer for you to use. The *only* thing I didn’t really like about it was the default DE was Enlightenment. It worked fine and was completely functional, just not to my tastes. I am sure I could change it to suit my needs better, but there were more PPC Distros to try!

Fedora 16 PPC:
Now THIS one I was SURE would be the one for me as soon as I got it running. The install went really smooth, especially for a Fedora install, which has a really bad historical habit of being broken in one way or another. Once I had the desktop up I was greeted by a standard Gnome3 DE, which is completely familiar to work with for me, even though it was minus the desktop icon support available in Mint. No matter, I was excited to use it and it was FAST and really responsive. Unfortunately, as is the habit of my ventures into Fedora land, it was hopelessly broken, and there is not a lot of package support. Here are a few for-instances: EPEL repo will not install. Flite makes the core dump. Worst was nautilus refuses to prompt for user/password on any shares (ssh, smb, webdav, etc.). It just says you must enter the password and then doesn’t afford you any way to do so. Nice try guys.

Ubuntu 11.10 PPC:
Saving the best for last, I *finally* hit on one that’s a keeper, otherwise I was going straight back to YDL. Ubuntu, as it turns out, ends up being a very polished product for PPC. Sure there are some issues, such as Unity completely rots on this machine, but they are easily overcome and then you have a nice solid worker with good package support. In my case, like I mentioned, I had an issue with Unity. It seems that the Unity 3D doesn’t like this mac. I am not sure why as Gnome-Shell works great with the 3D stuff. Unity 2D was fine, but not only do I prefer Gnome-shell over Unity, but I was working on a 4×3 screen, which nobody should ever use Unity with. Once I switched to Gnome-shell, I was set. I installed my standard set of packages I use. All of them installed without crabbing about anything and everything worked, even user/pass in nautilus

If you have an old PPC machine you want to keep in service or press into service, Linux PPC is surely the way to go. You just cannot go wrong with either YellowDog or Ubuntu on these machines. No sense in wasting or chucking good computer equipment right! Stuff Linux on there and make it useful once again!