Microwave Biscuit

I have this habit of making things more difficult than they need to be. A while ago I posted about setting up SSL access to my home Ubuntu PC and I had/have everything working as it should, however my home IP address recently changed and my router didn’t update my DynDNS address. It has a setting to use DynDNS which I’ve filled in and I just assumed that when it detected an IP change it would update the service. Well, it didn’t. So, I decided I would just set up a client on my Ubuntu PC to take care of the updating. A long time ago I had a bash script that did it fairly well but I’ve long since lost it and while I did come up with a few alternatives using the Google, I ended up grabbing the “official” Linux client which is “ddclient”. The DynDNS website has some very helpful tools for creating and configuring ddclient but I still had some minor issues. I started messing with config files, reading docs, etc and I’m sure I would have gotten it to work but a quick search on the Google revealed that ddclient is available in Synaptic. Duh! Why not look there first? I don’t know… Anyway, I selected the package and got a nice debconf gui configuration routine which I filled out and magically it all works. The moral of the story is before attempting to build things from sources, manually configure stuff, etc. check Synaptic. It’s entirely probable that what you are trying to wrestle with is available as an easily configured package.

I’ve noticed for quite sometime that as my computer is running over several days that the “xorg” process begins using more and more memory until eventually the performance of my machine suffers and I need to restart X. Is it the X-Server process that is “leaking” memory or is it something else leaking into the X process? Restarting X is not a terrible hassle but it doesn’t seem like normal behavior. Any thoughts?

Thanks to Nikhil Fernandes who left a comment on a previous post I found the tutorial I was looking for! http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=383053

This describes exactly what I am trying to accomplish including how to secure it with public/private keys. I’m very happy with the solution and now I can access my Ubuntu PC when on the road from Windows.

Thanks again to all who posted comments and advice.

First off - big thanks to all who have left comments on how to configure it. Via a combination of various approaches I seem to have it set up ok now. I ran into a couple of issues which were as follows:

1. I had the DenyHosts package installed to prevent malicious attacks. In attempting to configure VNC/SSH it determined that I was in fact a hacker (or hax0r). Every time I attempted to connect it kept re-adding me to the hosts.deny file. I can’t figure out how to “reset” DenyHosts to allow me in. For now I have disabled it.
2. Some of the tutorials I had been following were geared towards X forwarding which is different than what I had in mind. It’s kind of interesting in that you can create a new X session that you connect to and launch apps from. Nice feature but what I really wanted was the remote access provided by “Remote Desktop”.
3. I have not yet setup the port forwarding on the router I have which means I can only access the machine from within my network. I plan on keeping it that way for a bit until I feel a bit more “secure” in my solution.

So the ultimate solution was pretty much what Stefano left in the comments:

It’s pretty straightforward, really.

Setup:
* Make sure that all the users on your computer have secure passwords (even better, use SSH keys rather than passwords)
* Install ssh_server
* Make sure that port 22/TCP is forwarded in, from your router.
* Set up some kind of dyndns, so you know your home IP address.
* Turn on “Remote Administration”, and set a password for it, rather than requesting permission.

On the road:
* Use putty to ssh into home, before connecting go to port forwards, and add a local forward from 5901 to 127.0.0.1:5900
* Then connect
* Then you can use a VNC client to connect to “localhost:1″

Although the part about “use ssh keys” is a mystery to me. I know I’ve read about doing that before somewhere but for the life of me I can’t remember how.

Weather Wallpaper has been updated to version 0.2.0 and the author has added quite a bit of functionality. There is now a preferences dialog which allows for configuration of imperial/metric units, x and y offsets for the weather info (to reposition it on the screen) along with a host of bug fixes. If you are using it, I’d recommend upgrading. You can get it here: http://mundogeek.net/weather-wallpaper/.

I experienced a small bug and reported it on the launchpad site. Another contributor posted a fix. So, if you upgrade and have any issues, try this:

Change lines 558-566 to:

statusIcon = gtk.StatusIcon()
try:
    # Run the thread which updates the wallpaper
    updater = Updater()
    updater.start()

    # Create the status icon
    statusIcon.set_from_stock(gtk.STOCK_REFRESH)
    menu = gtk.Menu()

Also - notice the cool new wordpress feature for Syntax Highlighting!

I would really like to be able to remotely access my computer when traveling however I’m very concerned about opening up my PC for attack. What I’d really like to be able to do is use VNC/SSH to get full access to my PC’s resources from a Windows laptop when on the road. I’ve read a few things here and there but nothing that seems to be a complete guide to both setting up remote access and securing it completely.

I just finished reading the September 18th issue of PC Magazine (Mobile Super Guide) and they have an extended section on using Linux. The article has roughly 10 pages devoted to trying out Linux. The distro that they spend most of the time discussing is Ubuntu. The article is very basic and geared towards someone who hasn’t used and/or installed Linux before. My only real complaint about the article is that it misses one of the really nice features of Ubuntu for new users which is the Live CD. Having the ability to boot up a distro and see that all of your hardware works, etc is very comforting to new users. They don’t mention that at all in the article.

Anyway, it’s nice to see Ubuntu getting more good press!

Via: Weather Wallpaper using Imperial Units : Journal Of An Open Sourcee

So I saw Og’s post on Weather Wallpaper and I asked him to forward me on his code/hack to use imperial units. He sent it on to me and I further “hacked” it to include wind speed in mph. I sent it on back to Og who may or may not send it back on to the original author.

The basis of this project is a python script that auto-generates wallpaper with the current weather conditions. It’s very cool and now that I’ve fully hacked it to display all of my weather in imperial units I like it even more. If you’d like a copy of my version of the updated code leave a comment and I’ll forward it on.

Thanks to Og as well as the original author of the code. BTW - if you wish to use my (Og’s) code you still need to install the package from the author then you can replace the script with the new one.

Link to Weather Wallpaper site: http://mundogeek.net/weather-wallpaper/

I have been using Azureus for a long while to satisfy my bittorrent needs but it just kills me how resource intensive it is (thanks Java). I have tried several other clients and found them all to be lacking in some of the functionality that I want. That being said, I recently read about Deluge and decided to give it a shot. I’ve been using it for a few days and here are my thoughts.

The good:

• Uses half or less of the resources of Azureus
• Supports RSS feed scanning and filters
• Really easy to reseed previously downloaded torrents
• Nice set of features and plugins available

The not so good:

• It seems that I can’t easily “move” files that I’ve downloaded. Azureus has the ability to move downloads automatically or manually. Deluge can do it automatically, however I can’t seem to right click on something and move it to a different folder.
• On the web site there is talk of a built in scheduler for dl/ul speeds but I can’t seem to find it. That’s something I use quite a bit with Azureus as I don’t mind using a ton of bandwidth while I’m sleeping but during the day I share my bandwidth with several others and I like the ability to set max speeds for different parts of the day.
• It keeps all torrents in the same area. Azureus has a downloading and uploading area so that you can at a glance see what is seeding versus what is downloading.

My complaints aren’t many and I think I may continue to use Deluge especially given its much lower memory footprint. There are pre-built debs available (as well as RPM’s, sources, etc) including a AMD 64-Bit deb!

Link: http://deluge-torrent.org/

My favorite magazine - Linux Format did a Distro Showdown in the July 2007 edition. Their final standings are as follows:

1. Ubuntu
2. SUSE
3. Debian
4. PCLinuxOS
5. Mandriva
6. Fedora
7. Slackware
8. Sabayon

It’s a very comprehensive review and the compared many different facets of each OS. Well worth the read.