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.

My mother has asked me to assist her with the purchase of a new laptop so yesterday we went to the local BestBuy to scope out prospective machines. My choice was a clearance Gateway for $349 which I think is perfect for what she needs to do (surf the web, e-mail and play solitaire) however she was leery of it because it wasn’t plugged in and she couldn’t mess with it. So, we went up a notch to another Gateway which was $699 and was roughly twice as nice (double the RAM, double the HD, Writes DVD - which she’ll never do). I’ve bought quite a few Gateway PC’s over the years and they all have worked reasonably well. I still have a Pentium 90 with 64 Meg of RAM that would probably turn on if I asked it to. She wasn’t sold however so we kept looking. We found a virtually identical HP laptop in terms of specs and price but it had some “pretty” patterns etched into the lid of the laptop. SOLD! Pretty beat out all of the other factors. I have had good experiences with HP PC’s as well but just more with Gateway. Apparently that doesn’t matter - pretty swirly things convinced my mother to make a purchase. Hear that Gateway?

I guess being that they are all probably made in the same factory in China it doesn’t matter so much and it just comes down to luck. I also guess I could have gotten her a better deal by shopping online but being that it’s from BestBuy if it’s broken she might be able to take it back at her local BestBuy.

WordPress has a feature on the dashboard “Tag Surfer” which allows you to specify tags that you are interested in and then see related posts to that tag. I like scrolling through just to see what’s happening in the blogosphere relating to Ubuntu so I have that tag listed. I was just thinking that it would be nice to have that as a RSS feed. I did a little digging around and came up with a feed url for those that are interested.

http://wordpress.com/tag/ubuntu/feed/

This will get you a RSS feed of all wordpress blog posts that are tagged as Ubuntu. I don’t have a feel for the volume of posts yet but I’m guessing it’s not overwhelming.

I’m sure you could get a similar feed from other sources but I’m liking this one!

I just noticed that my total spam blocked has crested over 1,000. Thanks Askimet! I really think that Askimet is an awesome tool and in the entire time that I’ve been writing this blog not ONE spam comment has made it through. I’ve also not had ONE legitimate comment marked as spam. That’s a pretty good record!

I got a Starbucks this morning and I just noticed that on the cup is “The Way I see It #255″ which says:

We will end poverty and stop HIV/AIDS within our generation when guided by African principles such as ubuntu that underscore our interconnectedness. With greater compassion for others, we would no longer accept hunger and disease as facts of life.

– Cedza Dlamini
Youth Emissary

It’s not unusual for me to get aggravated about the world of news but today I managed to get ticked off (enough to blog about) twice on my “My Yahoo” page.

First, here’s a screen grab of the “Top Stories”:

Notice the interesting usage of the word “Soar” in two different headlines.

Next, music news:

First of all, I really don’t think that “reform” is the right word there. Someone may correct me but I would use a hyphen in there as in: re-form. Secondly, how exactly are they going to re-form without Sid? Yes, I know Glen Matlock was the “original” Sid but they’re getting back together to celebrate (rip off aging Punk rockers??) Never Mind the Bollocks 30th anniversary and it seems quite cheesy to me. Perhaps they can take the show on the road and sell $400 gold circle seats.

So, there you have it. I suppose I get annoyed at the news on a daily basis (whether it’s the news itself or the reporting of it) but occasionally I get a bit bent out of shape enough to comment.

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?

00021.jpg

Originally uploaded by phoch_98.

I went into my bathroom last night and when I turned on the light I noticed this lizard on the outside of the frosted “privacy” glass that we have. I ran and grabbed my camera and when I came back he (she? it?) was still there so I snapped a few pictures. It wasn’t easy getting the exposure, focus, etc correct and I found that the best picture came out with the flash on.

Also - just to add a little open source to this post, I imported the photo to my Ubuntu PC and then uploaded it using KFlickr which is a handy little app!

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.