Apr 27

And on to 12.04 – Precise Pangolin

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I had (somewhat) successfully upgraded from 10.10 -> 11.04, more successfully upgraded from 11.04 -> 11.10 and then I had used Popey’s tip for selecting the fastest mirror.

So I hit the upgrade button to 12.04, and waited.

With “4 minutes” to go, the upgrade stalled, apparently doing something with samba. After an hour, I couldn’t see it doing anything, so I killed the upgrade processes, and kicked it off again.

This time it went through correctly, and the system came up fine after a reboot.

However, when I subsequently tried to ping an address on my network, I got an error about “wide symlinks”. I knew that there was a line in my smb.conf which said:

wide symlinks = yes

But wait, why was it appearing in sodding ping?

No idea. But after some googling, I found it should have been:

wide links = yes

I changed the smb.conf file, and restarted samba.
So far, the error has gone. I still don’t know why it would have a) cocked up the upgrade process and b) subsequently put the error into ping?

Ideas welcome in the comments!

Apr 23

Upgrade problems…

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Okay, so the first round of updates (10.10 to 11.04) didn’t go so well. I’m typing this up at my main PC next to my server, which has been hit by bug #753853 - “The disk drive for / is not ready yet or not present …” Sigh. I think what happened is that X decided to fall over midway through configuring the packages.

This drops me at a prompt which asks whether I want to skip mounting /, or to attempt a manual
recovery. Skipping just starts the same error for the next entry in /etc/fstab, but hitting “M” drops you a root recovery prompt with a readonly Filesystem.

However – all is not (hopefully) lost! Within that bug report is a resolution:

Choose M to enter recovery console.
where sda1 is my installation partition:
# mount -w -o remount /dev/sda1 /
# dpkg --configure -a

the mount command remounts / as a writeable filesystem again, which we can then jump into with dpkg to finish configuring the update packages (and saying “No” to hundreds of config file updates)

Okay – dpkg finished, and it’s booting… there’s plymouth… mouse pointer! Hooray, here comes X.

Wow, I’d forgotten how bad Unity was – THIS is why I didn’t upgrade the server.

Okay – on to 11.10!

Edit: The upgrade to 11.10 went extremely smoothly. I just need to ensure all my cron jobs and various other scripts run correctly, then we are all set!

Apr 23

Time to Upgrade…

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With Ubuntu 12.04 on the horizon, it looks like it may be time to upgrade my trusty fileserver.
It’s currently running 10:10 – I originally held off because I was using AWN instead of the normal GNOME panels, and didn’t want to use Unity (In retrospect, this is a bloody stupid reason not to upgrade!)
My current plan is thus:

  • Backup the system completely using my backup script which gzips the filesystem apart from the storage folders and other mounted drives etc.
  • Remove AWN, maybe move to LXDE if I can’t (quickly) go back to GNOME panels.
  • Update through distros till I get to 11.10. I can then wait patiently for the demand on the Ubuntu mirrors to drop off before I come up to 12.04 proper.

Hopefully I have the time to do this during the evenings this week.
I’ll post more with successful updates – If it doesn’t go well, the VM with this blog in will be offline for a bit!

Mar 19

Scan-to-Email using a sendmail relay

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Last week, I got a printer from Freecycle. It’s a Samsung CLX-3160FN Multi-function colour laser.
I got it because A) it was free, B) it had a scanner, C) it has it’s own NIC, and D) it is toner-compatible with my current laser printer, meaning I can continue to use “compatible” (i.e. £8 vs. £60 for original) toner cartridges.

The scanner part is important, as the only one I have is about 13 years old. It is one of the first ones that was entirely USB powered, but it doesn’t have 64-bit drivers, so the only machines I can use it on are my Ubuntu server or my wife’s aging laptop with the Ubuntu HDD in.

As well as normal scanning, it also has the ability to scan to network (Windows machines using a small program in the taskbar) as well as scanning to Email. This is where the problem started.

The printer has the ability to enter SMTP settings into the web interface to send the email. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the ability to send to secure SMTP servers such as GMail.

My Ubuntu server, however, does use GMail’s SMTP servers as a sendmail relay, so it can send me Cron Job status updates – notifying me of backups completed or failed as well as output from my rsync jobs.

After a few hours of mucking about, I settled on setting up sendmail to act as a local -> remote SMTP relay, allowing LAN clients to send SMTP connections to the server unsecured, which would then forward them to GMail securely.

To do this, I had to make modifications to /etc/mail/sendmail.mc to allow SMTP connections from Addresses otehr than 127.0.0.1, and then re-make sendmail.cf using M4.

After this, I had issues with the printer failing to send the mail with an AUTH failure – I had missed something somewhere.

Turned out, I hadn’t noticed the “access” file. Which had the line “192.168 RELAY” commented out. Once I uncommented this, the local -> Remote relay worked! Hurrah!

So now I have my Printer successfully sending email.

Sep 20

The little (virtual) Webserver that could

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I’ve decided to start using a wordpress installation – not to gush any feelings into the world, but instead as a reason to play with a virtual webserver on my server.

Why virtual? Because I don’t like the idea of opening up port 80 of my regular server and leaving it exposed to the rest of the planet. I thought a nice virtualised environment would be good, so at least I can take a regular snapshot, and restore if anything breaks.

The Server is running ubuntu 11.04 server. I could have used any other distro, but I’m comfortable with ubuntu, apt, and all the other usual tools that this makes available to me.

Apache2, mysql, PHP5, we’re essentially a very basic LAMP server.

Really though, It’s just fun to play, isn’t it?