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This site is a collection of my own work with Linux. Certain things are easy, others take time to decipher and if I ever need to repeat the work (which usually happens!), then I need to remember everything by memory or... have a site with all the steps taken and to take again.

The following are my most recent posts:

ntpd: inappropriate address 127.0.0.1 for the fudge command, line ignored

I think I noticed that error before but did not pay close attention to it since my NTP just worked.

The fact is that something changed a while back (the new PPS API was accepted in 2000) and the fudge command was not updated accordingly. Either that, or the setup was always wrong?

The old /etc/conf/ntpd setup file included a line like this:

fudge   127.0.0.1     stratum 10

which is wrong because the local clock is not consider to be part of 127.0.0.1. I've never changed that IP address because I rarely look at the ntpd logs and since I did today, I noticed that error.

The correct ...

Changing the name of your computer (especially if it's Hal, that's dangerous!)

Ubuntu 16.04 and older

Changing your computer hostname used to be really easy:

sudo vim /etc/hostname

Change the name there and reboot.

If you reference the hostname in /etc/hosts, you also want to update that there and any other settings (such as tripwire).

The fact is that worked great in older versions. Change the name in that file, reboot and voilà the new name was the current name. The reboot is important because otherwise some of your services may not catch the modification. Yes. You can do:

hostname <new-name>

and it works as expected (i.e. try to log out ...

I noticed that the Linux Kernel allows for CPU frequencies to vary. But I could not really see any CPU running at a speed other than 800MHz when looking at /proc/cpuinfo so I thought that they were "stuck" there.

Looking a little further, I found a question with a good answer on Unix & Linux. You can use /proc/cpuinfo alright, but you've got to look at it constantly otherwise it will not look like it changes. That is, the change is so temporary, it happens so fast, that you really have to track that quickly otherwise you'll miss it.

Here is a command we can readily ...

Twin Windows — perfect duplication

Copying Data between Computers

Since I'm moving to a new server, I need to copy all of Gb or Gb of data from my old computer to the new one. This is mainly three folders:

/home
/mnt/cvs
/var/www

There are two main problems here:

1. the files have various permissions and ownership which I do not want to lose, especially for websites and the cvs repositories (I still have a CVS, but that folder also include SVN and GIT repositories)

2. the files on the source computer require various permissions to be read, "namely", I have to be root to make sure I can read all those ...

Spider Web representing various Internet and Intranet network of users.

Older Versions (Ubuntu 17.10-)

With older versions I would just go to /etc/network and edit the interfaces file.

This file would have definitions about the computer interfaces, whether each computer gets a static IP or uses DHCP, etc.

Here is a sample setup for older versions:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 10.0.0.1
        netmask 255.0.0.0
        network 10.0.0.0
        broadcast 10.255.255.255
        gateway 10.0.0.1
        dns-nameservers 10.0.0.8 10.0.0.9
        dns-search m2osw.com
        pre-up /etc/network/firewall

The pre-up is a script run ...

A hill of sparsely distributed trees.

Introduction

As I'm doing some work to create an RDBM like library to write data to a database, I wanted to make sure that my file was NOT sparse. I don't mind sparse files at all, they save us some space on disk. Only, when creating a database, pretty much all my blocks of data will need to exist, otherwise we may take the risk of not being able to allocate the inodes later and write in those blocks.

So I search Google to try to find information on NOT to create a sparse file. Make sure that my software prevents the OS from creating a sparse file. I could not really find ...

A modern tunnel.

Running X Tool from a Remote Connection

I have been using SSH to connect to my LAN network computers and make all sorts of changes to the machines running in a console and X tools. Works just fine.

Setup the SSH Tunnel

I actually setup the X11 capability with two changes:

1) setup the SSH server with:

X11Forwarding yes
X11DisplayOffset 10

Then restart the SSH server.

2) setup your client with a ~/.ssh/config file where you enter:

Host remote
  ForwardX11 yes

This is the equivalent to the -X command line option, without you having to remember to enter the ...

An Ubuntu 16.04 login prompt just after boot, ready for you to log in.

As I just upgraded my 14.04 installation to 16.04, it booted right up to lightdm.

I had it properly setup to boot in a console before, but somehow it changed the behavior on me.

This is because the computer is now using systemd to boot.

I already had the GRUB variables setup as expected:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="text"
GRUB_TERMINAL=console

But this is not enough if you want to start in the console when running systemd (which is running since 15.04). See X11 Auto-starting for details about older versions.

systemd has a list of ...

Setting up a USB over IP environment

Many times, under Linux, you have a device that uses a USB port and not the network. Yet, if you want multiple users to have access to said device, you need to somehow share it.

One solution is to have a driver which allows for network connections from remote systems. However, the likelihood of such is close to 0.

Another solution under Linux is to have the USB/IP (read USB over IP) modules setup and share any USB device from any computer to any other computer.

The reason why I looked for this is the limited number of USB port I have on my new server. I did not realize that I'd need 9 ...

Which destination has to be used?

Wildcard Certificate with letsencrypt

I have my own DNS, so I need to set it up myself to get letsencrypt to work as expected and generate a wildcard certificate for my websites.

They decided to test the DNS because that way they know you are in control of the domain and its sub-domains (only the owner of a domain name would be able to allow such a test to work.) When creating a certificate for just one website they can ask you to place a file there, which is very easy, but for an entire domain, that wouldn't be quite enough, especially since some business endeavors actually ...

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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