Craig Mayhew’s Blog

It appears one of the updates to the linpus linux operating system used on Asus Aspire One netbooks messes up the networking. In short the permissions get set wrongly on the network settings files. Symptons include, not being able to see the network icon on the menu, clicking “Network Settings” icon on the settings page and having nothing happen etc..

Before you run this fix, please understand that you will lose all your saved network connections and you will need to add in your network keys again.

To fix:

Press Alt+F2 and a run box should appear.
Then write “terminal” and click “Run”.
In the new terminal windows that has appeared type “sudo gconftool-2 –recursive-unset /system/networking” to clear all the root network connections.
Then type “gconftool-2 –recursive-unset /system/networking” to clear all the user network connections.
Reboot the netbook and the network icon appears again after about 20 seconds but you need to reconfigure the network connections again by adding passwords etc…

If this hasn’t fixed your problem then this forum has loads more info on the subject http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=2620&sid=7ee9a1caf5a8ccaf10dd281ac6caf861. I recommend reading the whole forum thread before trying the solutions, as you may want to try easier ones first!

If you need to concatenate several files on a windows system the command is as follows:

“copy /B filePart1 + filePart2 + filePart3 outFileName”

The /B indicates the files are binary files.

As soon as I switched to beThere and the appalling TG585v7 router they sent me I ran into VPN issues. Absolutly no outgoing VPN connections would work through this router. There is normally something called “VPN Pass Through” that needs enabling on routers to allow outgoing VPN connections. Unfortunately this router has no way of doing that through the web interface so I was forced to do use the following “solution”.

This will require you to have a spare DSL router as we will be turning the Thomson router into just a modem by using “bridging”. You will also need your static IP, subnet mask, gateway IP and DNS server IP addresses which Be should have sent you in your welcome email.

1. Plug your spare router into one of the ethernet ports on the back of the bebox.
2. Login to your bebox
3. Click “Thomson Gateway”
4. Click “Configuration”
5. Click “Setup”
6. Click “Next”
7. Select “Bridge”, Click “Next”
8. When asked, add your IP and DNS info.
9. Reboot router, it may do this automatically
10. Your “spare” router is now your actual router, plug the rest of your computers/network into it instead of the bebox.
11. Your VPN should now work.

If anyone else has a better solution than this, please drop something in the comments box below.

If it helps, the manual can be downloaded from here:
http://www.technostation.com/documents/26049/thomson-tg585v7

The noatime option tells an ext filesystem to not update the “last accessed” timestamp every time a file is opened. This enables you to save disk i/o and have you disk caches perform much better.

You need to edit the fstab file to use the noatime option.

sudo vim /etc/fstab

Your fstab file will look different to this. At this point I should warn you that if you mistype this, delete something you shouldn’t or otherwise break this file, you Linux system MAY NOT BOOT. You can see below where I have added noatime which is visible in bold.

/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro,noatime,auto 0 1

Reboot and if all is well then you should have a faster filesystem.

If you ever manage to damage your ubuntu install so badly that it won’t boot (as I recently did when trying to remove the gnome GUI) then boot from a LiveCD and then open up a terminal.

Type the following commands:

change to the media directory (where our drives should be)
# cd /media

Create a new directory called Ubuntu (We will use this to mount our boot drive too)
# mkdir ubuntu

Mount the boot drive, you will need to replace X with the correct letter
# mount /dev/sdaX /media/ubuntu

Mount some other required locations
# mount –bind /proc /media/ubuntu/proc
# mount –bind /dev /media/ubuntu/dev
# mount –bind /dev/pts /media/ubuntu/dev/pts

Run chroot, using this command and we are now root as if we had booted from the boot drive and not the liveCD:
# chroot /media/ubuntu

Your now in your Ubuntu system as root. If your unsure precisely why your system won’t boot then running an update is usually a good place to start. Good luck!
# aptitude update

I recently tried installing a .deb packagae I had made by converting an rpm. Synaptic package manager however errored and since then won’t open. Every time I started synaptic I was getting this error:

The package vmware-server needs to be reinstalled, but I can’t find an archive for it

This command solved it and will force the removal of my incosistent package:

dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq vmware-server

After a fresh install of Ubuntu Karmic I found that the additional hard drives kept asking for a password each time I logged in and accessed them for the first time.

To fix the problem, simply install pysdm:

sudo apt-get install pysdm

Then run it as root:

sudo pysdm

Choose your device and then mount your partitions accordingly.

One easy command to retrieve all drive UUIDs.

ls -lF /dev/disk/by-uuid

The most secure method of transfering files to and from your web server is via ssh. Here’s how to set it up and some of the pitfalls to avoid.

If you are using Putty generated key files they first need to be converted to openSSH before they can be used by NuSphere. If you are using Putty (Pageant) then instructions on how to do this can be found here. If not then please ignore that link and continue on…

1. Goto PHPED accounts, “keys” tab, create new SSH setting.
   
2. If you already have your keys then select no. Otherwise select yes and PHPED will auto generate a key pair for you. (Please note the server needs a copy of your public key)
   
3. Enable “Public key (ssh2)” auth method and add your OpenSSH key to “Public identity files” (Unless PHPED auto generated it for you, in which case it should already be there!).
   
4. Create new SFTP or SSH “accounts” on Account tab. In options set “SSH setting” to the one you have just created.
5. Enjoy your SSH uploads.

I recently needed to convert my Putty SSH files into OpenSSH so I could use them in NuSphere.

1. Open your private key in PuTTYGen
2. Export it in OpenSSH format. Top menu “Conversions”->”Export OpenSSH key”.
3. Save the new OpenSSH key when prompted.