Category: Linux

[sc:linux-category ]A little while ago I moved from OpenSUSE to Ubuntu which went reasonably well, however just a week or so later it turned out that a new long-term support version of Ubuntu was released.

My first thought of course was that I was going to have to do a complete re-install on my server.  That didn’t make me happy and I was kicking myself for not checking the release schedule before installing my server 😉

However Ubuntu comes with an upgrade script, either through the GUI or through the CLI.  Since I was logged on to my console anyway I used the GUI.

The process worked fine, however there were two things stood out as issues:

1. The upgrade takes a VERY long time and intermittently asks you for confirmations which is a real pain if you aren’t sitting right in front of the system while the upgrade happens.
2. It wiped out all my perl modules that I had installed.

Honestly I can accept the fact it took a long time and asked a pile of confirmations, the Perl modules on the other hand were a lot more annoying.

It took a while to track down all the modules I needed again and get them working (cpan is great, but sometimes things just don’t work as you would expect).

In the end it was successful and I haven’t had any issues so far so.

[sc:linux-category ]Having moved from OpenSUSE to Ubuntu I noticed something a little odd, VIM wasn’t working quite right.

Three things seemed broken:

1. When in insert mode, I couldn’t move around, it instead inserted the control codes.
2. It didn’t save the edit position from my last editing session.
3. Syntax highlighting.

Doing a quick search turned up the first issue being the version of VIM that was installed.  By default Ubunutu installs VIM-tiny, which seems a little weird for a desktop distro, but was easy enough to fix, a simple “apt-get install vim” pulled down VIM-basic which worked as expected.

Saving the edit position by default required editing /etc/vim/vimrc, there are three lines you have to uncomment to enable it:

" Uncomment the following to have Vim jump to the last position when
" reopening a file
if has("autocmd")
  au BufReadPost * if line("'\"") > 1 && line("'\"") <= line("$") | exe "normal! g'\"" | endif
endif

Similarly there are a couple of lines to take care of syntax highlighting:

" Vim5 and later versions support syntax highlighting. Uncommenting the next
 " line enables syntax highlighting by default.
 if has("syntax")
 syntax on
 endif

" If using a dark background within the editing area and syntax highlighting
 " turn on this option as well
 set background=dark

Overall they’re pretty easy things to do, but it’s yet another example of weird defaults in Ubuntu.

[sc:linux-category ]For may years now I’ve been running my home mail gateway on an OpenSUSE system, specifically 11.1.  With heartbleed running rampant on the net and no updates to such an old version of OpenSUSE, it was time to move on.

Ubuntu 12.04 got the nod and in general everything went well.

A few things did come up:

• Some of the core utilities live in different locations for example on OpenSUSE grep was in /usr/bin, but on Ubuntu it was just /bin.  A few scripts had to be updated to handle this.
• Installing Samba in to my AD domain was giving me errors, turns out the clock was off.
• NTPD isn’t installed by default.
• Perl’s DBI interface for MySQL didn’t work at first.  Neither the MySQL client library or the developers tools were installed.  The client was an easy package install as it was called “mysql-client” but the developer tools were harder to find.  Eventually I found it under “libmysqlclient-dev”.
• Automatic updates are limited to security fixes, this article walks you through how to add other updates to the schedule.

Other then that, the migration went smoothly.

Of course just a couple of days after I completed the migration the new LTS version of Ubuntu came out… sigh.

[sc:linux-category ]For the longest time, when I wanted to build a Linux system, my go to distribution was Slackware.  It was the first distro I used and was amazingly stable.  However as my requirements changed, so did my distro and the last few years I’ve been using OpenSUSE.

Recently though OpenSUSE has been in a bit of a weird spot, not supporting some of the apps I wanted out of the box and delays to new releases.  So I decided to take a look around and see what else was available.

My first stop was to Fedora.  Now I have a BAD history with Red Hat, the few time’s I tried it were terrible with hardware compatibility issues.  However that was quite a while ago and so I figured I’d give it a try.  Overall Fedora was fine, but getting support for some of the server-side apps I use seemed to be an issue so while it passed muster, I eventually moved on to something else.

Which placed me smack dab in the middle of Ubuntu.  I’ve toyed with Ubuntu a few times but the last version I tried was 10.  Version 12 was quite a surprise, and not in a good way 😉

Unity is terrible, I tried to use it but the placement of menus, the overlay scroll bars and the overall experience left me wanting to delete the VM outright.  However pretty much everyone supports it so took some time to see if I could make it livable.

First up was installing LXDE, which can be done through the software manager.  LXDE brings back a nice and simple interface that does pretty much what you expect.  Once installed, you have to logout and back in.  When you get to the login screen, selecting the gear icon will let you select LXDE instead of Unity and then continue your logon.

Next was removing the overlay scrollbars, which are a terrible idea if I’ve ever seen one.  Pulling up a command line and running:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface ubuntu-overlay-scrollbars false

Removes them quickly enough.

Suddenly Ubuntu is usable again!

I think I’ll use Ubuntu to test out an install of Zarafa, just to see how things go.

[sc:linux-category ]The previous two articles in this series focused on upgrading to Windows Server 2012, this one is a short little romp to upgrading my OpenVPN install to the latest release.

OpenVPN doesn’t update all that often and since my last update there was only a 0.0.1 version difference, but as I was in the upgrade mode anyway so away I went.

The first node in my OpenVPN cluster upgraded without issue, it’s just a simple matter of logging in as the root user and executing two commands:

wget http://swupdate.openvpn.net/as/openvpn-as-1.8.4-Ubuntu8.i386.deb
dpkg -i openvpn-as-1.8.4-Ubuntu8.i386.deb

An easy enough process on the first node, but when I logged on to the second node, the root file system was not mounted and would not mount.  I decided to force a fsck on the root system by executing the following:

touch /forcefsck

A reboot brought the system partition back online but it was completely full.  Looking around to see what had happened it appeared the OpenVPN logs had simply grown too large and cleaning some up freed up enough space to get things running again.

After that simply running the upgrade commands above worked without further issue and all was good.