So, back to Ubuntu Dapper Drake. It seems that both Edgy, Feisty and all other distros featuring the latest crappy Xorg server don’t play along with the louzy videocard bundled with my laptop. Not even when I use a Dapper working xorg.conf. To hell with it. At least while I don’t get a new laptop.

Learning from previous instalations, all things went smooth, except when I had to install a Citrix client. ICA Client version 10.0 requires Openmotif and there were no sources in sight with the appropriate package. But the package exists in Ubuntu’s package listings. Next step would be obviously installing the client, just to notice it just won’t run with the following error:


Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion
Warning: Unable to load any usable fontset
Error: Aborting: no fontset found


a quick peek at the support forum pointed me to the need of performing a


xset fp rehash


everytime and before wfica or wfcmgr are run. It also looks like there are a lot of other common problems known to exist with. Here’s a link to a page with some information on these Citrix ICA client issues (out of which this script is a real winner, as it will patch and configure permanently almost every aspect of this application – it’s designed for Ubuntu 6.10 and later, but nothing a little hack won’t fix).

2. Uncompress it and change to the directory it creates

bruno@sushi:~$ tar xvfz vpnclient-linux-x86_64-4.8.00.0490-k9.tar.gz
bruno@sushi:~$ cd vpnclient

3. Get the header files for yout current kernel version, you’ll need them to build the binary

bruno@sushi:~/vpnclient$ sudo apt-get install build-essential
bruno@sushi:~/vpnclient$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

4. Compile (there will be a few warnings)

bruno@sushi:~/vpnclient$ make

5. Install the VPN client

bruno@sushi:~/vpnclient$ sudo ./vpn_install

6. Create a VPN profile entry file (you can also migrate it from a previous Windows instalation – it’s a .pcf file sitting inside your Installation Path/Profiles directory) on /etc/opt/cisco-vpnclient/Profiles/

bruno@sushi:~/vpnclient$ sudo cp /disks/hda1/Program\ Files/Cisco/VPN\ Client/Profiles/corporate.pcf /etc/opt/cisco-vpnclient/Profiles/

7. You probably had it configured to start at boot time, but start the VPN Service anyway

bruno@sushi:~/vpnclient$ sudo /etc/init.d/vpnclient_init start

8. If your infrastructure uses certificates to authenticate you, you’ll need to import the root and user certificates you’ve previously had exported.

bruno@sushi:~/vpnclient$ sudo cisco_cert_mgr -R -op import -f /disks/hda1/root_certificate_export.cer
bruno@sushi:~/vpnclient$ sudo cisco_cert_mgr -U -op import -f /disks/hda1/user_certificate_export.cer

9. Connect

bruno@sushi:~/vpnclient$ sudo vpnclient connect corporate


Tested on Ubunty Dapper 6.06 with Kernel 2.6.15-27-386

The server which this site was running on (and a few others) had a few problems with the mainboard power module and started shutting down every now and then. It is a mini-ATX system using some kind of proprietary power supply (which was replaced promptly for an identical one – since the problem persists, I can now guarantee it’s related to the board). It was a matter of hours till I found a similar system on eBay: no hard drive, no DVD, no processor and no memory, just the board and the box. Dirt cheap. Which is nice.

I’m still able to power up the system and get it working for an hour or two in a row, but this was the perfect excuse to test my backup strategy – and disaster recovery procedure.

So every two weeks, I do filesystem backups (plain tar.gz files) consisting of:

• user directories (/home/* and /root/* – this includes the ftp site root at /home/ftp)
• website files (/var/www/* and /sites/*)
• webserver configuration (/etc/apache/* and /etc/php5/*)
• ftp server configuration (/etc/proftpd.conf)
• samba configuration (/etc/samba/*)
• mail server configuration (/etc/postfix/*)
• mt-daapd configuration (/etc/mt-daapd.conf – mp3 files come from CDs I own – cof!)
• cacti configuration (/etc/cacti/*)
• crontab configuration (including users crontabs – all in /etc/cron*)
• installed package configuration (the list is somewhat simple, but for reference sake, I save a copy of a dpkg –list output just in case, along with a copy of /etc/apt/sources.list. Should anything fail, it’s just a matter of looking at the diff of installed packages – with a little perl-fu).
• mySQL configuration (/etc/mysql/*)
• mySQL databases dump (mysqldump -ubackup_user -p –all-databases)

These backups usually fit a single DVD-R and there’s always a blank inside the recorder. I rely on a crontab job creating the backup and burning it. When the recorder tray is open, this usually means the backup was successful and all I need to do is label the DVD and insert a new one.

Then there are those things where running a bimonthly backup won’t do you any good if the information keeps changing and you just can’t recover if you’re stuck to a 20 something day old backup. MySQL is a pretty good example. User home directories are too, but most of their contents are usually found scattered in a number of places.
MySQL databases are usually very small or could achieve small sizes if compressed. And it has been proved that the best way to keep backups at hand is… away from the server.

I found an ideal way to achieve this: three lines of shell script which create a daily database dump, compress it, encrypt it, compress it and email it to a Gmail account.

mysqldump -u [user] -p [password] --all-databases > mysqldump.sql
gpg -r [myemail] -q -t --yes --trust-model always --output mysqldump.sql.gpg --encrypt mysqldump.sql
date | mutt -s "MySQL backup" -a mysqldump.sql.pgp [gmail_account]

There was a spare Dell laptop around with a few keyboard and touchpad problems which was being kept aside for dog knows what. It took me about 30 minutes to slam an Ubuntu live+install CD and install a base system, get the last DVD backup, tar xvfz back the whole relevant files, install a few packages (actually, perform an apt-get dist-upgrade), get the latest MySQL backup from Gmail and put the system back on. There was some downtime meanwhile, but I had to leave home several times during the process (and I do have a life).

Most important question here: do you backup? do you have a backup plan? a disaster recovery plan? anything?

There were a few additional steps I needed to take to achieve full control of the beast. Here are a few, for my personal reference or for the search engine monsters to dive into.

Mozilla Firefox configuration, preferences and extensions were seamlessly migrated from the Windows partition. Mozilla Thunderbird configuration had the same fate, but I backed up all my email to the Gmail account using GML and started dumping messages from scratch. I had to reinstall enigmail and give it a kick in the balls, but it looks alright now. I’m eager to try freenigma (a Firefox plugin which uses GnuPG to encrypt/decrypt/sign webmail messages) as soon as I sort another bunch of things out, but it looks promising.

Automatix does a great job installing and configuring a bunch of “uneasy” applications in a almost painless way (but also risky and undocumented). I also found EasyUbuntu to be a great alternative (with a GUI and uninstall features) to achieve this as well.

Gaim 2.0.0 beta 3 is up and running (courtesy of Automatix) and it suits all my instant messaging needs (there’s pretty good information at the Google Talk support side on how to use Gaim to… uhm.. Google Talk). The only thing left to sort out is the otr plugin. I’ll have to look into a compatible encryption library who plays well with 2.0.0 beta 3.

The WiFi configuration war had its final breath shortly after I first wrote about it. I was installing a great News/RSS reader called liferea and spotted an article on gnomefiles about a piece of software called WiFi Radar. It enables you to scan for available networks and create profiles for your preferred networks. At boot time, running WiFi Radar will automatically scan for an available preferred network and connect to it. Spiff warned me about this later. Wait a minute. I swear I had heard him switching to Mac OS X.

Cisco Systems VPN Client: Download it from Cisco’s website (requires registration) and use this procedure vaguely as a guide to compile and install it (there’s a source code patch and detailed information i’d like to redo a couple of times just to understand what’s really happening – it looks like it still compiles if you forget the patch and patches may fail if the kernel headers are different from the expected – I’m using 2.6.15-26-386). Certificate and connection files were copied from the Windows counterpart. It still needs a couple of fixes. Working on it…

Provided Rhythmbox wasn’t able to connect to local network mt-daapd servers (or iTunes), altough it issued some daap related messages if launched with debug flags. I even tried a newer release from Rhythmbox, but it refused to cooperate. It turns out it happened because there was no mDNS client available on the system. It was just a matter of installing the avahi-utils package. As simple as that.

Getting stuff in and out of the Garmin GPS was also really easy. I had used gpsbabel before to convert file formats (there’s also an web-service offering this) but I never thought it played so well with the USB port. Really, the hardest part about this is knowing the device the GPS is bound to when connected to an USB port (just take a closer look at /var/log/messages – I wonder if there is any applet providing this). Then it’s just gpsbabel -i geo -f geocaching.loc -o garmin -F /dev/ttyUSB3 - Hey, a GUI wouldn’t hurt, guys. Seriously.

And then at a given point, Firefox was unable to output any sound from YouTube videos. The solution was a click away and spotted here: installing the alsa-oss package and making sure /etc/firefox/firefoxrc had “FIREFOX_DSP=aoss” instead of the default value. Neat.

CPU frequency scaling had, by default, its behaviour locked to automatic choosing of CPU frequency. All regarding setting unnecessary superuser powers to yet another application. Quoting: “And why should a normal user be able to change the CPU speed in the first place? The automatic CPU speed works well enough for the majority of users, and control freaks can always use sudo to manually set the speed, or deliberately shoot themselves in the foot by making the binary suid root”. And that’s the trick. Issue a sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets and answer “Yes” to the question regarding setting the suid of the cpufreq-selector executable. Now, when I left click the CPU Frequency Monitor Applet, I’m able to choose the behaviour (powersave, max. performance, etc) and/or the processor speed. Yay.

Working on: OziExplorer under Wine. And then some minor applications I used to use (and then some I don’t depend on but would be cool to keep at hand). Wine to the rescue.
Annoyances? Yep. Some. gDesklets refuses to work with transparency/translucency/whatever. root-tail output doesn’t even dare to show up. Probably something regarding Xorg configuration, I bet.