There comes a time where you set-up a VM and don't set the hard-disk size to be big enough for what you are going to do. I hit that problem just the other day and I needed to increase the size of my home dir on a Ubuntu Lucid LTS…
Just had to do a quick switch over of UID and GIDs for a couple of users. I'm using Puppet to manage server configurations and it's got some nice features for automating the set-up of users. Unfortunately when I initially set-up the puppet directives, I overlooked setting the UID for…
I first saw this tip a while back on the Ubuntu Blog and it's a useful way of using SSH to set-up private web surfing. Not to mention I've come across several public wifi installs that leave port 22 unfiltered so providing you set firefox to run the DNS from…
This is really just a note for my future reference, but these details should pretty much apply to most linux servers that have a recovery mode. As is the case with several suppliers the instructions for how to mount the hard disk to fix problems are often left out or…
As Ubuntu Edgy has not long been released I thought I would see how it runs on parallels desktop for mac. I downloaded the standard .iso and followed pretty much the same instructions as when I installed Ubuntu Dapper. The install go stuck at the end and I couldn't seem…
Picture this; you come back from lunch at "My Old Dutch Pancake house" and every one of your ssh connections has been closed due to lack of activity. It's reasonable that the server you are connected to (or the hardware you are connecting through) closes connections due to…
I decided to check out Breezy Badger the latest version of Ubuntu linux. First I thought I would try the in place upgrade from Hoary to Breezy by altering /etc/apt/sources.list to the Breezy repositories and then running sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get dist-upgrade. First all seemed…
Strange things were afoot this evening when I switched on my laptop. Ubuntu did the intermittant "HAL could not be initialized" error first of all. A quick reboot and everything seemed ok for a couple of minutes. The update indicator was red so I though I ought to do a…