Sirius Stuff

Why I hate Ubuntu sometimes - crontab not enabled

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 08:08:08 PDT

I’m trying to set up cron to run jobs for me. I have to go look up the weird syntax but OK. Found it. Everything looks fine but the jobs don’t work. Go on vacation. Come back and try again. Syntax is OK. Everything looks fine but the jobs don’t work. Dig, dig, dig. Find this Unix Crontab - setting up cron jobs using crontab

You can execute crontab if your name appears in the file /usr/lib/cron/cron.allow. If that file does not exist, you can use
crontab if your name does not appear in the file /usr/lib/cron/cron.deny.
If only cron.deny exists and is empty, all users can use crontab. If neither file exists, only the root user can use crontab.

and, of course, there isn’t an empty cron.deny in /usr/lib/cron. OK, Ubuntu uses /etc a lot and that - according to man cron - is where the cron.deny file should be.

Granted that a lot of people might never have need for cron but doesn’t it seem reasonable that there would be an empty /etc/cron.deny file so people who are using Ubuntu and aren’t power users and just want to back up their files automatically have things work?

SSH your Debian servers without password - sftp

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 07:07:07 PDT

I was looking to do an unattended backup of some important files and found this very helpful: SSH your Debian servers without password.

Feisty Performance - “Fly Like A Butterfly” Ubuntu

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 07:07:07 PDT

Haven’t implemented all of the things here but this looked promising on speeding up Ubuntu: » Blog Archive » Feisty Performance - “Fly Like A Butterfly”

HowTo Mount NTFS Filesystem Partition Read Write Access

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 06:06:06 PDT

Found this article on HowTo Mount NTFS Filesystem Partition Read Write Access very helpful as I continue to dig out from under the Feisty Fawn -> Gutsy Gibbon explosion … er, upgrade. The key thing here is the ability to mount the files so that they’re readable and writeable by an ordinary user. I am in the process of moving photos and music off my second NTFS-formatted drive. I may reformat it as ext3 or I may not but I want to know that I’ve got copies on my first NTFS-formatted drive (which is split with an ext3 partition) and my SimpleShare NFS NAS. Also am putting copies on a DVD to take to work. Last step is to have a USB drive capable of backing up the SimpleShare and taking that to the office. DVDs hold a lot of pictures but CDs ripped in FLAC format take a lot of space.

Local DNS Cache for Faster Browsing using dnsmasq

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 06:06:06 PDT

Looking for a way to speed up recurring DNS lookups on my Ubuntu box. I found a reference to Local DNS Cache for Faster Browsing on Ubuntu Blog. Works like a champ. I like that dnsmasq allows me to configure the size of the cache easily. I don’t like that I had to chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf to make it immutable so that the system wouldn’t drop looking at 127.0.0.1 (localhost) first. I tried using the package resolvconf but it caused all lookups to fail. So I used apt-get again to remove it and stayed with just the dnsmasq package.

How to create a PDF printer (print to PDF) in Ubuntu

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 06:06:06 PDT

I found printing to a PDF file useful occasionally useful under Windows. Neat to have a way to do it in Ubuntu: 5 steps to create a PDF printer (print to PDF) in Ubuntu

Things I can do in Linux that I can’t do on Windows. | dmartin.org

Fri, 18 May 2007 05:05:05 PDT

This article lists some of the things I can do in Linux that I can’t do on Windows. Nice article.

You Can Switch to Linux! - willsmith - Maximum PC

Fri, 18 May 2007 05:05:05 PDT

Apparently it’s Ubuntu day for me. Wondering if you can switch to Linux? Here’s a nice article on how to do so. Published in Maximum PC magazine, it’s clear and current with Feisty Fawn, released just less than a month ago. Good stuff.

How to choose the right screenshot program

Mon, 07 May 2007 05:05:05 PDT

I need to get pictures of screens for reporting problems. I don’t usually want to take the full screen or even a window - I want the smallest section that will show the problem. Using Ubuntu, I wasn’t able to find anything that would do it as easily as I would like. I’m guessing with some certainty that I could have rigged The Gimp or something to capture the screen but then I would have to work at reducing the size, etc. In Linux.com | How to choose the right screenshot program there was a reference to Ksnapshot. It installed with just one file, though it referenced khelpcenter as suggested. With a bit of clicking, I found that the “region” mode was what I wanted. It works nicely with Gnome-based Ubuntu.