Tag Archives: ubuntu

Careful what you call your server!

March 1, 2010 – 10:09 am

I was setting up a server recently and I was using KVM to virtualise a whole lot of hosts. Being fairly unimaginative I decided to call the machine kvm. As usual I used LVM for the disks. Now on Ubuntu this means that by default the VG will be called the same as the host [...]

By johnf | Posted in Sysadmin | Also tagged , , | Comments (3)

Less is more for ISOs

January 28, 2010 – 11:35 am

I was tidying up some data recently and found a couple of ISO images lying around with cryptic file names. I didn’t have cdinfo installed, so I though I’d run less hoping that the binary data would have some useful text in it. Instead I was surprised to see the following: CD-ROM is in ISO [...]

By johnf | Posted in FOSS | Also tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Building a Private PPA on Ubuntu

September 14, 2009 – 4:59 pm

One of the things I love about the Ubuntu project and launchpad is the Personal Package Archive. PPAs make it so simple and easy to backport packages. The only problem with PPAs is that they are public. I had a need to be able to host some private internal packages as well as squid with [...]

By johnf | Posted in FOSS, General, Sysadmin | Also tagged , , , | Comments (10)

Hardy and password locking

April 29, 2008 – 4:32 pm

passwd -l root In gutsy the above would simply lock the account by placing an ! in front of the passwd in your /etc/shadow file. In hardy it now also sets the account as expired. Meaning you can’t ssh to it even if you have SSH keys in place. Time to go and rebuild my [...]

By johnf | Posted in Sysadmin | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (0)