Category: Linux

I used to use a 2 command 1 liner to update my system:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

That was easy enough to type out now and then. But over time it grew to include removing and cleaning downloaded packages as well.

Then there’s the matter of knowing if an update requires a system restart.

The lazy me put it all into one bash script and made it globally accessible and executable:

#!/bin/bash
apt update && apt full-upgrade && apt-get autoremove && apt-get autoclean
if [ -f /var/run/reboot-required ]; then echo && cat /var/run/reboot-required; fi

Placed it in /usr/local/bin/apt-upgrade  and made it executable with sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/apt-upgrade .

Now I can run sudo apt-upgrade on all of my servers and it’ll update things as well as letting me know if a reboot is required.

This tweet has to have been the most popular thing I have ever said. At time of posting it has gained 80 retweets, 25 favourites and many replies/questions.

Work recently bought me a new workstation, so the 1st thing I always do is to dual boot with Ubuntu.

Some might consider me an edge case user. Though as a developer, I like a rather particular set-up. That is, 3 wide screen monitors with the central one rotated 90 degrees for my IDE.

This is something that Windows gets right without having to dig about installing things. While Linux distros have always struggled (in my experience).

Because my tweet gained quite a few questions, I thought it best to reply to them here for everybody to see.

@ankitvad asks what specs. I use for Ubuntu.
Titanium Rimless Glasses from Spex4Less.com
Couldn’t resist, sorry 🙂

Dell Alienware X51
CPU: i7
Memory: 8GB
Graphics card: nVidia GeForce GTX 660
Storage: 1TB HDD (Windows) 120GB SSD (Linux)
Mouse: Logictech M570 trackball
OSs: Window 7 SP1, Ubuntu 12.10 64bit
Monitors: 2 x 22″ Dell, 1 x 22″ LG

All 3 monitors are connected to the one graphics card. Two by DVI and one by HDMI.

As I said, this is a working system from a fresh install without updates being applied or any 3rd party packages installed. So the default graphics driver is doing quite well these days 🙂

The only downside to this is that the default graphics driver is dog slow and won’t let me play games on Steam 😉 The next step will be to get the nVidia binary driver working.

Example user ‘iain’

sudo mkdir -p /chroot/iain/home/iain
sudo useradd -M -d /home/iain iain
sudo passwd iain
sudo chwon iain: /chroot/iain/home/iain

sudo nano -w /etc/ssh/sshd_config
# At the end of the file, add:

Match User paypoint
    ChrootDirectory /chroot/iain
    AllowTCPForwarding no
    X11Forwarding no
    ForceCommand internal-sftp

sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

If, like me, you can’t wait for Ubuntu 12.04.1 to be released, you can force an upgrade of your favourite OS OS.

sudo apt-get update;
sudo do-release-upgrade -d

If you are going from the previous LTS 10.04, then the -d is important. Otherwise there would be no upgrade to offer.

The upgrade process should go smoothly enough. Except for when it comes to the kernel.

Bytemark VM’s make use of kernels that sit outside of the VM itself.

I didn’t realise this until I tried to fix syslog doing this:

Jun 26 10:30:01 banana kernel: Cannot read proc file system: 1 - Operation not permitted.
Jun 26 10:31:02 banana kernel: last message repeated 1745888 times
Jun 26 10:32:03 banana kernel: last message repeated 1722636 times
Jun 26 10:33:04 banana kernel: last message repeated 1621724 times
Jun 26 10:34:05 banana kernel: last message repeated 1761707 times

Even if you update grub, it’ll be ignored. Instead, follow the instructions here: http://www.bytemark.co.uk/support/technical_documents/kernelchange?tags=VirtualMachine

At the time of writing, I chose 3.2.0-kvm-i386-20110111 as it’s fairly close to the kernel being used by other Ubuntu 12.04 machines I have.

Your mileage may vary, but I hope this helps somebody else with the same trouble.

Current project requires a couple of VPN tunnels to be set up. An IPsec and a PPTP.
The IPsec will wait for another day, the PPTP is set up and ready to go.
One thing that wasn’t quite right with the tunnel though, is the static route created by PPTP missed out a large chunk of the server’s network.

Starting the tunnel sets up the routing rule of 192.168.100.111 to be sent to the tunnel.

This meant that if I wanted to get to 100.10, it wasn’t being sent.

The way around this was to add a new route: route add -host 192.168.100.10 dev ppp0

Works great from the CLI, nothing happens when added to /etc/network/interfaces or /etc/network/if-up.d/foobar.

Found out (trial and error) that it was trying to add the route as soon as the tunnel was created. This doesn’t work as the tunnel takes a few seconds to wake up.

Work around was to add a ‘sleep 5’ to /etc/network/if-up.d/foobar before the route command line.

Creating race conditions isn’t nice, but it works 🙁