Work In Progress

I don’t know why it should be; when I first boot up BANANA, the debian box, and try to access a windows share via autofs, I get completely incorrect results.

phil@banana:~$ ls /smb/turnip/RADIO4/bin
APPIQ  DVDISO  ITUNES-XML    PHOTO  RADIO4      SharedDocs
DATA   ITUNES  phil-Desktop  print  RADIO4-MP3  temp

But If I restart the automount service, things sometimes go fine thereafter.

I can see a session with strace in my future, unless google gets me there first.

I want to set up network shares so that any windows machine on the home net can get to them via \\banana\vol1 etc. No authentication or shared secret worries – let the host doing the sharing decide if it can permit write access or not. This is inside my firewall, and only has to be as secure as anything else inside my house.

The way to get this to happen in Samba is to make sure you have these lines in smb.conf

security = share
guest account = nobody

Then set the shares up through the gui or through smb.conf, and ensure that the local nobody user has appropriate access to the files or directories.

Mail up and running, now I want my local network to work well. I’d like to be able to share volumes from the linux system (BANANA) with windows clients, and I’d like to be able to do the reverse without too much agony.

First, let’s figure out how to access windows file shares on other systems. I’d like to have /smb/turnip/TEMP be a way to access transparently the \\TURNIP\TEMP share.

I know how to do this. First install winbind and edit /etc/nsswitch.conf to append wins to the hosts search list. Then install autofs, and edit /etc/auto.master to uncomment the “smb auto.smb” line.

After restarting the autofs daemon, here’s what I get:

phil@banana:~$ ls /smb/turnip/temp
APPIQ  DVD     ITUNES      phil-Desktop  print   RADIO4-MP3  temp
DATA   DVDISO  ITUNES-XML  PHOTO         RADIO4  SharedDocs

That’s not quite right – it’s listing all the services but not the content of the share. Here’s what /var/log/messages says:

Jul  5 16:40:09 banana automount[10285]: >> mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //turnip/temp,
Jul  5 16:40:09 banana automount[10285]: >>        missing codepage or other error
Jul  5 16:40:09 banana automount[10285]: >>        In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
Jul  5 16:40:09 banana automount[10285]: >>        dmesg | tail  or so
Jul  5 16:40:09 banana automount[10285]: mount(generic): failed to mount //turnip/temp (type smbfs) on /smb/turnip/temp

It turns out this is Debian’s helpful way of telling you you don’t have the smbfs package installed. Soon fixed.

phil@banana:~$ ls /smb/turnip/temp
1300.ram            2549.mp3  772.mp3        FOR ENGLAND TRIP              ns.tiff               rtsp.pl~
2005-10-01-004.JPG  2550.mp3  941.mp3        idris 4th birthday share      nthapi_3-RC.dll       s_dougherty_ref1.doc

So far so good. Flawless install of Ubuntu 6.06 (desktop) from cd, (well, flawless the second time – first time hung creating the ext3 filesystem after 15%).

I have no idea what the root password on this system is. I can sudo anything I want, so why would I care (I think that’s the reasoning).

Firefox is up and running like a champion.

First job was to fetch and install Thunderbird and configure it to point to fastmail.fm. Thunderbird is going to be a better choice than Evolution because last time I checked (about 4 days ago) Evolution still couldn’t cope with the zillions of public folders that my work IMAP server publishes, whereas Thunderbird happily ignores them. Next job is to configure Thunderbird to point to mail.hp.com and confirm this assertion.

It’s time to try moving to a Linux desktop.
I have a spare x86 desktop, and I have a couple of reasons to want a Linux setup at home (a decent toolchain for the NSLU2, a build and debug system for mt-daapd, and the ability to script and automate the applications I run regularly). I don’t do much on the windows system, but what I do, I need to have working efficiently. Here are the activities I think I care about, (with the incumbent helper apps):

• Web browsing
• Email
• Occasional spreadsheets and documents (MS Excel and MS Word)
• Photo management
• Upload via USB
• Management and editing (Picasa)
• Publishing to www.abercrombie-family.org (Frontpage)
• Layout and printing (PowerPoint)
• Rotating AVI movies through 90 degrees (Virtual Dub)
• Audio tools
• download from the BBC (HiDownload, RealPlayer)
• upload to iPod (iTunes)
• rip from CD (iTunes)
• manage music, generate playlists compatible with mt-daapd (iTunes)
• record from tape (Audacity) and cut up into tracks (CD Wave)
• Share and Backup to/from NSLU2

Idris’s games can stay on the old windows system. Need to keep the old thing up for (at least) turbotax, google earth, printing key ring inserts, updating iPod firmware, making floppies for bios flashes.

I’ll be trying Ubuntu 6.06; I’ve had good experiences with Debian before (better than with RedHat), and I’ve read one or two favourable things recently about switching from OS X to Ubuntu (http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/03/1934251)

Let’s see how this goes