Jason L. Froebe: Ramblings of a Geek

As an ongoing effort for work, IT has deemed it necessary to encrypt our laptops.  No problem I say, but one issue:  the encryption software they chose only works on Windows 2000/XP and certainly not on OSX or Linux.  My chosen platform for work is Ubuntu 8.04 with the bling of compiz to show it off In order to comply, I did a little googling and ran across an excellent article by Lars Strand on how to encrypt your /home directory and swap space on Ubuntu 8.04 (should work with 6.04 and higher).

Encrypted swap and home partition in Ubuntu 8.04

Sunday, 04 May 2008 @ 22:32 CEST

Contributed by: lars

I really would like to have an encrypted swap and home partition on my laptop. In case it gets stolen or if I should forget it somewhere, I can be sure that no-one would be able to read my private files. In this mini-howto I set my home partition using LVM, but using a regular partition should work just fine. This howto should also work, with minor modification, if you use another distribution than Ubuntu.
By using Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) setting up encrypted partition in Linux is done in no time.

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I’m totally impressed by the article - the instructions are step by step and are easy to follow.  I’d create a new user belonging to the admin group with its home directory outside of ‘/home’ and use that user to perform the steps.

Initially I attempted to use an USB thumb drive to hold a key file but it proved unreliable because it wasn’t being mounted consistantly before the /etc/init.d/cryptdisks & /etc/init.d/cryptdisks.early were being executed on boot up.  This issue would cause the key file to be unavailable and therefore the encrypted home from being attached to (/etc/crypttab).  However, when if I inserted the thumbdrive after the system booted, the usb thumb drive would be auto-mounted and performing ‘mount /home’ would mount the encrypted home directory.

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There are several people at work that Brian Albert remind me of My Home 2.0

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After I downloaded a few eBooks from Bruce Perens’ Open Source Series, I noticed that several of the books were zip files containing the chapters as individual PDF files.  I don’t know about you, but I would rather hava a single monolithic PDF file for each book.

By using Ghostscript and pdftk, we are able to create the PDF file with no problem:

On Ubuntu Linux, you can quickly install these two tools with a single command:

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In order to avoid a drifting time clock in “ubuntu server 7.10″ vmware guest machine on an ubuntu 8.04 host, you need to do a few things:

• /etc/vmware/config

host.cpukHz = 2000000  <– replace # with speed of your cpu (2GHz listed here)

host.noTSC = TRUE

ptsc.noTSC = TRUE

• ‘clock=pit’ added to the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst
• tools.syncTime = “TRUE” in the (vmware_guest).vmx file

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Not sure who was the original author of this short synchronization script but kudos to whomever it is!

sync_users.sql

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SweeperBot is an application written by Paul Fenwick that plays Windows minesweeper for you automatically. It’s based upon code orignally written by Matt Sparks.

Get it at SweeperBot.org!

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We are currently using SQLite in production for some smaller projects.

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Apparently my wife programmed in Turtle on the Amiga 500 when she was in elementary school (she’s 7 years younger than me).

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I submitted two presentations, which I didn’t think would get accepted due to their subject matter… they didn’t get accepted. Please don’t think I’m disappointed or upset.  Personally, I’m rather pleased as I can make them into proper magazine articles.  :)  Yes, there is a new magazine in the works.

21200: Understanding RepAgent to Replication Server Communication by Creating Your Very Own RepAgent

21201: Running Sybase ASE in a Virtual Environment

Dear Jason,

Thank you for your Sybase TechWave 2008 abstract submission. There were a
tremendous number of excellent presentation ideas, and it was extremely
difficult to decide among the submissions.

We greatly appreciate the effort you made to develop your presentation and
to submit the application, but we are unable to include your suggested
session(s) in the agenda at this time. We encourage you to submit an entry
again next year.

The TechWave registration site is now live. Please visit the site at
http://www.sybase.com/techwave/registrationinfo by June 29th, to register
and to receive the early bird discount $1,295.00 rate.

We look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas this August. If you have any
questions, please contact Michele Shannon at (781) 251-7705 or at
SybaseSpeakers@experient-inc.com.

Sincerely,

Michele Shannon
Sybase TechWave Speaker Manager

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Taken from the Canon Pixma MP150 manual but here in a nice convenient place:

Press the Maintenance button (icon of a pliers & screwdriver) until the code you want shows up then press the Color or Black button:

Does any one know that the “1″ code is?

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Teething Miriam likes to suck on fingers, see how she takes the flavors of a Louisiana style shrimp boil!

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I’ve been looking at switching host providers from Yahoo for some time.  I did a test migration to Wordpress.com but discovered that they really don’t seem to get that many people would like to control their own blog.  For a simple blog, Wordpress.com would be fine but you might as well go with Livejournal.com, Facebook or some other blogging system then.  I don’t see what value Wordpress.com offers.

• No javascript is allowed in widgets:

My code has gone from my widget

If you paste code into a widget, save and when you look again it has gone then the system has removed it.
This is done for security reasons.

Anything that has a line like this:
<script type="text/javascript">
or that uses Form or Input tags for instance is not allowed. There are other tags but the effect is the same - they disappear.
There are no exceptions to this.

• You can’t add plugins to your wordpress blog:

Where is my plugins tab?

Unfortunately, there isn’t one to be found!

For various reasons we do not permit the uploading and use of plugins here at wordpress.com.

The hosting is simply for your blog even if you would pay $$ for email services.  Sure, they have a hack that will allow you to redirect to Google Apps but you might as go with Google’s Blogger then.  Perhaps I’m just not getting the point of Wordpress.com (not to be confused with Wordpress.org).  Can someone enlighten me?

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Yuval Malchi over on the ISUG sybase-l mailing list provided the following codes for Sybase’s Sysam (FlexLM):

The following License Types are only available for specific Partner contracts with OEM or embedded license arrangements:

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Sometime early this afternoon, the categories & tags of my blog disappeared. After a little bit of investigation (I was working quite heavily at the time), I discovered that the wp_term_taxonomy table in MySQL contained minor corruption. I ran repair table ‘wp_term_taxonomy’ and it was corrected.

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For the past few days, we’ve been struggling with getting Sybase’s ASE DBMS to start on our new Linux PowerPC (a virtual machine running on top of AIX). We were able to install the software with no problems. We weren’t able to get past the __gxx_personality_v0 error:

symbol lookup error: /opt/ibmcmp/lib64/libibmc++.so.1: undefined symbol: __gxx_personality_v0

The error is a linking issue with IBM’s Visual Age runtime (a c/c++ runtime). I was able to confirm with Sybase that ASE will NOT run with Visual Age 8.x or 9.x and that it requires the 7.0 runtime. I downloaded the 7.0 runtime from IBM’s website but still received the same error.

ASE’s linking looked okay however:

[sybase@sybase ASE-12_5]$ ldd -v bin/dataserver
libbtsymbols.so => /sybase/ASE-12_5/lib/libbtsymbols.so (0×0000008000002000)
librt.so.1 => /lib64/tls/librt.so.1 (0×0000008000647000)
libm.so.6 => /lib64/tls/libm.so.6 (0×0000008081560000)
libnsl.so.1 => /lib64/libnsl.so.1 (0×0000008000674000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0×0000008081510000)
libibmc++.so.1 => /opt/ibmcmp/lib64/libibmc++.so.1 (0×00000080006a4000)
libpam.so.0 => /lib64/libpam.so.0 (0×00000080006b7000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib64/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0×00000080006d3000)
libaio.so.1 => /lib/libaio.so.1 (0×00000080006ff000)
libc.so.6 => /lib64/tls/libc.so.6 (0×00000080812f0000)
/lib64/ld64.so.1 (0×00000080812b0000)
libaudit.so.0 => /lib64/libaudit.so.0 (0×0000008000711000)

I worked with Sybase & IBM to track down the cause but it was IBM’s Brian Shen that was able to identify the culprit. We need to preload the libstdc++.so.5 library:

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.5

Once we did that, we verified that the library was being picked up:

[sybase@sybase install]$ ldd $SYBASE/$SYBASE_ASE/bin/dataserver
/usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.5 (0×0000008000002000)
libbtsymbols.so => /sybase/ASE-12_5/lib/libbtsymbols.so (0×0000008000146000)
librt.so.1 => /lib64/tls/librt.so.1 (0×000000800078c000)
libm.so.6 => /lib64/tls/libm.so.6 (0×0000008081560000)
libnsl.so.1 => /lib64/libnsl.so.1 (0×00000080ef740000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0×0000008081510000)
libibmc++.so.1 => /opt/ibmcmp/lib64/libibmc++.so.1 (0×00000080007ba000)
libpam.so.0 => /lib64/libpam.so.0 (0×00000080ef6a0000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib64/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0×00000080007cd000)
libaio.so.1 => /lib/libaio.so.1 (0×00000080007fa000)
libc.so.6 => /lib64/tls/libc.so.6 (0×00000080812f0000)
libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib64/libgcc_s.so.1 (0×000000800080b000)
/lib64/ld64.so.1 (0×00000080812b0000)
libaudit.so.0 => /lib64/libaudit.so.0 (0×00000080ef6c0000)

If you receive the following error, you can safely ignore it:

ERROR: ld.so: object ‘/usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.5′ from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored

Don’t forget to set up your environment to include the IBM Visual Age runtime:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/ibmcmp/lib64:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/ibmcmp/lib64

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