sshmenu Tool for the admin

Again a blog post maybe interesting for you out there. I have to do quite a bunch of server administration throughout the day and have to connect using ssh many times a day. What gnome lacks here for me is a nice tool where you can manage your connections. I found this tool for me, called sshmenu. Nice tool, you can configure your ssh connection setting also including different profiles gnome-terminal provides. Due to the fact that I was a developer (a developer will always stick to developing) I saw that I had a bunch of connection to configure there but I won’t do that by hand. So I have written a little shell script which reads the server, user and gnome-terminal profile name (you saved your customized profiles with) from a file and generates the .sshmenu config file which is located in your $HOME directory automatically from the list. Here you find the sshmenu generating shell script you have to rename from .sh.txt to .sh only (wordpress does not gulp .sh files) and an example connection list file to test the script with.

Gnome-Blog

I have had some issues using gnome-blog. The trouble started with the settings dialog, what to choose. Due to the fact that gnome-blog has more intelligence inside than needed I got some trouble in selecting “Blog Type” – “Selfrun WordPress” because this causes gnome-blog somehow to autocomplete the url given with something like ../wordpress/xmlrpc.php, which resulted in errors when trying to post a simple blog entry. The workaround for me was to use “Selfrun other” and enter http://myblog.adomain/xmlrpc.php then it works. Cheers

BloGTK – Bug

Hi out there. Another bug report for BloGTK Users. When using more than one blog account the blog type radio button is not saved correctly when you only press the save button. Workaround: Change the blogtype to your choice and then press ok to use the currently edited account with BloGTK, afterwards it is saved correclty, if you only press the save button BloGTK looses this setting when switching back to the default account. Cheers.

WARNING With distribution upgrade from feisty to gutsy

Hi out there! I experienced some problems making the distribution upgrade from feisty to gutsy. The wu-ftp package could not be downloaden what I quit with a CTRL+C command in the command line. The download of all packages finished ok except for the wu-ftp package. The installtion process proceeded and when trying to install wu-ftp the installer quit installing at last and I had a feistygutsy distribution on my system. I decided to backup my data and install from scratch. So if you are on the edge with your ubuntu system take your time a few more days using the distribution upgrade I saw a few bugs posted for the installer.

Ubuntu MacOSX Look’n Feel

I have done some playing around with my ubuntu and here is the result

Cisco vpnclient with Ubuntu Gutsy

Alternative for Cisco vpnclient – vpnc

I have found a better solution then the one below, follow this link to get (sorry only german) description on how to use vpnc instead of cisco vpnclient. I try to translate this here:

Install the vpnc package, please check yourself what sources you have to enable.

sudo apt-get install vpnc


Now you have to create a file as root in /etc/vpnc, name it like your profile e.g. myvpncprofile.conf! Fill in the information into the file as listed below:

IPSec gateway
IPSec ID
IPSec secret
Xauth username XXXXXXXX
Xauth password YYYYYYYY


Fill in den gateway ip, vpn name for the cisco group password do the following: in your .pcf file you find an entry prefixed enc_grouppwd which contains an encoded group password. Copy it to your clipboard and click this link, there you will get the encoded password in plain text which you the fill into IPSec secret part of the file.

After you have done all this you can use vpnc-connect command:
vpnc-connect /ect/vpnc/yourprofile.conf


to connect to your vpn. I left the Xauth password empty because I have a token and the vpnc asks me for the password. So far so good so simple. DONE. vpnc-disconnect kills the vpn connection which is pushed to the background.

For all who want to use the cisco vpnclient package, follow this instrucktion:

I tried to install vpnclient for cisco vpn connections with the packages out of the known internet sources and did not succeed. I found

this link http://linux-support.hiwi.rz.uni-kon…1.0640.tar.bz2 within the ubuntu forum here . Extract the package, and run ./vpn_install, answer the usual questions and finished. If you have an existing profile import it as mentioned here.

Upgrade from Ubuntu 6.10 to 7.04

Hi folks, yesterday evening I decided to risk the upgrade from Ubuntu 6.10 to 7.04. I was a little suspicious about doing that because I had my current 6.10 polished and tuned and everything worked fine for me so I was anxious loosing some settings or programs.

Carefull as I am I made a complete system backup including the installed packages extracted from aptitude, I will add the script a little later, but the essence of the script is to extract all installed packages using apt-cache command and move them to a file with a timestamp. From there you can call apt-get install for these files automatically, if you have to restore your system after a new installation.

After that I checked if UpdateManager application has the right version as mentioned at the ubuntu page. Afterwards I started up a shell window executing update-manager -d. The download of all new packages took about 1 h 40 min, and the you have to wait additional 1 h until everything is ready. You get some prompts about keeping changed config files, where you have to decide from time to time. The only config file I kept was the apache2.conf file the others I decided to take the new ones.

After rebooting the system everything (tested till now, not complete) worked like before. No problems with my huawei E220 umts card, no sound problems….works fine.

Today I activated the desktop effect goodies preview and I am astonishe how flawless this works on my not top equiped notebook which is fujitus amilo Pro 1,6 Ghz Centrino, 1GB Ram and 64MB of VideoRam.

Congratiulations to the ubuntu developers team, they really produced a flawless upgrade procedure for my needs. My entire reason of upgrading was the long term support of 7.04 which lacks for 6.10.

HUAWEI E220 Follow Up

Again a shorty about the Huawei E220 and linux. Since my last updates of ubuntu 6.10 the E220 is always recognised the right way and usable right from the start.

Gnome-Blog is iWeb on Linux

I searched for a corresponding tools for blogging as iweb from apple and was told that gnome-blog does the same. Check gnome site for details. This entry was the first to be done with gnome-blog. See screenshot below.

Huawei E220 revisited

Hi Folks. Finally I have finished my tests and scripting with the Huawei E220 USB UMTS Modem and Ubuntu Edgy Eft. Some conclusions can be made:

1. have the modem plugged in on boot
2. if you work continuous only with the modem work with suspend to disk mode instead of shutdown
3. use the scripts I provide here
4. if you unplug the modem so that kppp is hanging or the modem device is hanging you will only get it back to work with a reboot

I have done some scripting and tests. The modem is ready for working if you have more than one device named /dev/ttyUSB. If there is only one ttyUSB0 device it might not work at all. I have created a script which checks the number of ttyUSB devices if not a minimum of 2 devices exist the script automatically does the procedure described in my prior article about this modem. ATTENTION please follow exact the hints written to the console. The script has some built in sleeps and waits which have been tested to work quite well. So long.

Script for setting the pin, slightly modified: setpinpl.txt

Script doing all the other work: huaweish.txt

HINT: Please modify the entry with the pin code needed for your umts device.