Source Guru

Ok, by popular demand (aka ompaul) I’ve decided to do a mini-howto on setting up networking on an ubuntu server, for those who are new to it.

In Ubuntu itself, when you install the desktop version, you get a nifty little tool called “Network Manager” (you may have noticed the icon, espescially if you have wireless) which pretty much does everything for you. However, if you’re using the server, without a GUI then this isn’t generaly available.

So, where to start?

It really depends on your network setup, you need to know a few things about your network before you start this.

The first and most important question you need to find out is whether there is a DHCP server on your network that will assign you an IP address. If so, your networking setup is very very simple, so I’ll start off with that.

Networking with an available DHCP server

When you have a DHCP server available on your network, things are made a lot simpler. Cut short, a DHCP server sits on your network and hands out configurations to the different computers that ask for them. I won’t go into detail, but, generally you’ll find these on small home networks (your router will generally work as a DHCP server, which is why you (usually) magically find your way onto the internet when you plug yourself into a network with a router on it)

First of all, find out whether you actually already have an internet connection. I’ll assume for now that you have a keyboard and monitor hooked up to the computer you’re setting up as a server, and have logged in as a user with sudo rights.

Type in the command “ifconfig” (without the quotes) and you should hopefully see something like this:-

mez@stupor:~$ ifconfig

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:16:3E:7F:AC:B2
inet addr:212.13.30.94  Bcast:212.13.30.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
RX packets:3576458 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1886783 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
RX bytes:836607596 (797.8 MB)  TX bytes:291514569 (278.0 MB)

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
RX packets:73611 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:73611 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:15252378 (14.5 MB)  TX bytes:15252378 (14.5 MB)

The important bit we see here is the block of text starting with “eth0″ and espescially the line

inet addr:212.13.30.94  Bcast:212.13.30.255  Mask:255.255.255.0

This generally means that the computer already has an IP address! yay!

Next, try the command

ping google.com

Hopefully, you’ll get back a response saying something along the lines of

PING google.com (64.233.187.99) 56(84) bytes of data
64 bytes from jc-in-f99.google.com (64.233.187.99): icmp_seq=1 ttl=245 time=100 ms

If so, you have a working internet connection! Go you! you can now start using your computer on the internet (though the IP address given above might only be accessible from an internal network, depending on your setup - going into howto get this IP available on the internet proper is beyond the scope of this blog post)

If not, you’ll get one of two errors, either a “no route to host” or a “cannot resolve google.com”.

The first issue is a complex one, which again, is beyond the scope of this article (though feel free to email me to ask questions - or catch me on IRC - I will *try* to answer them)

The second one generally means that you do not have a nameserver setup.

Open DNS is a project that provides Accessible DNS resolvers for the whole world to use. More information can be found out about OpenDNS here

For now however, lets open up your DNS resolver settings

sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

This file should be edited to contain the following lines only

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

Hit Ctrl + O then enter, then Ctrl + X to get back to your command prompt.

Try pinging google again, and hopefully it should work. If not, something went wrong somewhere, again, try emailing me or poking me on IRC.

So, what if you don’t have an IP address?

Well, assuming that you DO have a DHCP server running on your network, lets first of all check that we have a working interface on our system

ifconfig -a

You should hopefully see a couple of lines here, one starting with “lo” and another starting with “eth0″ (or similar) - remember this name

Now, open up your /etc/network/interfaces file (sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces) and make sure it contains the following

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

Assuming that it does, we should be able to do the following

sudo ifup eth0

Which will (hopefully) bring the interface up. Go back a step if you cannot resolve google.com when trying to ping it. You might have to setup a resolver (though your DHCP server should provide these details for you!)

Voila! hopefully you now have a working network interface

Networking without an available DHCP server

Now, here is where things get more interesting. To be able to setup a network without having a DHCP server readily available, you need to know the following

• The IP address that will be assigned to your host
• The netmask for the IP addresses being used
• The default gateway’s IP address (usually the IP address of your router)

It may differ how you get this information, however, I cannot tell you how to do so, I’d ask your network administrator if I were you (or your hosting provider)

So, I’m assuming here that you have the above details, are logged in at your machine and ready to go

I’ll only be brief about this setup, as a lot of the details are covered above.

First of all, make sure that your interface is down

sudo ifdown eth0

next, edit your /etc/network interfaces, replacing the information between < and > with
the information from above

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
	address <IP Address>
	netmask <Network Mask>
	gateway <Default Gateway>

So, you should have something like this

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
	address 212.13.30.94
	netmask 255.255.252.0
	gateway 212.13.30.1

Now head back to your console, and try

sudo ifup eth0

To bring your interface up. Hopefully, now, everything should be working (if not, go have a look at the DNS stuff above)

If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a comment here, or email me (martin AT sourceguru DOT net) and I will try and answer, though I make no guarantees!

Thus concludes Mez’s basic guide to server networking on ubuntu - I’ll try and add some more interesting stuff in a later blog post (IPv6, IP Aliases, etc etc)

It seems that since I’ve started using gutsy, my PC does not want to play (well, display) any video files played through xine. Which is very very very very annoying. It worked fine originally in fesity, then, when I upgraded to gutsy, the video I wanted to watch decided not to play (and OGG/Theora video)

Then, due to issues, It still won’t play. I’ve tried everything, adn xine itself isn’t thtrowing up anything in the log that’s making me think it’s an issue with that.

Does anyone have any ideas, or would anyone be able to tell me where to look to sort this out? I’ve been all over my xorg.conf, the Xine settings, all to no avail.

Any help would be muchly appreciated! This seems to be one of the only problems I’m, having with gutsy atm!)

Ok, so recently, I thought that my status as an ubuntu developer had expired, as I’ve had emails about my membership to ubuntu-dev expiring, and when I tried to send an email to a list in ubuntu (kubuntu-devel) it got bounced back to me. Now of course, I thought that the bounce was because the list was restricted for posting to developers only (as is ubuntu-devel)

I finally got a hold of a member of the Ubuntu Technical Board (thanks keybuk!) who explained to me..

<Keybuk> ubuntu-dev is a dead team
<Keybuk> rather than reject everyone, we’re just letting the membership expire naturally
<Keybuk> motu is the active “universe upload” team

So I then went to look what was going on with my email.

As my ubuntu email recieves a HUGE amount of traffic. (I dread to think but just checked and it seems I’ve had ~15000 emails go through it since march… a lot less than I’d expected) I have it setup in launchpad to go through a gmail account which means that I don’t overload my own server (as I was doing before when I hadn’t learnt to tweak my mailserver so it’s settings didn’tput my server into swap death!)

I was also sending outgoing email from my ubuntu email address through gmail’s smtp service.

However, it seems recently, that gmail will now rewrite an email address if it isn’t the one you’re sending through. If I send an email as if it’s coming from mez@ubuntu.com, then gmail’s smtp server will rewrite it so that it comes from mez.ubuntu@gmail.com…

I’ve now changed my email setup to use my server for all outgoing mail.

This comic from Scott Johnson made me laugh

So, this post is being written from Xubuntu.

As most of the people who know me will know, I’m a huge KDE/Kubuntu Fan. However, I’ve been sort of “donated” an old laptop to play around with for a while. And seeing as how old it is, I decided to install xubuntu on it.

I’ve only hit a few issues so far, so I’ll outline them.

• I downloaded the Dapper ISO thinking that it was the Feisty one - this was probably a case of PEBKAC
• Feisty crashes X when trying to load a terminal (and probably other things, I reinstalled when I tried for the 13th time to open a terminal
• When booting, between the grub loading and X starting, I just have a blank screen (I’ve heard this is an issue on laptops with *buntu though - so I don’t know - It worked fine on my old laptop!)
• No IRC client installed by default
• Slow responsiveness (but it’s faster thanit was in windows!)
• No Launch Feedback - when I click an icon to run something, I don’t know if it’s actually running or whatever. This is a feature I sorely miss from KDE as I just ended up loading 5 file managers as I thought that it wasn’t loading!)

In general though, other than the points above, I’m finding Xubuntu a nice clean distro. Looks wise, I haven’t had to change anything, as I do with kubuntu (what’s with those squished title bar buttons?) and it all looks nice clean crisp and fresh.

It’s a nice Distro. I think I may look at using it on some of my other machines in the future, even if it is GTK-app based, it’s still a nice alternative.

Ok, so not that long ago, I had to reinstall Kubuntu (we won’t explain why here! - I’m too ashamed to tell!)

Anyway, I installed Kubuntu Dapper, and that all worked fine. However, after upgrading to Feisty, I had a strange problem, I no longer had an English Keyboard layout, and I couldn’t change it.

So, I put up with it, after searching the ubuntu forums and realising a couple of people had a similar issue to me, thinking it was a bug.

Today, however, it really got to me (again, not something I wan’t to explain why)

So, I started bitching on IRC.

Again, as usual, my bitching and ranting and raving was unfounded. (sort of) The code WAS right in feisty, but for some reason, had been removed from my system. Grr…. I guess that the upgrade path is broken somewhere (seeing as I had to have about 3 attempts to do the upgrade with modding a couple of init scripts to just return true as they were giving me huge headaches! (one of the font updating things I believe))

But yeah, It’s fixed now, and much thanks to Colin Watson for pointing out that the file was in the package, as if it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t have thought to just

sudo apt-get install –reinstall xkb-data

So I’m now back on a UK keyboard, and after using it for a month as a US keyboard, am now having difficulty switching back!

I should switch to dvorak, and just make my life even more confusing

Trying to update my control panel software (Manages stuff like email websites etc, etc) and I get this

checking whether the C++ compiler (gcc   ) works… no
configure: error: installation or configuration problem: C++ compiler cannot create executables.

Kind of annoying, yes.

 But even more annoying that it then went on to delete my current (working) copy of My control panel.

Luckily everything works, I just have to do things manually until I can get this fixed

Last night, I released katapult 0.3.1.4, which is mainly a bugfix release, but well, It’s a release!

We now have katapult working with amarok >=1.4.2 (and with < 1.4.2 still too!)

It was annoying, however, when my ISP decided to drop my connection for half an hour in the middle of pushing the files out to sourceforge.

See The Katapult website for more details.

Packages will be available soon for feisty and sid

Recently Scott James Remnant blogged about his leaving of the Debian Project.

Reading this, I was sad to read how he felt that Debian’s conduct to Ubuntu Developers was wrong, and partly, I agree. But I would also like to say that although there are certain individuals within the Debian Community who are VERY anti-ubuntu, a LOT of them are not. I’ve found quite a few Debian Developers who are more than willing to help out, and although I get shot down sometimes in #debian-devel, and yes, I do ask a lot of stupid questions in a lot of stupid places, generally, the Debian community isn’t as elitist as many people think.

I also think that, although it doesnt come across a lot, the Ubuntu Community can come across as pretty elitist to. From my own experiences, I’ve seen a lot of elitism, there are people who will (no names mentioned) shoot down people for not being the “brightest” of the bunch.

The thing I ask is that everyone remembers that there are new people coming to Linux all the time. There are people from ubuntu who want to try something a little different, and want to try debian, there are people (like me) who want to contribute to both Debian and Ubuntu (but, unlike me, give up trying after their first bad experience of the “inter-distro” tension).

The Ubuntu community on the whole does a superb job in welcoming new people to the fold, as shown by Pete Savage’s latest blog. However, in some cases, it falls below par, just as a lot of other places do (as shown by a coment on Pete Savage’s blog).

I’d like to see  more people working towards helping new users get into Linux. There’s a wealth of people out there who just need a little help, and by giving them that little help, they’re more likely to contribute back in the future.

A few of you may know about the “New User Network” in ubuntu -  this is a team of “mentors” set up to help new users come to grips with Ubuntu, and Linux. Recently, it was featured on linux.com. I implore everyone reading this who wants to help increase the friendliness of the Ubuntu Community, whether you be a new user yourself, or an old hack, to join the NUN. It’s a great project, and it’s growing rapidly, and I like to think we’re making a difference.

If you’re interested in joining, feel free to talk to myself or nalioth on IRC, or join #ubuntu-nun, or make a post to the ubuntu-nun mailing list

Anyway, that’s my rambling over… now go read some more geek blogs

So … after finally getting everything ready for ifolder - I’ve finally actually made an apt repository for it

I have limited bandwidth however, so until Novell decide to mirror it - it’ll be restricted.

However, if you wish to grab a copy of iFolder, please feel free to email me and I’ll send you the details of the apt repository.

Please note, that this is currently only for ubuntu dapper. I will however, be adding sid, etch, sarge and breezy repositories soon … well - if they build

oh yeah - mez _AT_ ubuntu _DOT_ com