Tag: Ubuntu

Quick Tagging and Renaming

Last week I recovered a friend’s mp3 library from a 2nd generation iPod. All was well except for that fact that any music put onto the iPod is given a random file name such as C00XY.mp3. Not helpful.

After scratching my head and thinking that we would have to rename most of the files manually, I started to look for re-tagging programs. A few were recommended on the internet but I found them to be too unwieldy or didn’t quite work right.

Thankfully, I discovered a lightweight tagging application called Ex Falso. A fairly simple to use tool which easily re-tags your music, or renames the files with much more ease than any others that I have come across. It only took a few minutes to read the tags of around 3500 songs and rename them all.

To install in Ubuntu, simply run the command:

<code>sudo apt-get install exfalso</code>

As an added bonus – it also fixed tags of .m4a audio files, meaning that preparing music to go on my iPod Touch in Linux is slightly easier. Wehey!

Simple Linux DHCP / DNS Server

I’ve just completed the first DNS and DHCP server that I’ve built for a while. This was using Ubuntu Linux 8.04.

The nice thing about the process this time around as opposed to when I set one up a couple of years ago is that I was a little more au fait with the process. The DHCP successfully updated the DNS records, and everything ticked along nicely.

It’s going into production tomorrow, so I’m hopeful that it will fix a number of network problems that a client has been having with the RM DHCP Server service that runs in Windows XP.

If it would be easy to tie the upcoming Samba 4 into the mix, then I think that you have the perfect open source server! I have another server to put together soon, so I plan to write a ‘howto’ and post it here.

Mount a Webdav folder in Ubuntu Linux

Webdav is a very handy protocol for writing files back and forth across the internet.

I’ve never really had much call for it – but I’m all for it lately as I’m trying out Alfresco and would really love to see a better way to upload files than the basic web-bsaed uploader that is provided.

As Firefox doesn’t had webdav support, I’ve had a go at mounting webdav folders in Linux. The results have been good, with a couple of small caveats that are remedied fairly easily.

First of all, you need to install the davfs2 package. Once done, we can start connecting to a webdav folder on t’internet:

Open up the terminal and create the mount folder:

mkdir ~/webmount

Now run the mount.davfs command to connect as root

sudo mount.davfs http://yourwebsite.com/webdav ~/webmount -o rw,uid=john

Now, let me quickly explain the paramters.
yourwebsite.com/webdav is the server and path
~/webdav is your local directory where you want to webdav files to appear
-o rw,uid=john is the options to set the webdav as re-writable and allow me (john) to have user-level access to the files. Make sure that you put your own username here.

And that’s it.

When you copy files, you might get an error such as this:

cp myfile.pdf ~/webmount/

cp: cannot create regular file `~/myfile.pdf’: Input/output error

This is caused by the server not supporting file locks. You will need to edit the /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf file and add the following line:

use_locks       0

Remount your webdav directory, and you should be able to create files with no problems.

No More Lost Deleted Files in Ubuntu

I had a shocking error of judgement this morning when I accidentally deleted some of my son’s photos from his toy digital camera. They were sitting on my desktop, and I was on a cleanup… These were a casualty of my cleanup-fest and obsession with the shift key.

Thinking on a Windows vein – I thought that I should be able to backup the files easily and seamlessly. But I don’t want too much aggravation. A quick scoot around the Ubuntu forums, and I found TimeVault.

TimeVault is the equivalent project to Windows’ Shadow Copy service or Apple’s Time Machine. Basically it’s a completely transparent backup that allows you to recover files easily on the system you are working on.

I’ve downloaded the .DEB and forced the installation (there’s no binary x64 version at the moment). I’ll see how it all goes and report back!

Reset your MediaWiki Sysop Password

When you’re stuck without sysop access to MediaWiki because you cannot remember the sysop details then there’s a handy maintenance script that’s available (if you’ve used the package manager) to reset the sysop username and password.

On Ubuntu server you can run the following command:

php /usr/share/mediawiki/maintenance/changePassword.php --user=sysop --password=password

The script will immediately reset your sysop username and password with what you have entered above.

Now you can log in without any problems!

Installing Ubuntu 8.04 server on VirtualBox

I had a little trouble running Ubuntu server on VirtualBox today.

Thankfully the answer was easily found at Installing Ubuntu 8.04 server on VirtualBox « {S.A.Z.W.Q.A}.

All you need to do to get Ubuntu server firing up is to open the settings screen for your virtual machine, and then tick the Enable PAE/NX box.

Click OK and fire it up! No problem.