Last night Ubuntu saved my life - How I used Ubuntu to recover ALL my files…

Hello Boys and Girls,

Commodore 64 here to bring you another horror story from binary-land. Lord knows I’ve been through hell and back with computers. Overheating CPUs, which were fixed by the cold of the winter outside my apt; crashing hard drives which were fixed or accessed by various means; faulty power supplies, which had me gutting and re-assembling my machine; and many more.

Up to this point, the only time I actually lost data, was to my ex-wife, who got to keep the computer with all my stuff in it, while I made away with a crappy laptop. Other than that, I’ve always been able to salvage my data somehow.
This time I had a new problem. Upon conferring with the Admin, to whom I have exclusive access (belonging has perks people, hit the comments if YOU want to belong as well) we came to the conclusion, based on past problems that were brought to his attention, that I have a power supply which is not supplying a steady stream of power to my hard-drives and various other internally powered devices. Now so far, to the best of my knowledge, a hard drive and ram are really the only components that can suffer from a faltering power supply. For the past 6 months, my computer has eaten through 3 Western Digital hard drives, which I’m sure were perfectly fine from the get-go. I will note here that I DO NOT blame Western Digital for these issues. I am a fair consumer which doesn’t point unnecessary blame where it is not due. I will however give them a call and will update this blog with their responses and whether they are able to help me at all along the lines of some replacements.

My problem started because of me. I let waaaay to much time go by before I blew the inordinate amount of dust out of my computer, and more importantly, my power supply. I have gotten into the bad habit of leaving my case open, as I am also inordinately lazy. This probably contributed to the systematic weakening of my power supply. My hypothesis is that the dust caked up on the power supply fan, causing the power supply to rise in temperature, and over time this started to affect it’s power output. This, in turn, caused my hard drives to fuzz in a very weird, intermittent way. At first we thought that my snazzy hard drive enclosure was the culprit. I had one of my drives, my all-important work drive with all my years of work, in an enclosure which, through an lcd display provided me spin-up and temperature info, but more importantly this enclosure allowed my drive to be cold-removed from my machine easily. My justification was, that in the case of a fire, or a world-wide Huxley style pron hunt, I would have the ability to simply slide my drive out of my machine, and make off with my all-important stuff. Karl and I had hypothesized earlier on, that this was the culprit to the failing of my first WD-320 drive. At the time this was my data drive on which I kept all my data, but I also had a recent copy of the data on another drive, so it was no big deal.

So I removed the offending enclosure and drive, and continued on with a slightly bruised ego and one less hard drive in my collection. For about a few months this was fine. Most likely there was now less power being drained from the power supply so this proved to be a stop-gap measure which lasted only a few months, which I only know now.

Then the unthinkable happened. Something that hasn’t happened to me in years. A full-out dead freeze in Windows, which upon rebooting, no longer existed according to the cryptic error message my BIOS was giving me. Windows was gone. Since I couldn’t deal with the problem right there and then, I popped in my newly burned Ubuntu 7.10 Live CD to leave some semblance of a usable computer intact on my PC.

A few days later I was actually able to spend some time recovering or repairing my machine, whichever came first. Since I had turned the machine off the night before, I booted up and noticed that Windows was beginning to boot. Hooray!
By some miraculous feat, Windows was booting up! However, my beloved work drive was not showing up. Upon checking BIOS I noticed that the hard drive was being detected, but Windows couldn’t see it! Before I could do much else, Windows froze again. At this point I realized Windows wasn’t coming back, and that I had to concentrate my efforts on damage control rather than repair. Recovering my work files became my top priority.

Enter Ubuntu.

At first, Ubuntu did not recognize my work drive. Then, after a few minutes, my work drive appeared in the My-Computer-esque Home window Ubuntu had given me. Eureka! The OS sees my drive. I quickly connected my LaCie external USB drive and double clicked on the WD-320 drive which contained all my precious work files. One more obstacle: I received an error which said something to the effect of (loosely translated) “Ubuntu needs you to give it the command, in the command prompt, to mount the drive with the force option activated.” I popped open Firefox and Googled just the first part of the error and was presented with some results to some blogs which contained the exact command, with switches, that I was to use to successfully get my drive accessible in Ubuntu. The command worked an I proceeded to copy the 130 Gigabytes of precious data from my half-broken, limping hard-drive to my ever solid external USB drive. A few hours later the operation was complete. I can rest easy now.

A later memory test, courtesy of the good people that brought the Ubuntu Live CD, revealed that my memory chips were fried too - looks like a job for Crucial.com.
It’s been a week now, and thanks to Ubuntu, getting my data accessible after a hard system crash like that was not something I had to lose sleep over. Since I was able to safely offload my data without having to overhaul my computer, I was able to get some sleep that night, and many other nights following the incident. Sleeping is not an issue when you know your data is safe, even if for the time being.

Now I can slowly work on getting the $500 together to buy 2 new hard drives, and 2 new ram chips, so that one day my computer will be restored to it’s former dual-screen, design station ala Commodore glory. But in the meantime, I can survive rather comfortably using my Mac, and my resuscitated PC running Ubuntu 7.10. In all fairness this was a harrowing situation, but the availability of a self-contained, graphical operating system, that can run off a CD on a PC with nothing in working order besides a power supply, a motherboard, and some limping hard drives and memory chips, enabled me to not have to put my life on hold again to ensure access to my important stuff.
Piece of mind, that’s what it came down to.

_TheSleepingCommodore_

Ubuntu Quick Tip: Missing Minimize and Maximize Window Buttons?

Hello out there in admin land!

It is I, El Di Pablo here to bring you a quick Ubuntu tip for the week. I haven’t written on aTa in a while due to my hectic schedule, but I am sure you have seen me milling about the comments quite a bit.

Anyhoo, so there I am last night, screwing around on my Ubuntu laptop surfing porn doing homework when I noticed that all of my minimize and maximize buttons were missing from my windows.

The only way to minimize and maximize my windows were to right click on the bottom task bar and select it from the menu. WTF?!?!?

Well, it turns out that those buttons aren’t completely controlled by Gnome. For those buttons, Gnome uses a windows manager call Metacity. To get those buttons back I had to open a terminal and run the following command:

Once I did that, my buttons came back, and I was able to minimize and maximize like a mofo! Do you have any good Ubuntu tips/tricks you want to share? Hit us up in the comments!

By El Di Pablo of Bauer-Power

Ubuntu Tip of The Week: Changing the Login Message on Ubuntu Server

Hey boys and girls out in Admin land! I thought I would swing by aTa today to drop a little Ubuntu know-how on ya.

Have you installed Ubuntu server and noticed that when you login to it there is the generic CYA login message from Ubuntu about them not providing warranty blah blah blah blah? Of course you have! Personally, I am not one to stick to defaults very often, especially when it comes to generic welcome messages that can be easily changed! Here is what the original message looks like:

Linux Hostname 2.6.24-18-generic #1 SMP Wed May 28 20:27:26 UTC 2008 i686

The programs included with the Ubuntu system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
applicable law.

To access official Ubuntu documentation, please visit:
http://help.ubuntu.com/

Yuck! How boring is that? Why not change it to something a little more fun? Or perhaps, if this is a company Ubuntu server, maybe something a little more customized for your company? Changing the message is really quite simple. Just run the following from the terminal:

sudo nano /etc/motd

Make your changes, and save them. It really couldn’t be any easier than that. Now you might have something that looks like this:

For those not in-the-know, motd stands for “Message of The Day” which according to Wikipedia is used to:

…display rules, administrator contact, or simply a piece of ASCII art. This is frequently used in schools or workplaces such as offices.

Have you created a funny or strange motd message on your Linux box? Care to share a screen shot? If you have some good ones, please post a link to them in the comments.

[EDIT]- By The way, if you don’t want your new cool message changed back at reboot, you will also have to edit /etc/motd.tail as well. And yes Jeremy, you can use vi instead of nano!

By El Di Pablo of Bauer-Power

Confessions of a dude quiting Microsoft Cold Turkey.

Open Source cake… Here is an excerpt that caught my eye that I wanted to share with you:

I have now been Microsoft-Free at work for about 7 weeks. I have also found solutions for almost all of the initial hurdles I encountered in the first week.

Here is the list:

Email - I now have Thunderbird working flawlessly as my email client in sync with Exchange. I do need to talk to the Exchange admin to change a setting on the Exchange Server so I can use the Calendar functionality with Sunbird. I am currently use Webmail for my calendar.

Office - Open Office has worked well with Word, Power Point, Excel, and Adobe documents. I can use Wine to install Visio on my Ubuntu desktop. This doesn’t allow me to be totally Microsoft-Free but there is no answer for Visio’s proprietary format that I am aware of. This is not an issue with Open Source, the problem is that Microsoft doesn’t use an open standard for
their Visio product. Open Office Draw works fine for creating new drawings but can’t import Visio documents saved in Visio format. I also downloaded OxygenOffice Professional that gives me the much needed templates and clip art that Open Office was missing.

Browser - I have been using Firefox at work for years so this a no brainer.

Printer - I do have one unresolved issue. I have an old HP Laserjet (about 8 years old). Although I can see the driver I can’t get the printer to work. I have not invested a ton of time trying to fix it.Before all of the Microsoft defenders start slamming me, let me put my disclaimers out.

My goal of this article is to prove that people can be productive at work without the need of Microsoft software. I am not saying that because I can be productive that everyone should abandon Microsoft and start a project to implement Linux corporate wide. However, I do recommend to those who are open to exploring alternatives that they should start a small pilot project with a handful of desktop users. I think a 5-10 person pilot with Ubuntu or Mepis would be a great way to learn about the opportunities and challenges that an Open Source OS resents.

This is low risk and high return.

A pilot like this will give your IT shop an opportunity to try out alternatives without disrupting the day to day business.When I first started my experiment I was trying to keep it a secret out of fear of attacks from angry Microsoft worshipers (especially from the admins and desktop support). What I am finding out is that most of the folks that I was hiding from are sick and tired of supporting Windows and are proponents of Linux. Several of them are using Linux at home. One of the guys I talked to has Vista and XP installed on his laptop. He swaps out the hard drive when switching between OS’s. He is less then impressed with Vista and complains about the slow boot time (2 times slower then XP).

I recently moved to a new office and a desktop guy saw my Ubuntu desktop when I was moving. I expected an ear full but instead the guy said he fully supports a move to Ubuntu and wished the company would move in that direction.

These stories are coming from Microsoft certified engineers who have spent years supporting Microsoft tools. These stories are not coming from anti-Microsoft people who worship Linux.

Ubuntu Quick Tip: Installing New True Type Fonts

Hey boys in girls out in Admin land! It is I, El Di Pablo coming straight at ya from Bauer-Power with some quick Ubuntu knowlege!

I am always playing around with different fonts and such in Windows as I strive to play around in various graphic programs for promotional material and other stuff. Every once in a while I have to add a new font that I downloaded from the Internet. Most of us know how to do that already in Windows (If not, email help_at_asktheadmin_dot_com), but what about Ubuntu?

Ubuntu is starting to gain share in the computer OS realm, and a lot of people want to know how to do average everyday things on it. One of those things people want to know (I know they want to know because they ask me…you know?) is how to add fonts to Ubuntu.

Well its simple, all you have to do is to download your favorite font. Then in your home directory, crate a folder called .fonts (The ‘.’ makes it a hidden file). Just drag your newly downloaded font into that folder and, you guessed it, you are done!

Just open up your favorite graphics program, or whatever else you use fonts in, and your new font will be ready to go!

Got any other Ubuntu tips you want to share with the group? Hit us up in the comments!

-El Di Pablo of www.Bauer-Power.net

Ubuntu Tip of The Week: Configuring Static IP Addressing

Hello fellow geeks and geekette’s! It is I, El Di Pablo back with another quick Ubuntu tip. I thought of this because I am working on creating an Ubuntu 8.04 VMWare GSX server for my company. I figured I might as well write about it on aTa while it is still fresh in my mind.

As with most servers, you want to configure it for static IP addressing to make life a little more simple for everybody. Linux servers are no exception. The only trouble with some flavors of Linux servers is that they are strictly command line for less overhead and better performance. So how does one configure Ubuntu server for static IP addressing in the terminal you ask? Simple:

1. First you need to edit /etc/network/interfaces using your favorite text editor (I like nano):sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces
2. Next you need to enter your static IP information:#The primary network interface
   auto eth0
   iface eth0 inet static
   address 192.168.0.100
   netmask 255.255.255.0
   network 192.168.0.0
   broadcast 192.168.0.255
   gateway 192.168.0.1
3. Save your changes.
4. Now you need to point your server to your DNS server. To do this, you need to edit /etc/resolv.conf:sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

   name server xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (Replace the x’s with the IP address of your DNS server)

5. Save your changes, then restart your network:sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
6. Now test it by pinging www.asktheadmin.com. If all went well, you should be all set!

Have you had to set up a production Ubuntu server in your environment? Tell us about your experience in the comments!