Linux

I am led to believe this is the kind of thing that seed boxes are good for: https://whatbox.ca/

Cheers for the tips. I'll have a look.

I have what I think is a Linux problem.

Plex server is on a Ubuntu server. All my network drives are on a Windows server.

To access the drives I did

sudo mkdir /media/windowsshare

and then added to /etc/fstab

//servername/sharename /media/windowsshare cifs credentials=/home/ubuntuusername/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm 0 0

(obviously replacing relevant parts with my server, username, etc and creating a .smbcredentials file)

All seemed well and good, can read the folders, Plex works fine.

I've recently been testing the DVR part of plex and found that it wasn't working as I couldn't write to the network drives.

I tested this by copying a file to the network folder and it didn't work.

The reason I think it could be a linux issue though is that copying the file using sudo does work. As such I can't see it being a permissions problem on the Windows server. Any suggestions?

You're probably mounting it as root, which means all the files and directories are owned by root:root, regular users can't write. (If I'm right, the root user should be able to write to those directories).

You need to specify the owner and group. Either set owner and group to the user you want to allow access to, or create a new group for all users who need access to use.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/68079/mount-cifs-network-drive-write-permissions-and-chown

Alternatively, it could be samba settings:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/334422/mounted-cifs-share-but-no-write-permissions

Thanks, yes I can write to the folders using sudo which makes me think it's a permissions thing rather than the samba settings.

I assume the user is the Linux user, not Windows. So far as I'm aware, I don't have any groups set up, is there a default for this or something (or can it be skipped if I set a user)? Cheers

I don't think there's a default group for something like this.

If you don't want to make a new group, you can either make the mount world-writable, or you can just set the owner to be the one user you want to be able to write to it.

Anybody maintaining a ppa for Ubuntu?

I'm rebuilding my home server. I used to use amahi which was some software built on ubuntu. It set a lot off stuff up for you. I never really liked it though, so I'm trying to start from scratch. I have just discovered docker. Has anyone experience of this? The containers are easy to set up but what i would like to do is use my server as a dns server so that i can access web-apps on the server by a name rather than IP and port number. Can anyone offer any advice?

I didn't like docker.

Why not just install the web apps straight on the OS, and use NGINX config to direct traffic appropriately, based on the host name?

Why not just install the web apps straight on the OS, and use NGINX config to direct traffic appropriately, based on the host name?

Because then you have your temporary piece of work leaving permanent files on your OS.

Over time this cruft is messy, and when you're working with multiple web apps it's hard to divine which left what where.

Docker is fantastic for local development in the same way virtualenv is. It can namespace and contain all of the files, processes and configuration for an app.

When you're done with it... just blow it away.

Then if you're deploying it can be a dream there too. Maintain your own company image repo and have your CI push docker images into it. Later... just deploy a pushed image to whatever container cluster you happen to run in prod, be it Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.

The experience remains consistent from dev through to prod, and the only thing we really gained is better management.

But that's ace, better management is what was missing.

I'm not very good and often break things while trying to sort stuff out. I like that with docker I can stop the container, remove it and start from scratch in very little time without worrying I've broken some other dependencies or anything like that.

I'd guess I'd need to run a dhcp server, dns server and nginx all up and running.

I've always just fired up a VM if I've wanted isolation.

I used docker once, to run a few lines of python that someone had packaged as a docker container, and it ended up eating all 5GB of spare space on my AWS instance and I never bothered to figure out why.

Anyway, what you describe sounds good. Especially for CI and deployment.

Not sure how well it would work for local development. Would you include the container config in your repo, and rebuild the container every time you pull from master?

The config is normally under source control. You could snapshot the container at the end of the build and discard it if the config changes. Not sure how you actually do this, I was too busy writing code when Docker became a thing here.

Would you include the container config in your repo, and rebuild the container every time you pull from master?

Depends on the size of the project.

For small projects that are to be shared to a wide audience... yes. This is what people do.

For large projects inside companies comprised of many components... no. In this scenario one typically has a "dockerfiles" repo containing all Docker files. This is no different to how companies have a repo for their Puppet/Chef/SaltStack or something. Except in the Docker files example one typically will publish you compiled or packaged code to a package server of some kind (maybe you push a .deb file somehere) and then the Dockerfile is simply a small container describing an apt-get install mycode=this_version.

But for local dev and small projects, yes... docker files go into the repo.

For large corp dev, docker files are managed along the lines of config management and are in other repos (though local repos may still have a docker file for local dev work).

Trying to get arch on a pi I just bought. Have a Linux box but no SD card reader for it. Have a Windows box (surface) with a micro SD slot, but arch doesn't provide images. Have an SD card with noobs/raspbian on it, but not sure where that gets me. Finally, can't seem to get the pi to boot from USB despite following instructions exactly.

Any ideas? Rather not but a USB to micro SD.

Could you use a usb stick to live boot into Linux on the box with the sd card reader?

Ha, thanks - I thought of that just after posting and am currently downloading fedora, which apparently offers best surface support out of the box (so hopefully micro SD card reader works).

Sometimes just typing things out makes everything clearer...

Hmmm. Fedora on my surface, that sounds interesting...

Virtual machine on the surface and install some flavour of Linux

Ended up just running a fedora live USB (fuck me these live boots are much faster than they used to be). Wrote Arch to an SD card, booted up the pi, and SSH is a go!

Now the fun bit.

I'm trying to back up my primary ssd to an external hard drive using dd

NAME                  FSTYPE        SIZE MOUNTPOINT LABEL
sda                               238.5G
├─sda1                ext2          487M /boot
├─sda2                                1K
└─sda5                LVM2_member   238G
  ├─ubuntu--vg-root   ext4        234.3G /
  └─ubuntu--vg-swap_1 swap          3.7G [SWAP]
sdb                                 1.8T
├─sdb1                              300G
├─sdb2                ext4          300G
└─sdb3                ntfs          1.2T            1200Size

I'm trying to back up sda to an image file on sdb2 using the command

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb2/plexdisk.img

but getting the message

dd: failed to open '/dev/sdb2/plexdisk.img': Not a directory

Any suggestion what I'm doing wrong? Cheers

Pretty sure that given you are creating a file, not cloning to another device, you need an output path to a mounted filesystem, e.g under /mnt or /media, not /dev.

You haven't mounted the target partition, sdb2 is just the device node. Also I suspect there's a chance you'll end up with a corrupt image if you dd a drive (your sda) while there are partitions mounted as rw.

Cheers, I should have thought of that.

That's a good point, I should probably stop being lazy, connect a monitor and keyboard and boot into a livecd or something and do it properly.

Any arch people here? I'm trying to move the filesystem on my raspberry pi from the SD card to an external HD. Moved the necessary stuff with rsync, but Arch doesn't seem to mount the root directory with fstab. Therefore, not sure how to point it to the new root directory.