Stephen RC's questions

I'm trying to build a custom Ubuntu Server ISO, and am hitting a weird problem I'm hoping someone here can help with. I'm using UCK and these instructions.

When I do the minimum possible to build a "custom" ISO, it spits out an ISO which installs and works without any issues.

uck-remaster-unpack-iso ./ubuntu_trusty-server-amd64.iso 
uck-remaster-pack-iso 

However, I want to be able to include custom packages on my ISO too. UCK sets up the environment for you and then takes your GPG key and automatically signs everything for you:

uck-remaster-clean
uck-remaster-unpack-iso ubuntu_trusty-server-amd64.iso 
uck-remaster-prepare-alternate 
gpg --list-keys
uck-remaster-finalize-alternate 60FB276F
uck-remaster-pack-iso 

It generates an ISO without any errors, however the ISO those this wonderful error:

Syslog shows these (full):

Mar 19 19:37:28 base-installer: Using CD-ROM mount point /media/cdrom/
Mar 19 19:37:28 base-installer: Identifying.. 
Mar 19 19:37:28 base-installer: [53fed41586d1f78a456ce051a5c87264-2]
Mar 19 19:37:28 base-installer: Scanning disc for index files..
Mar 19 19:37:29 base-installer: Found 3 package indexes, 0 source indexes, 0 translation indexes and 1 signatures
Mar 19 19:37:29 base-installer: Found label 'Ubuntu-Server 14.04 LTS _Trusty Tahr_ - Alpha amd64 (20140306)'
Mar 19 19:37:29 base-installer: This disc is called: 
Mar 19 19:37:29 base-installer: 'Ubuntu-Server 14.04 LTS _Trusty Tahr_ - Alpha amd64 (20140306)'
Mar 19 19:37:29 base-installer: Copying package lists...
Mar 19 19:37:29 base-installer: gpgv: Signature made Fri 14 Mar 2014 01:18:54 AM UTC using RSA key ID 60FB276F
Mar 19 19:37:29 base-installer: gpgv: Can't check signature: public key not found
Mar 19 19:37:29 base-installer: E: Sub-process gpgv returned an error code (2)
Mar 19 19:37:29 base-installer: W: Signature verification failed for: /media/cdrom/dists/trusty/Release.gpg
Mar 19 19:37:29 base-installer: E: No CD-ROM could be auto-detected or found using the default mount point.
Mar 19 19:37:29 base-installer: You may try the --cdrom option to set the CD-ROM mount point. See 'man apt-cdrom' for more information about the CD-ROM auto-detection and mount point.
Mar 19 19:37:29 base-installer: error: error while running apt-cdrom

I also tried following the instructions here but it had the same result - UCK seems to follow those instructions from looking at the source.

Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.

Updates after more investigation:

Breaking out to a shell after the 'bad kernel' message: When examining the keys found in /usr/share/keyrings with gpg --list-keys --keyring ./ubuntu-archive-keyring.gpg the signing key injected by UCK or manually through a ubuntu-keyring rebuild are NOT installed prior to the apt-cdrom call in the installer. As such, dists/trusty/Release.gpg fails gpg verification.

Manually running dpkg -i on the rebuilt ubuntu-keyring package installs the replacement keys correctly; both in /usr/share/keyrings and into the appropriate gpg envelope - however, exiting the shell, and reinstating the software installation at that point from the installation menu, does not fix the apt-cdrom gpg validation process - it looks as though gpg keys are getting injected from some other udeb, and ubuntu-keyring is not installed prior to the apt-cdrom check.

Unfortunately, the error message displayed, is not reflective of the underlying problem. The problem is that that apt-cdrom cannot verify the gpg signature, therefore doesn't recognise the CDRom as a valid package source. That means that there are no kernels available to install.

I have the git-prompt.sh script setup in my .bashrc file which gives me the useful git information in my prompt. This is great for small repos, but when I cd into a large repo, it can take a 30+ seconds, for the prompt to respond since it needs to review the git repo first.

It is possible to set up my .bashrc so that I can either whitelist my small repos for the git prompt to display, or blacklist my large repos so it doesn't load the git prompt?
Alternatively, I'd be happy with a flag/variable that I have to set to enable the git prompt.

The relevant part of my .bashrc looks like this:

##
# Git prompt options
##
source ~/.git-prompt.sh
GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE=true
GIT_PS1_SHOWSTASHSTATE=true
GIT_PS1_SHOWUNTRACKEDFILES=true
GIT_PS1_SHOWUPSTREAM="auto"

if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then
    PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]$(__git_ps1 " (\[\033[01;33m\]%s\[\033[00m\])")\$ '
else
    PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w$(__git_ps1 " (\[\033[01;33m\]%s\[\033[00m\])")\$ '
fi
unset color_prompt force_color_prompt

I need to configure an Ubuntu server to follow a strict company password policy that specifies the following:

• at least one upper case
• at least one lower case
• at least one digit
• at least one special character

I've had a look around and all I have found is the instructions for specifying the password length; but, I have yet to find something that relates to specifying the content of the password regarding the above points.

Any help would be appreciated.

I'm working on an apache logs analyser, it requires the apache log files to be imported into a directory for processing. I cannot simply point it to the apache logs directory as it imports each file before deleting it. It also has no concept of duplicate records, so I cannot set up a cron to copy /var/log/apache2/* into the folder.

I assume logrotate is the best place to do this, but I don't have a clue where to start to configure it. So my question is:

How can I configure logrotate to SSH rotated apache log files to a remote host automatically?

The alternative is to copy locally and run scp & rm via cron, but a one-step SSH process would be nice.

I'm working on an automated security audit system which analyses custom Ubuntu installations to check for packages affected by security vulnerabilities. Since these machines are not connected to the internet I cannot simple run apt-get, and we need to keep the upgrades as small as possible so only updating packages when they are actually needed.

Part of this process is to monitor the Ubuntu Security Notices (USN) for new reports and extract information. However, I can't find a way to easily access all of the historical USN notices.

There is an RSS feed linked on http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/ but it only returns the most recent 50 reports, which won't work as I'm dealing with older Ubuntu versions and need to check historical reports.

The two options I can see, neither of which are nice, are to scrape the email archives or scrape the website. But I'd rather avoid doing these if possible...

Any ideas?

I have UFW, OpenVPN and Virtualbox installed on my home server. I have a host-only network for my virtual machine guests (vboxnet0) set up with the IP range 10.0.1.0, and another IP range of 10.0.0.0 configured on the other end of the OpenVPN connection.

IP Forwarding is configured on the host, so when UFW is disabled they can talk to each other without any issues. However, I'd like to run UFW as this host will be web-accessible and I'd like some access control.

How can I configure UFW to allow this sort of traffic?

I've tried various combinations of: ufw allow allow in|out on vboxnet0|tun0 with no success.

My UFW rules are:

root@gimli:~# ufw status
Status: active

To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
22                         ALLOW       Anywhere
Anywhere                   ALLOW       10.0.0.0/16
Anywhere on vboxnet0       ALLOW       Anywhere
Anywhere on tun0           ALLOW       Anywhere

Anywhere                   ALLOW OUT   Anywhere on vboxnet0
Anywhere                   ALLOW OUT   Anywhere on tun0

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

This could be a no-brainer, but when I look in ifconfig it lists two different global IPv6 addresses. Is there a reason why I'm getting two assigned? Shouldn't I just get a single address?

valorin@gandalf:~$ ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr e8:9a:8f:6d:6a:aa  
          inet addr:172.10.10.1  Bcast:172.10.10.255  Mask:255.255.255.0

          inet6 addr: 2400:4000:cafe:2014:48c8:f262:ebe8:297b/64 Scope:Global
          inet6 addr: 2400:4000:cafe:2014:ea9a:8fff:fe6d:6aaa/64 Scope:Global

          inet6 addr: fe80::ea9a:8fff:fe6d:6aaa/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:258 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:313 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:78280 (78.2 KB)  TX bytes:46173 (46.1 KB)
          Interrupt:41 Base address:0xe000 

I somehow managed to break auto-mounting for my encrypted home directory.

Every time I login via SSH, I see this:

valorin@joshua:~$ ls -la
total 44
dr-x------ 3 valorin valorin  4096 2012-03-17 17:10 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root    root     4096 2012-03-17 11:45 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 valorin valorin    56 2012-03-08 20:37 Access-Your-Private-Data.desktop -> /usr/share/ecryptfs-utils/ecryptfs-mount-private.desktop
-rw------- 1 valorin valorin   917 2012-03-17 19:24 .bash_history
drwx------ 3 valorin valorin  4096 2012-03-16 17:58 .cache
lrwxrwxrwx 1 valorin valorin    33 2012-03-08 20:37 .ecryptfs -> /home/.ecryptfs/valorin/.ecryptfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root    root    21954 2012-03-08 20:35 .face
lrwxrwxrwx 1 valorin valorin    32 2012-03-08 20:37 .Private -> /home/.ecryptfs/valorin/.Private
lrwxrwxrwx 1 valorin valorin    52 2012-03-08 20:37 README.txt -> /usr/share/ecryptfs-utils/ecryptfs-mount-private.txt
-rw------- 1 root    root      703 2012-03-17 17:10 .viminfo

Any ideas what I've done, and how I can fix it?

UPDATE:

I have set up the SSH key authentication using the method here, which in hindsight is the reason for the non-working encrypted home directory.

So, my new question, how do I get it to automatically prompt for the password after I have logged in with the SSH auth key?

The one feature of Gnone Shell that I would love in Unity is the 'Dynamic Workspaces'. Is there a way to emulate this functionality within Unity?

I know it can be changed via CCSM, but that method is slow and defeats the purpose of dynamic workspaces.

I am setting up multiple-machine backup plan and I was hoping to use a user called 'backup' on each machine as the backup destination.

My problem is, there is already a user called 'backup' on my machine.

What is it for, and can I hijack it for my own purposes?

root@frodo:~# useradd backup
useradd: user 'backup' already exists

I've been having issues installing 11.04 on my new laptop, the solution was to enable any of these boot options:

• acpi=off
• noapic
• nolapic

But, what do these options actually do?

What sort of problems are there in enabling them?
i.e. can they cause hardware problems (like fans not running causing system overheating).

I am running Ubuntu 11.04 desktop with encrypted home directories. I do development work on my computer and I want to have my webroot directory to be within my home directory so it is encrypted with the rest of my home directory. As I am the only use of the machine, I want to configure Apache to point to this directly.

Current I have changed the /var/www folder into a symbolic link to the workspace in my hone dir: /home/valorin/workspace

However, this throws 403 Forbidden errors in apache.

I have added my user into the www-data group, and set the ownership & permissions on the workspace folder:

drwxrwxr-x  2 valorin www-data  4096 2011-04-23 10:02 workspace

But the only way I can get it to work is to change my home dir group to be www-data and set permissions too. I don't really want to do this as it means Apache has access to my home dir and could possibly be used by someone on my network to get into my personal data.

Does anyone know how I can solve this problem?

I am trying to install ZendStudio 8 (Eclipse based) on 11.04 and am kinda stuck at the part were I can get it into the Applications list.

ZendStudio prior to version 8 came with a magic .bin which installed it all no problems, but now it simply comes as a folder all set up to be run as-is. I have copied this folder to /opt/ZendStudio, and I can launch the program using /opt/ZendStudio/ZendStudio but in the Unity Launcher it shows up with a grey box and a big Question Mark as it's icon.

However, I'd like it to be show up in the Applications list so I can search for it and load it like a normal application.

I also want to Pin it to the launcher so it stays there the whole time, and I tried this with running it directly but it didn't work and it didn't load up the application icon.

Any ideas how I can finish the install so it is in my menus etc?

Currently, as far as I am aware, you need to use the CompizConfig Settings Manager application to play with the Unity configuration settings.

While this makes sense, from a technical point of view, it requires the user to know about the settings manager, install it, and then find the Unity options within it. Not very user friendly.

Is there a user friendly configuration application planned that will offer all the configuration options in an easy-to-use for new people fashion?

A lot of torrent search engines have the ability to provide an RSS feed of matches, allowing you to set up torrent programs to download items which are published on the feed. This is useful for watching releases of things.

The problem with doing this through a random search engine for Ubuntu is that you usually get too many torrents as it picks up different custom versions, and other software with the name in the title/description. See: http://www.mininova.org/rss/ubuntu

So I was wondering if there was an RSS feed somewhere that only loads up the official torrent files for releases?

So from the responses, there doesn't appear to be an existing RSS feed that does what I am after.

I am trying to install the Ubuntu One Windows Beta program on Windows XP, but I keep getting the following error:

"This installation package cannot be installed by the Windows Installer service. You must install a Windows service pack that contains a newer version of the Windows Installer service."

I have XP SP3 installed, and fully updated.

Any ideas?

I am trying to use the Remote Desktop Viewer on my laptop to connect to my desktop, which I have configured with Remote Desktop preferences. But it fails to update the screen shot image, making it useless.

What can I do to speed it up and actually have usable Remote Desktop?

Any applications I can install on either/both sides to do it?

What is the best way to get a critical bug noticed by the right people, so it can be fixed ASAP?

There is a bug with GVFS which is preventing developers, like myself, from using IDE's in 10.10. We need to downgrade to 10.04 to use our IDE software. I'd call it a critical bug.

We've reported it in these bug reports:

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-vfs/+bug/658069
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/geany/+bug/643253

But, so far there has been absolutely no official response that I can see. How do I get it seen quickly and fixed?

I understand patience is always a good idea, but is there anything else that can be done to these bug reports to raise attention to them?

I am happy to wait, but if there is something we can do to speed up the process, it would be good to know it :)

One of the reasons we use Windows in the office at work is Active Directory. It makes it a piece of cake to bring up a new workstation and have a new or existing user login and do their work. Once all the Applications are installed, a user can login on any workstation and have all their documents and settings available to them.

Is there any way of doing this on Ubuntu?

Sure, there are syncing programs like Ubuntu One that sync the files (and hopefully eventually settings), but as far as I am aware it still requires each workstation the user wishes to log onto to already have their user account set. Also, any time a user changes their password it needs to be changed on each machine the user logs into.

It would also be useful if this applied to servers as well, so a user can SSH into a server and have the same files as on their desktop in their home directory.

Does this sort of ability existing in Ubuntu currently?

I have my hard drive partitioned with two partitions, so I can easily re-install Ubuntu and try out different versions without losing my home directory data. It is setup like this:

20GB  -> /     (root)
180GB -> /home 

I do a lot of development work, so I have my /var/www folder symlinking to /home/valorin/workspace.

But I want to do this with my MySQL data files as well, as I am getting annoyed that each time I reinstall my machine I need to do a full SQLdump and then restore all the DB's before I can do more work.

What is the best way to do this without breaking MySQL?