Alan's questions

I just installed Ubuntu Server 20.04.2 LTS and have a situation where it 'hangs' after booting up.

It gets to (what I guess is) the end of the boot process, and hangs on a line saying:

cloud-init [1781]: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS,182 - cc_final_message.py[WARNING]: Used fallback datasource

The date and time changes with each boot - not sure if the '182' is part of the timestamp - I think it is, since it also changes each time.

Initially, I could press 'Enter' and it would go to login, but now it is just hanging there, and never gets to login.

I can access the server over SSH no problem, and I cannot see anything that is not working once I am in.

I found these from a while back:

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2446855 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64486060/cloud-init-not-executing-vra-cloud-config-script

which imply that it is not an issue, but pressing Enter does not get me to the login prompt now which makes me uneasy.

I'm looking for help / suggestions on how to diagnose the issue, and fix it.

Thanks,

Alan.

Looking at the manual for e2fsck, there are two options that appear very similar:

e2fsck -y (which answers 'yes' to any question answered)

e2fsck -p (which does not ask any questions, and just goes ahead and does whatever it thinks best)

I found this older thread which seems to confirm the above:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/132803/what-is-the-difference-between-fsck-options-y-and-p?newreg=1a2c41a3eb4b4086a5d5fb88bc74d813

Whilst I can see the difference, I don't understand the practical impact it might have.

Can someone give me an example of where an Ubuntu system (assume Ubuntu 20.04 LTS if it makes a difference) would do something different if using the -y versus -p options?

The reason for asking is that I have a system that I am trying to bring up a disk on (to copy data off) and I am trying to run:

fsck -pvcf /dev/id

The system is telling me that it cannot run automatically, and needs to be run 'manually' without the -p option. The problem is that this generated thousands of confirmations (I gave up holding down the 'enter' key and did a Ctrl-C), so I figured I would see if:

e2fsck -yvcf /dev/id

would work, but then wondered what the difference might be, and would there be a downside.

For the avoidance of doubt, I have a ddrescue 'image' of the drive already (I told it to ignore errors and do the best it can), so no real risk of making things any worse - I am mainly just playing around to learn and see what I can achieve with fsck at this point.

Thanks,

Alan.

This is just me wanting to understand 'sudo' better.

I am logged in to my Ubuntu 18.04LTS machine as 'alan' which is a normal user, and is a member of the 'sudo' group:

$ groups
alan adm cdrom sudo dip plugdev lpadmin sambashare

First I did this (I have correctly entered my password):

sudo touch /lost+found/test.file

I get these:

$ ls /lost+found/
ls: cannot open directory '/lost+found/': Permission denied

and

$ sudo ls /lost+found/
test.file

That is completely what I would expect. However, I don't understand why I get this:

$ sudo -u alan ls /lost+found/
ls: cannot open directory '/lost+found/': Permission denied

Why can't I run an 'admin' command, as myself, if I am a member of the sudo group, and I have entered my password?

Clearly I don't understand how 'sudo', or more specifically, 'sudo -u' works :-)

I have a machine running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS where I cannot seem to get SSH Server working.

I installed SSHServer using:

sudo apt install openssh-server

but I am getting the following when I try to start and / or check the status:

sudo systemctl start sshd

Failed to start sshd.service: Unit sshd.service not found.

.

sudo systemctl status sshd

Unit sshd.service could not be found.

I figured I must have done something wrong (typo?) when I installed, so I tried to install again thus:

sudo apt install openssh-server

to which I get:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
openssh-server is already the newest version (1:7.6p1-4ubuntu0.3).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

So, it appears it is installed, but for some reason Ubuntu cannot find it.

I am not sure where to go from here, so any suggestions would be welcome.

Thanks,

Alan.

I am using this on a customer's directory to rename files with first letter of each word being capitalised as per their request:

rename 's/\b(\w)/\u$1/g' *

That works fine, but it also capitalises the first letter of the extension, so I use this to fix that:

rename 's/\.Txt$/.txt/' *.Txt

which works okay if most of the files in a folder are the same extension (generally true),but is a pain if they are very mixed.

To get around that issue, I created a small script that looks like this (don't laugh!):

#!/bin/bash
rename 's/\.Txt$/.txt/' *.Txt
rename 's/\.Doc$/.doc/' *.Doc
rename 's/\.Docx$/.docx/' *.Docx
...
rename 's/\.Xlsx$/.xlsx/' *.Xlsx

I ignore the 'Can't rename *.Txt *.txt: No such file or directory' errors, and if I find an extension that is missing, I just add that line to my script.

I don't think this will matter, but the files are on a Windows server fileshare, but I am accessing it using Ubuntu 16.04LTS. If it does matter, then I could copy them to my local drive first, run a command in Ubuntu, then move the files back if required.

Is there any way to amend the first rename command to ignore the extensions and leave them as lowercase? Can I run the new command in a higher level directory, and have it recurse through all the sub-directories?

I am trying to create a 'shortcut' that I can pin to my launcher in Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS that will launch an RDesktop session.

It works fine from the command line thus:

rdesktop -u UserName -d Domain -g 1024x720 -a 16 ServerName

I found something close in Terminal command script launcher, but it does not quite work.

I made the desktop file that contains this (made it executable etc as per the link above):

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=RDP-ServerName
Comment=Open an RDP session to ServerName
Exec=rdesktop -u UserName -d Domain -g 1024x720 -a 16 ServerName
Terminal=true
Type=Application
Categories=Utility;Application;

I figured if I could get it to work from the desktop, then I could somehow pin it to the launcher afterwards?

However, when I run it from the desktop, nothing seems to happen. I tried choosing the 'terminal' option, and also the 'run' option, but neither seems to work.

We have an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS machines that is giving errors when I try to run updates.

Specifically, I am getting a load of errors like this:

W: Failed to fetch http://packages.medibuntu.org/dists/precise/non-free/i18n/Translation-en  Something wicked happened resolving 'packages.medibuntu.org:http' (-5 - No address associated with hostname)

I tried to ping packages.medibuntu.org, and it returns:

ping: unknown host packages.medibuntu.org

It therefore seems to me that sometime in the past, packages have been installed from there, but it has 'gone away'.

Questions:

Is that diagnosis correct?

If so, how do I identify and 'fix' those packages? Do I have to carefully go through the whole output from 'apt-get upgrade' and uninstall each one? Hope not, but if that's what's required, then okay.