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Remmina, the last remote desktop client you’ll ever need

2010-08-20 22:43 UTC | 2 comments

I’ve been searching for a good remote desktop client for a long time. My requirements are simple. It must:

  1. save passwords
  2. manage connections via the GUI
  3. support VNC and RDP
  4. work with our IP KVM

This last requirement is the kicker. When I change hosts on our Adderview IP KVM, it draws one frame at 0×0 resolution, and then changes to the resolution of the new host. This has crashed every VNC client I’ve tried except xvnc4viewer. Which of course, doesn’t save passwords or have a GUI (the raw X menu when you press F8 does not count).

I have tried KRDC, Vinagre, xtightvncviewer, and a number of simpler command-line VNC clients. They all seem to be designed to support the “my Mom needs tech support” problem, not the “I manage remote servers” problem. KRDC won’t even login to my KVM; it just hangs after authentication. I suppose that’s better than crashing, but it is still a show stopping bug for me.

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Upgrading from Kubuntu 9.10 to 10.04

2010-08-04 20:39 UTC | No comments

Last week I upgraded from Kubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” to 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”. The word “upgrade” here is misleading, since I chose to reformat to take advantage of filesystem changes. However, I imported much of my customisations from backup. Here are my notes on Lucid, from the perspective of a long-time Kubuntu user.

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Installing Sun Java on Ubuntu Lucid

2010-06-10 22:41 UTC | 5 comments

As of Ubuntu Lucid, the Sun Java JRE has been replaced with OpenJDK. Unfortunately, OpenJDK still isn’t a complete drop-in replacement for Sun Java. For instance, the Facebook “Upload Photos” applet doesn’t work correctly; the photos don’t have thumbnails and can’t be rotated before upload. The solution is to install the Sun Java JRE.

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AC3 audio with pulseaudio in Ubuntu Lucid

2010-05-09 12:58 UTC | 2 comments

Since upgrading my media PC to Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”, pulseaudio can’t play files with AC3 audio. Unfortunately this includes all of my ripped DVDs, which were encoded with AC3 pass-through audio. If I play such a file in Miro, the video hangs after a few seconds. If I play it in Totem, the same happens but a pop-up is also displayed: “pa_stream_writable_size() failed: Connection terminated”.

I fixed it by downgrading Pulseaudio to the karmic version. Here is how.

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iptables firewall templates

2010-03-29 18:39 UTC | No comments

I use iptables firewalls on every server I administer, including all of our core routers (which run Linux too). There are lots of tools to easily configure a firewall. For simple tasks, Ubuntu now installs ufw by default, which has both command-line and GUI tools. For servers, consider Webmin.

If you want to do something more complicated, or prefer editing iptables rules yourself, you’ll have to do it by hand. When I first started doing this I found a template online and edited it to suit my need. Over time I’ve learned a lot more about iptables, and my templates have evolved.

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VLANs, bridges, and virtual machines

2010-02-20 12:44 UTC | No comments

We run several virtual machine host servers on a network with multiple VLANs. The virtual machines are members of different VLANs, but are not themselves aware of the VLAN. This is how we did it.

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virt-manager now in repo

2009-12-08 17:23 UTC | 1 comment

The latest virt-manager package in Ubuntu karmic is broken. We use virt-manager to manage KVM/QEMU virtual machines over an ssh tunnel. This worked fine in hardy and jaunty. But it is partially broken in karmic.

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Securing laptops with ecryptfs, cryptsetup, and tmpfs

2009-11-14 00:17 UTC | 6 comments

One of the awesome features of the last several Ubuntu releases is support for ecryptfs, an encrypted filesystem. At Talia we depend heavily on GPG, OTR, SSH keys and other forms of encryption and secure identification. Loss of those keys and other confidential data to laptop theft, corporate espionage, or the US Customs Service is a big concern for us. This week I secured my laptop, as a prototype of our new corporate laptop setup. Here is how I did it.

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Enabling the Sleep button on a Dell laptop in Kubuntu Karmic

2009-11-10 19:35 UTC | 7 comments

Update 2010-05-02: See this comment.

I read an article in the Dec 2009 issue of Linux Magazine, one of several Linux-focused magazines we get at the office. I’d like to link directly to it, but it the magazine’s own website doesn’t offer the article or even a reliable permanent link to the issue number. Hint: hey guys, sort that out.

The article was about configuring ACPI hotkeys to support your specific laptop. IE, the buttons for “sleep”, “brightness up”, etc. For most laptops this already works on Ubuntu. On my Dell Vostro 1500, every button except for “sleep” worked right after install. This is Linux, so there is always some way to fix that.

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Poor VirtualBox guest performance with Intel VT-X on Ubuntu 9.10

2009-11-04 21:36 UTC | 1 comment

Since upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 I’ve noticed poor performance of VirtualBox guests with Intel VT-X hardware virtualisation enabled. This has been noted in a few places, but I didn’t enable VT-x until recently so I can’t be sure that the problem began with Karmic. I can be sure that it is happening to me now.

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