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

2010-08-20 22:43 +00:00 | 16 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 0x0 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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Saving passwords for multiple Skype accounts

2010-08-12 21:20 +00:00 | 11 comments

I have two Skype accounts; one for work, and one for personal use. Unfortunately, the Skype client for Linux is somewhat limited. It can store two usernames, but it saves only the last password entered. Tonight, I hacked up a solution.

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Upgrading from Kubuntu 9.10 to 10.04

2010-08-04 20:39 +00:00 | 1 comment

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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Fixing BackupPC’s “Download Zip archive” restore option in Ubuntu Lucid

2010-07-21 19:39 +00:00 | 10 comments

Update 2012-02-28: Consider upgrading to BackupPC 3.2.0 to resolve this.

We recently upgraded our BackupPC servers to BackupPC 3.1.0 on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. It’s working almost perfectly. However, the “Download ZIP archive” restore option no longer works. This is due to a bug in recent version of the Archive::Zip Perl module which generates corrupt ZIP archives.

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Firefox extension: New MitM Me

2010-07-16 19:45 +00:00 | 2 comments

I’m an engineer. I understand SSL, public-key encryption, man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, and certificate chains-of-trust. I look carefully at the URL bar before entering login or personal data, I don’t allow javascript to change the status bar, and I mouse over a URL and read it before I click. I’m paranoid as all hell, and I do not fall for stupid fraud schemes.

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Installing Sun Java on Ubuntu Lucid

2010-06-10 22:41 +00:00 | 8 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 +00:00 | 2 comments

Update 2010-10-14 – This problem has been resolved since pulseaudio 1:0.9.22~0.9.21+stable-queue-32-g8478-0ubuntu14. You can now play AC3 audio with the Lucid packages.

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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Moving an existing BackupPC partition to LVM

2010-05-06 20:39 +00:00 | 6 comments

I recently discussed how to use LVM to make a live copy of a BackupPC pool. That guide covers how to set up LVM on a new server with no data. But what if you already have a working BackupPC install, and you want to move your existing pool to LVM?

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The new mouse

2010-05-04 18:57 +00:00 | 2 comments

I’ve just bought a Logitech M205 wireless notebook mouse. Like my older MX650, this mouse uses the 27 MHz spectrum. The wheel doesn’t tilt, but it has a power switch and you can stow the receiver on the underside of the mouse. So far I’m very happy with it as a travel mouse. I’ll keep the MX650 for my regular work desk.

It seems Logitech is going entirely to 2.4 GHz for their mice. This is very disappointing, as the spectrum is so crowded. I’d love to switch, but the interference problems with wifi are horrible. The tiny “unifying receiver” used by their new devices is pretty slick too, but I doubt you could put an effective 27 MHz antenna in such a small dongle. Does anyone make a modern mouse which doesn’t use 2.4 GHz or bluetooth?

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Using LVM to make a live copy of a BackupPC pool

2010-04-23 20:32 +00:00 | 4 comments

“How do I backup my BackupPC pool” is perhaps the most common topic of discussion on the backuppc-users mailing list. BackupPC stores all files in a common compressed pool (cpool, although I’ll use simply “pool” for this discussion), and maintains trees of hardlinks into the pool for each backup host. Therefore BackupPC requires a Linux/Unix filesystem. If you want to back up the BackupPC server itself, you must duplicate the pool, and the hardlinks to it.

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