February 2007 archive

Don’t remove the ‘super’ from sudo, like I did in Ubuntu

There’s a fine line between empowerment and impotence in Unix. Is that why it sounds like eunuchs?

I accidentally revoked my power to run the sudo command. Yeah, it was a dumb thing to do. With godlike power comes great responsibility, and there I was like some half-wit sticking a fork in an electrical outlet. I realize the need to be careful as root in Unix systems, and in the case of Ubuntu when running sudo, but still: oops.

Maybe I was lured to incaution by the rapid typing of commands while trying to get something working, in this case: TrueCrypt. I had set the SUID bit on it with sudo chmod u+s /usr/bin/truecrypt so that a regular user could run the program, but I was concerned about security issues.

I find that in …

Check out the Rambling Traveler!

Taking a break from all the heavy GNU/Linux and Samba network drive stuff of the past couple of posts, I’d like to point you to a non-technology site. It *is* free culture related, though, because the proprietor offers all of her work under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Check out Rambling Traveler. It’s my big sister’s travel blog. (Ok, so maybe I had some influence in the licensing idea. I’ll say that she was very receptive to the idea though.)

Stacy has a lot of great pictures and stories from her travels. You’ll find a link there to her Flickr page where she has some spectacular shots from Ireland, the Mediterranean, and other places, with many more to come. There are also some slideshows on YouTube. The picture from this …

HOWTO: Samba and the NSLU2: Remote Drives in GNU/Linux

Yesterday’s post seemed a bit garbled to me. I wanted to work on a hastier posting style, but then see what happens? I make even less sense than usual. I’d like to set down this latest migration adventure for posterity. I’d be happy if it helps even one person in the future. This post is mostly for my own memory and those random Internet searchers looking for similar information. Expect more hasty incoherence to follow. Hasty and *extended* incoherence. Read on at your own risk. You’ve been warned.

I’ve talked about how backing data up is an obsessively crucial part of my computer usage, and mentioned that I picked up the awesome Linksys Network Storage Link for my online backups. I’ve …

Doing the Samba with the Slug

This post cost me $20.

But only because I wanted to write it after donating to the NSLU2-Linux project so I could put my money where my keyboard is. It’s a token amount for the great work they’re doing and all the great resources they provide for free. But let’s back up for a moment…

I’ve written about my trouble getting network drives to work in GNU/Linux, and now I’m happy to report I’ve made some progress in that area. (I’m not sure how best to refer to this topic–in the Windows world we usually talk about “mapping a network drive”, but I suspect if it’s more common in Unix to refer to “mounting a remote drive.”)

As mentioned, I have this nifty little Linksys Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 …

Inertia prevents Bruce Schneier from moving to GNU/Linux

When you don’t see new posts here, it probably means one of three things:

I’m busy with other things in my life, such as:

Family
Work

I’ve lost interest in the blog.
I’m actually doing the free software thing! I’m learning about free software or getting things set up in support of the move.

While #1 is almost always true, the past week has also seen some of #3, and I’ve been enjoying it. And as always, I’m trying to think about how to write about it. I do want to write about it, hopefully in a way that is useful and possibly entertaining for others. But it takes so much time. So maybe I should learn to just post some hasty blurbs here.

And I’m still wondering how much technical detail to go in to. …