Our home computer has been Ubuntu linux for a few years now. My wife does just fine on it doing all that she does and my daughter has no issues with barbie.com or mylittlepony.com flash games either. The only thing that my wife needs from Windows is an app called Ding! from Southwest Airlines. It’s a little app that tells you about deals from the airline. I had it running in Wine on Edgy and then upgraded to Gusty without error. I’m starting fresh with Hardy on her laptop and wanted to remember how I set it up. After digging around to remind myself here’s how I did it:

Follow these excellent steps from Drew Withers: http://drewwithers.com/2008/03/southwest-ding-via-wine-and-ies4linux.html (Thanks Drew!)

The registration window acted funny and kept refreshing and losing the text field data. Here’s how to fix that:
Quit Ding and let’s create a special startup script to get things working:

#!/bin/bash
export WINEPREFIX="/home/YOUR USERNAME/.ies4linux/ie6"
wine ~/.ies4linux/ie6/drive_c/Program\ Files/Southwest\ Airlines/Ding/Ding.exe


If you use that startup script to call Ding! everything runs great.

Get yer Linux on… download the latest Ubuntu release fresh out today. Get it here. Get it now!

nail is very cool. Think mailx meets SMTP auth w/ SSL.

We are making the jump to Google Apps for your Domain and I needed a way for Nagios to send alerts out our Google Apps account. Here’s how I got nail speaking to my Google Apps Account, but it will work just fine with your plain ol’ GMail account as well:

sudo aptitude install nail ca-certificates

Then add the following to the ~/.mailrc of the user that needs it (it my case nagios)

set smtp-use-starttls
set pop-use-starttls
set smtp-auth=login
set smtp=smtp.gmail.com:587
set pop=pop.gmail.com:996
set from=USER@DOMAIN
set smtp-auth-user=USER@DOMAIN
set smtp-auth-password=PASSWORD


and now for a test to run as that user:

nail -s 'Testing123' bobsyouruncle@aol.com ...


Mormons for Open Source. Phe. nom. i. nal.

I’ve been running knoppmyth for years now with no real issues. It’s been stable and great, but I was always worried that I’d break something by installing new packages above and beyond what’s already there. With the recent demise of zap2it’s US TV feed I needed to upgrade myth to use SchedulesDirect. I took the opportunity to upgrade the hardware (new mobo and more RAM) and reinstall MythTV. I’m a long time Ubuntu user and advcate (go AZ LoCo) so I’ve been wanting to try Mythbuntu’s sweet meta-packages.

I was not disappointed! I used a base Gutsy server install to start. It was the slickest install of mythtv I’ve seen. The config was easy and I was back onlne and watching TV in no time - which is important for the wife and kid factor.

A big thanks to the Mythbuntu folks and all their hard work.

UPDATE: SchedulesDirect has have hit their goal and lowered the membership fee to $20/year!

http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/12/22/do-you-blog-about-ubuntu/

Good point. I blog about ubuntu, do you?

I recently decided to upgrade my IPCop box and in the process switch my home/office VPN from IPSec to OpenVPN.

First we install, Zerina’s OpenVPN addon to IPCop. Basically copy the zip to the IPCop box, unzip and run the install file. Actually follow this guy’s great tutorial up to step 7. he’s got it all covered.

Now that you have the OpenVPN server all setup and the OpenVPN client package (zip) what’s next? In order for this to work with Fiesty’s network-manager-openpvn package you first have to follow this guy’s great blog post about splitting the .p12 file up. (the .p12 file is found inside the client package zip file)

Ok - now you have a pem, crt and key file… let get it working with the VPN section of network manager. Ensure you have the network-manager-openvpn plugin installed sudo apt-get install network-manager-openvpn. Now click on the NM applet -> VPN Connections -> Configure VPN. Create a new OpenVPN connection.

Under the Required tab:
Gateway address: (your gw address)
Leave port as is
Connection Type: X.509 Certificate
CA File: (your pem file)
Certificate: (your crt file)
Key: (your key file)

Under the Optional tab:
I prefer to have “Only use VPN connection for these addresses”, but it’s up to you.
Ensure “use LZO compression” is checked
Use Cipher: BF-CBC

And you’re done!

Now when you want to connect to your VPN you can just click on the NM applet -> VPN Connections -> (Your VPN name) and it’ll start right up.

There is one annoying bug that I hope will be fixed soon: When you start your VPN it clears your /etc/resolv.conf file. I just have to manually fix it each time. See Lanuchpad bug here.

(I’m pretty sure that these directions will also work for older versions of ubuntu.)

You need to install a program on your Treo 650 that will let it become a USB modem like:
Treo USBModem or PdaNet
If anyone knows of any free / open source software for the palm that will do the same thing let me know!

/etc/chatscripts/USBModem:

TIMEOUT 5
ABORT '\nBUSY\r'
ABORT '\nERROR\r'
ABORT '\nNO ANSWER\r'
ABORT '\nNO CARRIER\r'
ABORT '\nNO DIALTONE\r'
ABORT '\nRINGING\r\n\rRINGING\r'
'' \rATZ
TIMEOUT 12
OK ATD#777
TIMEOUT 22
CONNECT ""


/etc/ppp/peers/USBDialup:

noauth
connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/USBDialup"
defaultroute
usepeerdns
/dev/ttyACM0 115200
local
novj


You may notice that when you turn on the usbmodem software on the Treo and plug it in you may see something like this in dmesg:

[110049.340000] usb 3-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 5
[110049.508000] usb 3-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[110049.512000] cdc_acm 3-1:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device


That’s where you find out what tty port the USB modem will be communicating on: /dev/ttyACM0. And that’s the port used in /etc/ppp/peers/USBDialup.

The rest is easy…

pon USBDialup

And you’re gold! You can then tail -f /var/log/messages to ensure it’s connecting alright.

Ubuntu’s super-awesome new version is out. Help the world and grab the torrent here.

One of *the* coolest things in the ever colliding worlds of Asterisk and Ruby: Adhearsion