Day 29
Crikey. Has it nearly been 30 days already? How time flies when you're having fun.
I did promise to myself that when this project started, I would approach it with a total newbie attitude, i.e. no futzing around with coding custom scripts, recompiling of kernels, rummaging around in the trunk of the OS as root, or things of that nature. However, in order to accomplish actual workplace productivity, I've had to crack under the strain ever so slightly.
The Problem: Samba. There is something wrong with my Samba install. It keeps eating part of the smb.conf file every few times Samba is restarted. Since the part that gets eaten specifies workgroup and computer name information as well as user access, this sort of defeats the purpose of "making my laptop look like it used to to everyone on the network" that I was aiming for. I dug around a bit on a few forums and the Samba/Ubuntu bug reports, and came up dry.
The Hack: A simple cat-grep script that runs as root, checking the smb.conf for the important bits and replacing them from a backup smb.conf if they're not there. It's cronned to run every five minutes, although ideally this should really be integrated into the Samba startup script for efficiency.
The Problem: The network manager. Kubuntu's network manager is very neat and pretty - and doesn't work. Well, it works most of the time, but rather erratically. And it might tell you it's working when it's not, and vice versa. It works just fine if you're a desk jockey who boots up their machine in the morning and never unplugs the network cable, but if you're anything like me you're chopping and changing between the wired network and different wireless access points all day. I need a quick, reliable way to switch networks, the way (and it pains me to say this) the WinXP network manager does.
The Hack: I tried a couple alternative graphical network managers for KDE. None of them really satisfied. Going into the control panel -> network -> password-protected admin screen -> change network settings is just too much PT. So I wrote a couple shell scripts to take all the network interfaces down, manually set the gateway and DNS servers, and re-dhcp the one I want up. It's not elegant, but it does the trick, and some hotlinks from the panel menu make it a one-click affair.
The Problem: Backups. See last post.
The Hack: See last post.
On the plus side of things, I made the pleasant discovery that (almost) all of the old electrical simulation software packages I wrote donkey's years ago in Visual Basic run perfectly with Wine. I was dreading having to rewrite them - they're sorely overdue for that anyway, but at least now I can do it at my leisure knowing I can still use the old software if we need it for anything mission critical.
Back to the grindstone... more soon.
I did promise to myself that when this project started, I would approach it with a total newbie attitude, i.e. no futzing around with coding custom scripts, recompiling of kernels, rummaging around in the trunk of the OS as root, or things of that nature. However, in order to accomplish actual workplace productivity, I've had to crack under the strain ever so slightly.
The Problem: Samba. There is something wrong with my Samba install. It keeps eating part of the smb.conf file every few times Samba is restarted. Since the part that gets eaten specifies workgroup and computer name information as well as user access, this sort of defeats the purpose of "making my laptop look like it used to to everyone on the network" that I was aiming for. I dug around a bit on a few forums and the Samba/Ubuntu bug reports, and came up dry.
The Hack: A simple cat-grep script that runs as root, checking the smb.conf for the important bits and replacing them from a backup smb.conf if they're not there. It's cronned to run every five minutes, although ideally this should really be integrated into the Samba startup script for efficiency.
The Problem: The network manager. Kubuntu's network manager is very neat and pretty - and doesn't work. Well, it works most of the time, but rather erratically. And it might tell you it's working when it's not, and vice versa. It works just fine if you're a desk jockey who boots up their machine in the morning and never unplugs the network cable, but if you're anything like me you're chopping and changing between the wired network and different wireless access points all day. I need a quick, reliable way to switch networks, the way (and it pains me to say this) the WinXP network manager does.
The Hack: I tried a couple alternative graphical network managers for KDE. None of them really satisfied. Going into the control panel -> network -> password-protected admin screen -> change network settings is just too much PT. So I wrote a couple shell scripts to take all the network interfaces down, manually set the gateway and DNS servers, and re-dhcp the one I want up. It's not elegant, but it does the trick, and some hotlinks from the panel menu make it a one-click affair.
The Problem: Backups. See last post.
The Hack: See last post.
On the plus side of things, I made the pleasant discovery that (almost) all of the old electrical simulation software packages I wrote donkey's years ago in Visual Basic run perfectly with Wine. I was dreading having to rewrite them - they're sorely overdue for that anyway, but at least now I can do it at my leisure knowing I can still use the old software if we need it for anything mission critical.
Back to the grindstone... more soon.
posted by kittychunk at
11:06 PM
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