Notes about open source software, computers, other stuff.

Tag: Linux (Page 2 of 7)

Fixing Emacs tramp mode when using zsh

Today I finally took some time to fix a long-standing problem: when trying to edit a file on a remote host using Emacs tramp mode, long time-outs occurred when typing the remote file name (after hitting C-x C-f). These time-outs were so long and occurred after each key press that tramp was effectively useless.

After some digging (e.g. excluding helm as the problem source) I found this entry in the Emacs Wiki which basically told my that using zsh (the Z shell) on the remote host could be the culprit. Indeed, after adding

[[ $TERM == "dumb" ]] && unsetopt zle && PS1='$ ' && return

at the top of my ~/.zshrc file solved the problem instantly. What this line does is simply replacing the shell prompt with a very simple one (a $ followed by a space) if the terminal is of the dumb type (which is the case for tramp).

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Installing parted during Ubuntu installation

When installing Ubuntu (I guess a regular Debian installation won’t be any different), I sometimes would like to manually create or change partitions (by jumping to another terminal, e.g. using Alt-F2) before doing the actual install. My preferred tool for that is parted, however, on regular Ubuntu installation images (at least the server variety), parted isn’t available from the console by default.

Today I noticed that (at least on today’s daily image of Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial), a udeb file for parted is available. This is how you install it:

udpkg -i /cdrom/pool/main/p/parted/parted-udeb_3.2-15_amd64.udeb

after which you can use parted to your heart’s content.

For more information on udebs see the Debian Installer Internals documentation.

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Setting the console font when using an nVidia card

Even though I do most of the work I do on my workstation in a graphical desktop environment, I sometimes want or need to switch to one of the virtual terminals (consoles), for example when trying to fix a connection problem or hanging desktop environment.

Whenever I had to do this I was always bothered by the fact that the font was so large (or, the other way around, the resolution so low). What made my annoyance worse was that I knew from my early Linux days So, instead of being annoyed I decided to fix this. Thanks to the help of mchid on unix.stackexchange.com I solved in a matter of minutes. The tricky part for me was to realise I am using an nVidia graphics card, which means things are just a little bit different than normally.

Just in case StackExchange ever goes down or this answer gets lost I will reproduce it below.

For newer Debian & Ubuntu distros using nvidia, I had to do the following: First, edit /etc/default/grub. Change the following line:

#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480

to this:

GRUB_GFXMODE=1920x1200
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep

replacing 1280×800 with the desired resolution.

Then:

echo "echo FRAMEBUFFER=y" | sudo tee /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/splash
sudo update-initramfs -u
sudo update-grub

To simply change the font size, you can do so using the following command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

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Converting a PDF file to a PNG file

Although ideally I try to create and use PDF files whenever I create something that is to be printed or even used on screen. It’s a universal, well defined open format. The added advantage is that is works well with vector graphics, something you really want for high quality material. However, sometimes external circumstances force you to deviate from your preferences. Yesterday I needed to import a PDF image into a LibreOffice Impress presentation. Unfortunately Impress can’t import PDF images. So I decided to convert my PDF image to a PNG file. My first idea was to use the convert utility:

convert file.pdf file.png

However, the default resolution was too low (and can be corrected using the -r option), but more importantly, I had some colour problems that I didn’t know how to correct.

I quickly looked around on the web and found this answer on superuser.com that pointed me to the pdftoppm tool. That worked brilliantly:

pdftoppm -r 1200 -png file.pdf > file.png

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Getting the version of a remote SVN repository via SSH

A quick note to self: I wanted to find out what Subversion version was run on R-forge, which I access via SSH. This is how to do it:

$ ssh username@svn.r-forge.r-project.org svnserve --version
svnserve, version 1.6.17 (r1128011)
   compiled Nov 20 2011, 01:10:33

Copyright (C) 2000-2009 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.apache.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).

The following repository back-end (FS) modules are available:

* fs_base : Module for working with a Berkeley DB repository.
* fs_fs : Module for working with a plain file (FSFS) repository.

Cyrus SASL authentication is available.

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Using rsync to backup a ZFS file system to a remote Synology Diskstation

Some time ago I moved from using LVM to using ZFS on my home server. This meant I also had to change the backup script I used to make backups on a remote Synology Diskstation. Below is the updated script. I also updated it such that it now needs a single command line argument: the hostname of the Diskstation to backup to (because I now have two Diskstations at different locations). If you want to run this script from cron you should set up key-based SSH login (see also here and here).

#!/bin/bash
#
# This script makes a backup of my home dirs to a Synology DiskStation at
# another location. I use ZFS for my /home, so I make a snapshot first and
# backup from there.
#
# This script requires that the first command line argument is the
# host name of the remote backup server (the Synology NAS). It also
# assumes that the location of the backups is the same on each
# remote backup server.
#
# Time-stamp: <2014-10-27 11:35:39 (L.C. Karssen)>
# This script it licensed under the GNU GPLv3.
 
set -u
 
if [ ${#} -lt 1 ]; then
    echo -n "ERROR: Please specify a host name as first command" 1>&2
    echo " line option" 1>&2
    exit -1
fi
 
###############################
# Some settings
###############################
# Options for the remote (Synology) backup destination
DESTHOST=$1
DESTUSER=root
DESTPATH=/volume1/Backups/
DEST=${DESTUSER}@${DESTHOST}:${DESTPATH}
 
# Options for the client (the data to be backed up)
# ZFS options
ZFS_POOL=storage
ZFS_DATASET=home
ZFS_SNAPSHOT=rsync_snapshot
SNAPDIR="/home/.zfs/snapshot/$ZFS_SNAPSHOT"
 
# Backup source path. Don't forget to have trailing / otherwise
# rsync's --delete option won't work
SRC=${SNAPDIR}/
 
# rsync options
OPTIONS="--delete -azvhHSP --numeric-ids --stats"
OPTIONS="$OPTIONS --timeout=60 --delete-excluded"
OPTIONS="$OPTIONS --skip-compress=gz/jpg/mp[34]/7z/bz2/ace/avi/deb/gpg/iso/jpeg/lz/lzma/lzo/mov/ogg/png/rar/CR2/JPG/MOV"
EXCLUSIONS="--exclude lost+found --exclude .thumbnails --exclude .gvfs"
EXCLUSIONS="$EXCLUSIONS --exclude .cache --exclude Cache"
EXCLUSIONS="$EXCLUSIONS --exclude .local/share/Trash"
EXCLUSIONS="$EXCLUSIONS --exclude home/lennart/tmp/Downloads/*.iso"
EXCLUSIONS="$EXCLUSIONS --exclude home/lennart/.recycle"
EXCLUSIONS="$EXCLUSIONS --exclude _dev_dvb_adapter0_Philips_TDA10023_DVB*"
 
 
 
###############################
# The real work
###############################
 
# Create the ZFS snapshot
if [ -d $SNAPDIR ]; then
    # If the directory exists, another backup process may be running
    echo "Directory $SNAPDIR already exists! Is another backup still running?"
    exit -1
else
    # Let's make snapshots
    zfs snapshot $ZFS_POOL/$ZFS_DATASET@$ZFS_SNAPSHOT
fi
 
 
# Do the actual backup
rsync -e 'ssh' $OPTIONS $EXCLUSIONS $SRC $DEST
 
# Remove the ZFS snapshot
if [ -d $SNAPDIR ]; then
    zfs destroy $ZFS_POOL/$ZFS_DATASET@$ZFS_SNAPSHOT
else
    echo "$SNAPDIR does not exist!" 1>&2
    exit 2
fi
 
exit 0

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Multiple accounts on an SSH server: managing key files

I’ve got several domains hosted at the same hosting company, and the company provides SSH access for each of them with a different user name, but with the same SSH server address. As I’m using key-based login to the server (see also my post here) I ran into the following problem: How do I set up my SSH config file such that it knows which key to use for which user name?

It turns out that the solution is easy (thanks Kelvin!): if you use the %r variable in the ~/.ssh/config file it contains the user name which you used when logging in. Similarly, the %h contains the host name you used on the command line. So all I needed to do was to create entries like this:

Host ssh.myhoster.com
     IdentityFile ~/.ssh/hosting-%r.key

and make sure that the corresponding key files are named hosting-domain1.key, hosting-domain2.key, etc. and then log in using a command like ssh domain1@ssh.myhoster.com.

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SSH with several keys: fix “Too many authentication failures” error

Yesterday I created an SSH key for a new machine. Today I try to log in to a different machine, one that actually doesn’t use keys, and I got the error mentioned in the title. It turns out SSH offers all available keys by default, so I ran out of login attempts before I noticed it.

The solution is simple: Add

IdentitiesOnly yes

to your ~/.ssh/config file.

A more detailed explanation can be found here.

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