The Rust Belt

To the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh

Rich — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:29:52 +0000

I’m currently looking into getting a PhD place for the next few years to continue my studies, and one of the places I was looking into was University of Edinburgh and the Royal Observatory near there. Late last month I was invited to an interview there, which I was more than happy to go to. The only problem though was how long it would’ve taken me to get there. About 4 hours, which may not seem like much but its a lot for me!

Oh well, I took the opportunity to take some pictures whilst on the train up. Didn’t really get to take any when inside, the tour was very fast. The actual telescope was amazing! Really puts the mere 16 inch scope at Wast Hills to shame! Plus Edinburgh really is a nice city, both from its people and just how beautiful it is!

From Trip to Royal Observatory

Anyway, some interesting (and lame) pics during the journey!

Trip to Royal Observatory

(Sorry about the window glare, it was sunny and stuff was reflective!)

First Light – The Phone

Rich — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 09:55:02 +0000

I’ve had a new phone for a while now, ok, perhaps “new” would be a better term since I have had it nearly a year. It even has a camera and internet on it! I’m pretty sure anyone reading this now is thinking “big woop”, and you’re probably right, but screw that, this phone is a thousand orders of magnitude times better than my previous one (not just a thousand times, but a thousand orders of magnitude)! I occasionally take a few pics with it but I’ve never gotten round to working out how to get the pictures off the phone.

Sadly, my ubuntu setup doesn’t seem to recognise it when I plug in the usb cable (I’m looking into it, after my project work’s done) and I had some trouble setting up my phone to send email with my googlemail account (server error when sending emails). Strangely though, after setting up an email with a server I have access to, and feeding those details into my phone everything seems to work! So last night, whilst I should’ve been sleeping I emailed myself the photos I liked best and this morning over breakfast I added them to my new picasaweb.

Have a gander, I thought they came out quite well…

phone – first light

They seem to be a mix of stuff, mostly clouds… Pretty cool clouds mind but still clouds. And one pic of what I do at work when bored… The first picture in the album I really do like. Its the Grubb telescope siting on the roof of Poynting Physics at the university of Brum, shortly after it was refurbished. Obviously we’re not looking at anything there, it’s cloudy, and daytime, but its very cool to see it in the daytime before using it on a clear night one evening!

From phone – first light

Vale Fireworks 2009

Rich — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:41:39 +0000

Every year the guild of students at my uni runs a fireworks display at, oddly enough, bonfire night, or the closest thursday to it anyway. This year was the first year I had a camera on which I could film it. This is pretty much an exercise in filming stuff with my little camera. Here are the two vids I made, one half way through, the other the last few minutes.

I thought it came out ok, despite the rain (truth be told, the second one I really like as all the mist on the lense causes the fireworks to remind me of the battles in the Battlestar Galactica re-imagining).

Mounting Samba Shares (cont.)

Rich — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:38:18 +0000

A few weeks ago I wrote about how to mount a Samba share in ubuntu.

It seems my method is incomplete as not long after working it out when I eventually decided to shut down my ubuntu box, I came across a message of this sort during the shut down process:

CIFS VFS: no response for cmd 50

I never really thought much of it until I followed my own methodology when setting up a ubuntu 9.04 machine at work. It seems I’m not the only person to get this message. A quick google search revealed http://whereofwecannotspeak.wordpress.com/2007/12/25/unmount-samba-filesystems-before-shutdown-or-reboot/ who tells us all about this message (that its ubuntu trying to unmount a filesystem after the network connection to it has already been shut down), and more importantly, how to fix it. As the author says, we just need to get ubuntu to unmount the shares a little earlier in the shutdown process.

Long story short, these two commands (run as root) should do it. Just follow the link above to get the full explanation as to why.

ln -s /etc/init.d/umountnfs.sh /etc/rc0.d/K15umountnfs.sh

ln -s /etc/init.d/umountnfs.sh /etc/rc6.d/K15umountnfs.sh

Many thanks to the author of that blog for this posting this fix.

40th anniversary of the Moon Landings

Rich — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:31:26 +0000

As I hope many of you will know, today marked the 40th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon, the first of sadly few human visits to our nearest neighbour. I thought I can’t let such an event slide past without as much as a cursory comment, and well, this is it. I am actually still surprised about some of the stories I hear about it, from the crazy conspiracy theories to realising just how close they came to disaster on the very first trip (such as NASA forgetting to install a handle on the outside of the lander which meant that Neil and Buzz had to remember not to close the door when they went outside). Its still an amazing achievement.

Hopefully we won’t have to have another 40 years go by before anyone else steps foot on the Moon again…

And whilst we’re on the subject of the Moon Landings, here’s an amazing piece of news from a few days ago. It feels appropriate to mention it now. The Landing site’s have been photographed at last!

NTLDR is Missing

Rich — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:26:01 +0000

Probably not for the first time I’ve said this, but undoubtedly for the first time I’ve said it in this journal, but bloody windows!

At work last week we had a computer mysteriously go down with the error
NTLDR is missing press ctrl+alt+del to restart

or something to that effect…

Apparently whatever the boot sector points to got corrupted (as did a ton of other things in the file system given large swaths of data had vanished, including the Documents and Settings folder)… Lord knows what happened but by the gods it was the worst thing that could have happened that day given how much use that machine gets.

Anyway, the way I saw it, once we got the backup machine running, we had two options: reinstall the operating system or repair the hard drive; but repairing the drive was the only way we could realistically go…

The windows recovery console was a load of rubbish though (that’s probably just because I didn’t really know what to do to be honest) but then I happened upon: http://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm

Godsend, is that place! Their recovery procedure worked a charm, just need to deal with any lost data after the corruption now…

That or learn how to interface with our RS-232 machines in python, rewrite our analysis software and persuade my boss to migrate to a linux OS… That’s also my preferred resolution too…

Moral of the story is, if you’re unfortunate enough to use windows and get and “NTLDR is missing” error, just do what they suggest here http://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm

Mounting Samba Shares

Rich — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:16:39 +0000

A while ago I got a network/USB hardrive, so today I finally decided to set it up! Sadly it wasn’t as problem free as I’d have hoped but oh well…

The drive was a Freecom 500GB network/USB drive that had a samba server and ftp server installed upon it. It also has fat32 as its file system (yuck, but nought I can do about that… I think…)

So first of all then, I needed to configure it. It comes with an install CD, but I’m not one for those sorts of things, especially since as a rule they’ll only work on windows and install a load of unwelcome crap onto your system, so once I’d plugged it into my router, found the IP it had been assigned I then went into my browser and typed the IP. It should be something along the lines of 192.168.1.XXX, probably at the first free DHCP assigned IP from whatever assigns your DHCP addresses.

It’ll then ask for a username and password. The CD probably deals with this sort of thing, but fortunately, as I ain’t using one, google is your friend, and the default username and password are “admin” and “admin” respectively.

Once in, you get a few menus and things. First one is the status window where you can change your hostname and things like that. I don’t generally like the default names (FND in this case) so I changed my hostname. I also changed the admin password to something a bit less naff.

Next is the IP config menu. If you intend on running this as a fileserver for a *nix box or something else that requires a constant known IP on your network you probably want to switch this to a static IP, but there are tools available to track a DHCP IP if you want to keep it that way.

The next screen of interest is the Samba server. The default configuration on my box was for two folders, PUBLIC and rips, to be in the folder list and PUBLIC to be in the shared list. I made my own folder and shared that instead, removing the PUBLIC folder from the shared list, but really do what you want with this… Annoyingly, there’s no option for securing it with a password…

FTP server is next, which is useful if you want to connect to your files from elsewhere in the world. (You also need a router that can do port forwarding too). Its also useful on your home network without port forwarding if, for some reason, you can’t mount the drive normally so you can at least get the files off there if samba breaks for example. Just click add to define a user, click ok to add it, then back on the FTP screen, modify the user to define a password, level of access and which folders they have access rights to.

That’s about it for setting up the drive on the device itself, now you need to connect it to your computers. Because its a network drive, it should be visible to everything on your network that really gives a damn. I’m going to talk about Ubuntu 8.10 here, but possibly an honorary mention of Windows XP.

Connecting to ubuntu 8.10

This is going to be mostly commandline manipulation, so just open up a terminal window before you can begin.

First of all, you need to have smbfs installed on your system. If you don’t, you can get this with this command:

sudo aptitude install smbfs

with that installed, you can now try and mount the drive. This however also requires a directory to mount it to, so you’ll need to make one. In this case, I’d just use the share name for the directory in /media

sudo mkdir /media/

To manually mount it, run this command

sudo mount -t cifs /// /media/ -o guest,nounix,user,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777

or, if you have do have login details for the share, then the command

sudo mount -t cifs /// /media/ -o username=",password="",nounix,user,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777

should work.

Alternatively, if you make a file /root/.credentials and edit it via nano or whatever, you can set your username and password in the file like

username= password=

and then use the command

sudo mount -t cifs /// /media/ -o credentials=/root/.credentials,nounix,user,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777

to mount it onto your system during this session. Don’t forget to secure your credentials file by chmodding it to 600. If you only have guest access you can still do it this way too, just use a username of “Guest” and a password of “” (without the quotes of course). For the rest of this guide for ubuntu, I’ll just use the credential file version.

Mounting it like this can also be done automatically too everytime you boot, which is quite grand. Simply edit the file /etc/fstab and add this line to it after all the other mount commands that deal with mounting your actual filesystem and swap space.

/// /media/ cifs credentials=/root/.smb_cred,nounix,user,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

Save and then run the command

sudo mount -a

to test it. If all went well, a removable media drive by the name of your share drive should have appeared in your list of places and you now have free reign over it!

In the case that samba is broken but you need some files off it desperately, ftp should work fine. In the command line type in:
ftp open

and enter your username and password when prompted. Then just navigate around it using ftp commands. You can also ftp in GUI’s if you want…

A thing to note though, if you followed the steps above you should be ok, unless I’ve missed a step in which case I apologise and will fix when I work out what I’ve missed, but if like me you originally went in head first you might have some trouble. I for one had this lovely error message:

mount error 5 = Input/output error Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs)

with the command

sudo mount -t cifs /// /media/ -o credentials=/root/.credentials -rw

I still don’t know why, but after I found this post

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-networking-3/why-unable-to-mount-my-nas-in-fstab-get-mount-error5-inputoutput-error-716082

I added the nounix attribute and tweaked the command a bit as well to get what I got above. For some reason, removing the nounix breaks it…

Windows XP

This is boring… Login to windows, open an explorer window, and browse to

\\

where is the host name you set right after logging in. This should bring your share folder into the window. Right click on it -> Map Network Drive to put it on a labelled drive such as Z:\. Set any other settings you want, click ok. Done.

Told ya, boring… Just thought I’d mention it…

Error exit status 134, Base-files on Ubuntu Update

Rich — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 21:04:55 +0000

My first post I guess. Might as well start somewhere, since I can’t think of anything to write about, I’m just gonna talk about an annoying problem I encountered with Ubuntu one day…

Way back in november 08 when I was still running ubuntu hardy (8.04) did what I usually do when the package manager tells me that there’s an update ready, I tried to update.

Except it didn’t work! From the commandline during a dpkg –configure command I got this error:

Setting up base-files (4.0.1ubuntu5.8.04.3) …
xargs: xargs.c:443: main: Assertion `bc_ctl.arg_max <= (131072-2048)’ failed.
find: /var/cache/anthy: No such file or directory
Aborted
dpkg: error processing base-files (–configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 134
Errors were encountered while processing:
base-files

This effectively stopped me updating and installing packages if I recall correctly.

After doing some digging I found that the cause was a botched line in /var/lib/dpkg/status with the entry for base-files.

To fix that file, first make a backup of the file using sudo cp /var/lib/dpkg/status /var/lib/dpkg/status.backup or however one prefers to back up stuff. Then open the file (as root) in your preferred editor sudo gedit /var/lib/dpkg/status

Search for something like Package: base-files

If its the same problem I had the status should be Status: install ok half-configured

Change that to: Status: install ok not-installed

And delete everything pertaining to this package (should be the next dozen or so lines) after “Section: admin“. This should leave you with these five lines in the status file under the base-files package

Package: base-files
Essential: yes
Status: install ok not-installed
Priority: required
Section: admin

This tricks the package manager into thinking an essential package is not installed, so it then should cleanly install it when you run
sudo apt-get -f install

If you check your status file then it should be back to having a long entry for the package with the status: install ok installed

And everything should be fine then!

If anything similar happens with any other packages, I hope its as simple as just do the same thing with whatever the broken package name is.

I made a thread about it at ubuntuforums.org for anyone who’s interested.