This morning has been interesting. I couldn’t sleep thanks to a failed wisdom tooth extraction (honestly, probably the most painful thing that’s ever happened to me) so at 5am I went to finish setting up my file server (well, I stared blankly holding my jaw until 5:30am when the painkillers kicked in).

My file server is a fairly simple setup – samba and ssh (for sshfs too) on a headless Ubuntu 9.10 box connected to a Virgin Media “Superhub”, with the intention of it supplying media to me and my family.

I reconfigured samba for the external drive I’d plugged in and added to the fstab and went to connect to it from my PC: “No route to host”. What? How can that be? I’m ssh’d into it! I spent about an hour double checking all the configuration on both PCs. I even ran an upgrade (which I hate doing, because no matter what I tell synaptic, it still likes to overwrite my custom compiled ffmpeg/x264 – I guess next time I’ll uninstall ffmpeg and not use checkinstall, but just make install).

After confirming everything was configured properly on both PCs, I checked the “Superhub” for firewalls or other “weird stuff”. As anyone with a “Superhub” will know, sometimes you just have to restart it and pray. Even restarting the damn thing is a problem: I restarted the “Superhub” and as usual, it insisted on giving the fileserver a new random IP.

Or so it claimed.

The “Superhub” control panel tells me it’s put the file server on 192.168.0.4, but I can’t even ping this IP… Turns out it’s still responding on the old 192.168.0.10 address. After months of dealing with this piece of junk, I’m not even surprised.

I spent a while confirming all the connections back and forth were working correctly, did a hard reset of the “Superhub” but still no joy.

By this time I was losing my temper.

So, how did I fix the “Superhub”? How did I bend it to my will and get my shares working? I unplugged everything from the “Superhub”, and used an ancient £5 generic unbranded router I found in a dusty corner of Maplins.

Yeah, that’s right Virgin Media. Your “Superhub” is WORSE than a cheap old unbranded white box.

I’m a big Linux user. I have Ubuntu on my PC, my wife’s PC, my kids PC and the fileserver. I also run CentOS on my two servers, and use CentOS, Ubuntu and RedHat in the office. RedHat was someone else’s choice and CentOS was somewhat forced on me by cPanel. Why did I choose Ubuntu? It’s simple really. Years ago when I started moving away from Windows, I didn’t know a significant amount about Linux, and Ubuntu held my hand just enough for me to get by.

Over time, my questions on ubuntuforums.com have become less and less stupid. Nowadays I’m a pretty proficient Linux user and find some of the “help” Ubuntu gives is actually a hindrance.

This week has been a fairly big week for Ubuntu users worldwide, as 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” was released. Those patient enough to download the new packages at a snails pace were “rewarded” with Unity and the plethora of new features and programs.

Last night I gave in and hit the Upgrade button. After a few hours I gave up and left it downloading the new packages overnight. I awoke and was greeted by the usual “Do you want to replace your php.ini?” (that’s a HELL NO from anyone who develops PHP professionally). More hours passed but eventually everything had gone smoothly and I got to restart into the wonder that is Unity.

Unity is a wonder. I wonder why Canonical think it’s ready for prime-time desktop distribution. Lets look at a few points here to prove I’m not just being bitter, old and grumpy:

• Scrollbars: I’m sure some people like the new magic disappearing scrollbars. How quaint that they’re outside the main window and only appear when you mouse-over the right part of the window. I hear Unity is touch-screen friendly. I’d love to hear how these scrollbars work on a touch device, because it baffles me. Regardless of your or my personal opinion of the scrollbars-of-wonder, it’s so inconsistent as to be a nuisance. The first key to ergonomic interface design is consistency, and this has been a down-fall of Linux from the early days of X.org. If you’re not going to find a way to implement the scrollbars in all cases, just don’t do it.
• Application Menus:I was given a Macbook last year, and one of my pet hates is the menu bar. To see this replicated to Unity upsets me a great deal. I could handle it on a laptop screen where you typically run applications full-screen, but take that concept to a 24″ widescreen with perhaps a dozen programs (none of which are maximised), you’re left with confusion and RSI. What’s next guys? Copying the Microsoft ribbon?
• Customisations:I love Gnome. You can do a lot with it, move it about, add icons wherever you like etc, etc. Unity basically lets you move the application bar around but otherwise just sit and look at it. I want to turn off the “Mac Menu Bar”. I want my places and system menu back. I want my Komodo IDE and Chrome icons top-left. I want to change the way applications are displayed in the “Start” menu. Unless I can customise this the way I want, it’s a definite no-go.

Other than Unity gripes, we have:

Ubuntu One: This was disabled prior to my upgrade. I had a folder in it that was only about 200mb at the start, but is now around 20gb and 100,000 files. After my upgrade and restart, Ubuntu One decided to start itself and start syncing the lot. I tried to cancel it with no success, so eventually hit “disconnect” and uninstalled it from the Software Center. About 10 hours later, my PC is running very badly… Ubuntu One was sat quietly in the background using 3gb of RAM. Amused, I was not. Thanks for that Canonical.

Window issues: I have a much smaller monitor sat to the side of my main monitor. I regularly drag windows between them and this worked very well yesterday. Today it’s become a nightmare. Every third attempt, something screws up (wrong size or wrong monitor are it’s current favourites).

I’m sure new users will love it, and I’m considering it for my children and grandfather – people who don’t demand a lot from their interface and have a very simplistic setup: 1 monitor and 1 application at a time. I’m sure it’s great on a 17″ monitor or a tablet. For everyone else, I strongly suspect you’ll be switching back to Gnome– Sorry, Ubuntu Classic.

I have to say: Every day I’m closer to switching to Debian.

Let me define a few terms in the IT world:

Hackers: Used to be known as the seedy, dodgy guys in films who break PCs. Nowadays hackers are the elite programmers who can turn Lead into Gold and such.

Crackers: Always considered “bad”, and now taken on the original definition of hacker. Crackers break things for their own purposes (spam, taking down servers etc).

I’ve had a run-in with some crackers lately which is starting to annoy me. As a server administrator, I wish I could do more about it. PCs in Saudi Arabia, Korea and China have been doing their best to take over my server through SSH, and in separate attempts, turn my server into a spam “bot”.

The widespread abuse of PCs and servers worldwide is becoming a serious issue. I have enough experience to keep these guys out (though I should have changed my SSH port before today…) and haven’t been seriously affected by it, but what about the other guys?

I’m a strong believer in security above all else, but I’ve been somewhat upset recently by a large company not using basic security consistently in their own card processing example code.

I think the point I’m making is twofold:

1. People need to consider security more carefully. You never know what will happen or when. Change default SSH and Remote Desktop ports. Sanitise all your data. Use passwords that no one could possibly ever guess. Use blacklists and blacklist data providers. Implement brute force limitations.

2. Governments need to consider cracking and PC abuse more seriously. If someone breaks into 1000 houses and steals a little money from each, they’d be in prison. If you steal 1000 bank records and commit minor fraud on each, you stand a fair chance of getting away with it. Hell, if you’re in the right country, no one will care.

The world needs to sit down and enforce specific laws around cracking, proxy servers without sufficient logging and infact any service that doesn’t maintain reasonable IP logging. Server owners worldwide need to be held responsible for continuously allowing (willingly or through negligence) cracking, unlawful or illegal activities on their systems. If you’re not logging it and willing to pass this on to the relevant authorities as required, you should be held partially responsible.

You do something illegal on my server, I’m rollin’ over on ya.

I’ve spent a lot of time using Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Windows XP and 7, and Ubuntu over the last year. It’s remarkable and amusing how similar and dissimilar they are in surprising ways. I think the main issue people overlook is what the core of the operating system is built on, or derived from.

Mac OS X is Unix based/clone

Linux is Unix based/clone

Solaris is Unix based/clone

Windows XP and 7 is WinNT based

Well, isn’t that lovely, but what does it mean or matter?

Operating systems based on similar systems tend to work in a similar way. To oversimplify this, I often use a tool “rsync” to update content from my desktop to my web server. I’m familiar with this tool. I booted up my Macbook and wanted to copy a large folder to it, but didn’t have Samba installed on my Ubuntu desktop… I used “rsync”! The desktop options are also similar (or identical) between Gnome/Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris.

Windows is a highly proprietary ”beacon” of sorts on the landscape now. Ubuntu is doing wonders for the Linux world in general. Mac OS X is pushing ever forward courtesy of Mr Jobs and his zealous band of fanatics. Solaris will probably remain a niche product and go the way of OS/2 eventually (die a slow and painful death).

This operating system selection is now giving me a headache.

I use Adobe Photoshop. I play World of Warcraft (yes, I said it. I actually admitted it). To get anything above Photoshop CS2 working AT ALL in Linux (courtesy of Wine), you need to pray the Wine developers find the time to develop their software further, or Adobe suddenly decides to release a Linux version. To get World of Warcraft working in Linux, you need a supported graphics card (most Nvidia cards, or modern ATI cards) with proprietary drivers. On this note, might I add I use an ATI X1250; Screw you ATI. Screw you. Apparently this chip isn’t modern enough to let me run the official ATI drivers.

If it wasn’t for my crap graphics card, ATI being bastards and needing more memory to properly virtualise Photoshop, I think I’d actually uninstall Windows now. The utility and synergy between my Linux desktop and Mac laptop are far more useful to me than kludging around with Windows integration with either, and aside from the two examples, the software available in Linux and Mac OS X suits my needs perfectly.

I find myself wondering, if hardware manufacturers spent more time supporting alternative operating systems such as Linux, would a lot more people switch? I know I’d have my grandfather on Linux if his random choice of multi-function printer was supported fully.

P.S. Take note ATI, if you’re too lazy to support slightly older graphics cards in your official Linux drivers, I’m too lazy to continue my 15 year support of you. Next purchase: Definitely Nvidia.

Every day I take the time to read my iGoogle. It has my weather, news, email and RSS feeds. There is no better place to get my daily dose of informationm and kudos to Google for managing to provide such an excellent facility. I’m aware other sites can provide similar, but they tend to be filled with a lot of extra crap I really don’t want – popups and the like.

Today I bumped into http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/7545722/A-third-of-people-think-it-is-acceptable-to-pirate-software.html – an article based on Microsoft research. Apparently most people use pirated software. My last employer used pirated Windows Server, pirated Windows XP on every workstation, pirated Adobe CS3 suite, pirated Microsoft Office.

For the record, I use a legal Windows XP for gaming and entertainment, and Ubuntu for everything else. I even get my music through Spotify – I expect my sainthood any moment! If anyone has any tips for Spotify randomly crashing in Wine, that’d be lovely.

If Microsoft’s poll wasn’t so blatantly a political move in light of the Digital Britain legislation, one might suggest they change the focus and find that actually, 99% of people use pirated software, without issues. They quote figures relating to viruses and crashes, presumably in the hope it’ll scare people off. I often wonder if the Microsoft execs don’t live in a different world. Infact, I’m sure they do. While I’m on the subject, I have an old friend who works for Microsoft, I’m going to point him here and seek his anonymous feedback.

On a slight tangent: How do people start up using industry standard software, when such software is quite so expensive? I want to type a piece here about Photoshop and Gimp (yes, there’s Paint Shop Pro etc, etc. Photoshop and Gimp are the big boys of proprietary and free in my world). There’s lots to be said for cost of ownership – free support in Windows and paid-for support in Linux, and it’d be a never ending debate. In the grand scheme of things, Photoshop is known by many and despite the initial cost, you may employ trained people quickly. Gimp is less known and has training costs, and potentially harder to recruit for.

Anyway, I’ve rambled through this entire post. I don’t know what the answer is. I DO know, I won’t pay for Windows 7 or Photoshop while Ubuntu / Windows XP and Gimp will suffice. I really hope http://www.reactos.org/ gets somewhere, though I imagine it’ll suffer similar fates to DR DOS and the AARD debacle (look it up).

My PC runs Windows 7 Ultimate and Ubuntu 9.10. Windows for Adobe software and gaming, Ubuntu for development. Recently my Nvidia graphics card started playing up, so I removed it. Thankfully, my motherboard has a fairly adequate ATI card built in. I removed the card, restarted Windows and continued as normal. Windows detected the card, installed appropriate drivers. All I had to do was reselect my resolution.

Later the same evening, I restarted into Ubuntu.

Ubuntu greeted me with it’s cute little white logo, all is well. Then the problems started. I’m notified the proprietary Nvidia drivers aren’t functioning and asked if I’d like to reconfigure my graphics settings. Yes please! Apparently I’m not allowed, it can’t save the new settings. I ask nicely to edit the configuration manually, and restart. Success! No. Apparently my ATI X1250 and 21″ CRT can’t support more than 1152×768. I try “vesa”, “ati”, “radeon”, “radeonhd” with no success, and finally move on to the ATI website to get official drivers.

I’m not going to rant about ATI, but suffice to say: If they can’t be bothered to make an installation that requires less than an hour of my time, requiring steps 99% of the population wouldn’t stand a chance of completing, I’m not going to bother. I’m simply going to save myself the bother in future by never using ATI again.

I fixed my problem by following a complex guide on the Ubuntu website, purging all traces of Nvidia drivers and reapplying the “radeon” driver. I then went to an unrelated website about advanced configuation of “xorg.conf” and guessed a number of settings to type in. Fairly certain my edits would simply cause the system to crash, I crossed my fingers, restarted and… It worked! It actually worked. I got my 1600×1200 back. I lost all 3D support, but at least I don’t have to bother keeping Wine installed anymore…

What’s my point?

I really want to recommend Ubuntu to friends and family, like most of the Linux fan base would. Frankly though, that’s years away from happening. There are so many fairly fundamental usability issues in Gnome and KDE that mean installing it for my parents would result in many hours per week in technical support to them.

Something as simple as adding items to the “quick launch” or “start menu” equivalents is a sweat inducing trial of endurance for anything but the most technical person. Running scripts on startup that require elevated privileges is something that’s eluded me so far, and I open a terminal to “sudo” run them manually every time I start the PC.

Ubuntu is a great operating system though. Having a LAMP server setup on my desktop PC in a few lines of text makes me very happy. The range of 1-click install software on hand is wonderful. I just wish some of the fairly basic features you expect to find (like intelligent driver selection…) were worked on a little more.