There’s no place like 127.0.0.1

My odometer read this as I pulled into my driveway at home tonight. No joke. There really is no place like localhost home.

No place like 127.0.0.1

Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Jan 27th, 2012 by Wyatt Walter

Time Machine Backups from Airport Extreme

Hopefully Apple doesn’t make up some way to disable this in the future, but it seems that despite claims elsewhere on the web, the latest Airport Extreme can be used with a USB hard drive to perform Time Machine backups. I’ve always heard great things about the Airport devices and really wanted to do backups over it, but I already had a larger USB hard drive, so a Time Capsule seemed like a bit of a waste. This worked with an Airport Extreme 802.11n 5th generation. My Macs are both Lion and Snow Leopard.

All you have to do is first plug the hard drive directory into your Mac, partition as desired and format filesystems as an HFS (Mac OS Extended). Then, plugin the drive and enable disk sharing on the Airport. After that’s done, your Aiport should show up in Finder. Once you mount it, you can select it from the Time Machine settings (it will appear as a Time Capsule).

That’s it! Glad I found out and wasn’t deterred by what Apple says and is on their forums. The Airport has been amazing, video streaming is far smoother now unlike with the aging wireless router I was replacing. Definitely a recommended buy!

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Nov 10th, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

A Rant about Ubuntu 11.10

Every 6 months when Ubuntu releases I throw caution to the wind, click the upgrade button on my desktop, and leave, expecting to come back shortly to an awesome new operating system. And every 6 months it seems I don’t come back to something awesome, but to a whole collection of new problems. Usually it’s a whole collection of conflicts or broken packages. Sometimes the system won’t boot. Sometimes X won’t start or some weird new graphics problem pops up. It pretty much always leads to a fresh install. This time, however, things were different. With 11.10, things went smoothly and everything came back up nicely. That is until I logged in and realized all my GNOME settings were non-existent afte the upgrade to GNOME 3.

I don’t really have any particular loyalties or love of GNOME, I just used it because that was the default and tends to be the one that’s been polished the most by Ubuntu. While the new desktop looks great, it seems to have gone backwards quite a bit in usability. The integrations with Banshee/volume controls seem to be gone (or at least not working after my upgrade), menus are confusing and way too click-heavy, and there seems to be almost not configurability to the desktop. Even the new gnome-tweak-tool seems to have very little customizability. It seems over half of the customizations have to do with fonts and really small things that don’t matter to me at all. There are those who are passionate about fonts, but I am not one of those people.

Perhaps worse, there’s a new menu item under your username on the menu bar for “Online Accounts”. When I clicked on it, it brought me to a screen asking to give access to my Google account.. I thought maybe this could have some promise, so I granted it access to my Goolge account and it said that it had access to, among other things, docs (which I thought was going to be really awesome). However, nothing really indicated any next steps for accessing things. After poking around a bit and not finding anything, I did a quick search online to see if anyone could give any indication for what this thing was supposed to do. And, as it seems.. It does nothing. While I do enjoy a good technology preview.. I had to remind myself that this was an actual release. Ugh. I just granted access to my Google account for.. what?

One pleasant detail that I did thoroughly enjoy about the new GNOME is the OSX-style alt-tab/alt-~ app/window switching. Grouping applications and switching windows within the apps that way has been something that I’ve desired for a long time when switching back and forth. I know that most will probably hate it, but I’m a fan :)

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Filed under Rants : Comments (0) : Oct 26th, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

Launching Ubuntu 11.04 Instances on KVM

This post is mostly for my own record as I keep having to look at my shell history every time I want to spin up a new virtual machine on my KVM server at home (so for those looking for something earth shattering, move along). For anyone looking for a how-to to get started, I followed an entry over a howtoforge. It’s pretty good, so no need to replicate.

Now, the goods.

If this is your first image, I recommend looking for the section in the page referenced titled “3 Creating An Image-Based VM” (seems no way to link to specific sections..). For me, I just copy one of the dirs from an existing one and clear out the ubuntu-kvm dir and edit vmbuilder.partition as necessary.

Then, from that dir, run:
sudo vmbuilder kvm ubuntu --suite=natty --flavour=virtual --arch=amd64 -o --libvirt=qemu:///system --ip=172.16.0.10 --templates=mytemplates --user=wyatt --name=Wyatt --pass=supersecret --addpkg=vim-nox --addpkg=unattended-upgrades --addpkg=acpid --addpkg=openssh-server --firstboot=/home/user/host.whatan00b.com/boot.sh --mem=1024 --hostname=host.whatan00b.com --bridge=br0 --part=vmbuilder.partition

Then, start the vm:
sudo virsh start host.whatan00b.com

It should boot shortly and you can ssh to the shiny new vm with the IP and username/password specified. Hopefully soon I can find some fancy way to integrate Puppet into the mix. :)

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Oct 23rd, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

Vagrant Fails To Start VM with Bad Default Machine Folder

I’m here at PuppetConf in Portland and one of the speakers got me all excited again about Vagrant. I’ve played around with Vagrant before, but he was showing off some awesome features that I didn’t realize existed which made me want to play with the tool again (more on that later!). Anyway, I updated all the versions of things Vagrant-related and tried to use it again. However, when I downloaded one of the default images from the getting started page I was greeted with an awesomely descriptive error:

[default] Importing base box 'lucid32'...
The VM import failed! Try running `VBoxManage import` on the box file
manually for more verbose error output.

Running it with VBoxManage as instructed gave a slightly-better-yet-not-so-useful error:
VBoxManage: error: Appliance file must have .ovf extension
VBoxManage: error: Details: code VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR (0x80bb0004), component Appliance, interface IAppliance, callee nsISupports
Context: "Read(Bstr(pszAbsFilePath).raw(), progressRead.asOutParam())" at line 302 of file VBoxManageAppliance.cpp

A few Google searches for this error got me almost nowhere except that it was likely a VirtualBox configuration issue. Great. After digging around for far too long, I figured out that it was because when I had played with Vagrant/VirtualBox in the past I had configured VirtualBox’s default machine folder to an external drive that I didn’t have plugged in! Doh. Anyway, was a pretty easy fix but I thought I’d share if it saved someone some time. The default machine folder is set on the first screen in the VirtualBox preferences window (at least for me on my Mac).

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Sep 23rd, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

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