I was bored one day, so I looked around for something to do.
I had some scrap wood lying around, so decided to build a spice rack to fit my kitchen.
I took some measurements and with a pad and pencil I drew a plan:
A few days later, it was finished:
About as difficult to believe as a caterpillar turning into a butterfly Eh 🙂
What is NFS?
NFS stands for Network File System.
NFS allows you to share directories from one computer with another. For example:
Here we have a server with a user called user1 and a laptop with a user called user2.
What we want to do is to see all of user1’s files on the laptop.
With /home/user1’s directory NFS mounted onto the directory /home/user2/zoostorm lets user2 see all user1’s files in the zoostorm directory.
You can modify, delete and add files there.
This is so you don’t not have to use Sneakernet which is sharing files between computers by putting your sneakers on and carrying the files between computers on a floppy disk, CD, DVD or memory stick.
Microsoft stole this idea from UNIX and calls it Simple File Sharing.
This can be very useful for backing up files or partitions from the laptop to the server PC, as servers traditionally have lots more drive space than say, a laptop or netbook.
192.168.1.3 – This is an example i/p address
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nfs-common
192.168.1.12 – This is an example i/p address
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nfs-common
Open the /etc/exports file in your text editor with root privileges:
sudo vi /etc/exports
We want to create a line for each of the directories that we wish to share.
/home/username *(rw,sync,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check)
You can replace * with one of the hostname formats. Make the hostname declaration as specific as possible so unwanted systems cannot access the NFS mount, i.e. 192.168.1.12
sudo exportfs -a
In your home directory create a directory for the mount in my case this is called zoostorm
mkdir /home/chris/zoostorm
sudo mount 192.168.1.3:/home/chris /home/chris/zoostorm
At this point, you probably will find out that the mount will time out, what the Ubuntu documentation fails to tell you is that the Ubuntu built in firewall
will block the mounts.
On both the client and server do the following:
sudo apt-get install ufw
sudo ufw enable
The ports you need to allow through the firewall are 111 and 2049
Just to be on the safe side to find out which port NFS is using:
cat /etc/services | grep -i nfs
you should get:
nfs 2049/tcp # Network File System
nfs 2049/udp # Network File System
so NFS is using port 2049.
We now do the following:
sudo ufw allow 111
sudo ufw allow 2049
Now on the client,
sudo mount 192.168.1.3:/home/chris /home/chris/zoostorm
We have opened the required ports, so this should now work.
A different post today from my usual Nexus/Ubuntu posts.
Whenever I talk to ‘normal’ people they look blank when I say I use Ubuntu or Linux. I get “Oh no one uses that, its not mainstream” The likes of Terry Lamb insisted that no one used it. He backed down when I pointed out that his own web site did.
These comments made me think about the ignorance of most people who believe the world according to Bill and the ignorance of people in charge of large organizations, the banks, governments, et al.
I remember an experienced UNIX sysadmin guy telling me one day, how he would deal with any company who had the temerity to sack him. The retribution he proposed was severe and could bring a company to its knees if not destroy it. The modus operandi he would use I am obviously not going to mention here because IT WOULD WORK. One of the major UK banks paid me a while ago to do a security audit on all their UNIX machines and I can tell you that even they would not be immune to such an approach, even AFTER the security was tightened.
Banks, if you want to know where you are vulnerable, you know where I am. Don’t say to your shareholders and customers you were not warned!
People are very blinkered in their thinking, they can not, will not, ‘think outside the box’ For example, imagine this:
If I had a ‘magic wand’ that would stop all Linux boxes working, full stop, what would happen? “Not an awful lot” I here you say.
Well, No more Amazon, Facebook, Youtube, Ebay. The Daily Mail readers in the UK would love to see Amazon die as they don’t pay much in taxes over here. Those Daily Mail readers, however, would come to their senses when Tarquin and Amanda’s Christmas Kindles stopped being any use. They would not even be able to share books with friends because of DRM.
It gets worse. It is estimated that 80 – 90% of the Web runs on Linux. No more email, no more e-commerce, ie no shopping online, no online banking and if that sysamin guy got employed by a bank, no more banking.
Take a look at government users of Linux: US Department of defence, US navy submarine fleet, Federal aviation administration, French parliament, the list is almost endless take a look here.
Governments are spending Billions defending the outsides of their systems and not looking inwards to what might be happening there. They are spending all their time looking to the East and ignoring the West
If you are happy losing all of this, ignore what I am saying. Each to their own. You can always move to Pennsylvania and join the Amish.
If you don’t want to go back to those days then share this post with your friends, family, colleagues and don’t tell any terrorists. They will only get ideas. Unless they are already ‘thinking outside the box’ or have that ‘magic wand’ and are waiting to use it.
Words (Photo credit: sirwiseowl)
I spent too much time today trying to find out how to do outlining in Libreoffice Write, the same way that you can in Microsoft Word.
It seems after much looking that all Writer have a a window called Navigator which is a very pale imitation of what Word had even in very early incarnations of Word.
Now Writer has some features that are far superior to Word but this omission make Writer unusable for me. I thought that I would look at what the developers think about this.
Their attitude is that they are not a copy of Microsoft Word even if it has features that the users want. This is what I posted to the developers on one thread: ( I am putting my tin hat on now 🙂
<Flame off>
I can understand both sides of the problem here, I have seen many blogs from journalists who support Linux but say that it will never become mainstream until the developers give the users what the users want regardless whether the developers like what the users want or not.
The current situation is like going to a pub who have a Trad Jazz Band on, playing what they like, not what the customers want to hear and the Jazz Band getting upset when all the customers leave.
We all know that Microsoft’s Operating systems still haven’t attained what Linux had years ago, so why do we (Linux users) have to put up with the reverse situation with applications?
It is like you developers being forced into developing without using snippets or syntax checkers just because Mr Gates has them. Bill uses them so we won’t, just to spite him. Rearrange this to make a meaningful sentence:
Spite cutting off face to nose your your.
The danger here is that I and others would be prepared to pay a reasonable amount for the features in Libreoffice that we want.
We all know that is the start of a slippery slope. So, here is the deal, you give us what we want and we will let you use: vi spell nroff troff LatEx awk sed and the pipe character for your word processing.
Just a thought
<Flame on>
I know it wont make any difference, the developers like mummy, know what’s best 🙂
Today I found an interesting site about Ubuntu, my preferred desktop operating system:
I noticed that they had an RSS feed button on the top of their page  
  Just like the one at the top of my blog – hint, hint 🙂
I thought it was about time I set things up for me to read them, so here goes:
For those of you who don’t know what RSS feeds are and how useful they can be, here is brief description culled from the net:
RSS (most commonly expanded as Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works…………………
Simple eh? Some people have a way with words, the wrong way !!! – Well that’s the Wikipedia format for you.
It is easier to think of it as a funnel that sites that you like, are asked to pour their latest offerings into. That enables you to read them all in one place. This saves going to your favourite sites on a regular basis to see if there is anything new. When you look for it, there are lots of interesting feeds out there and lots of junk too. You choose. To show how bad it can be, there is even one for Strictly Come Dancing, so you have been warned.
RSS Funnel
There are many ways of doing this, but the one I decided to use was Google reader on my PC:
and the Google reader app on my Nexus 7 :
The reason I made these choices was that The Google reader on the PC allows you to create folders to put your RSS feeds into, for example one for Nexus another for Ubuntu etc. Great for organising things.
I tried various apps and widgets on the Nexus, but the official free one from Google was the only one that seemed to recognise folders. I am currently using a few of them at the same time to convince myself that it is the right one. If anything changes I will blog it.
I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t let go when I go to bed. Now, no mucky comments Keith.
I want to carry on browsing and watching my YouTube favourites on my Nexus 7 in bed, where I’m nice and warm and cosy. So I looked for a solution for having the same links on my tablet as my PC. Here is my solution.
I looked at Pocket, which works great on the Nexus but I could not find it for Ubuntu and it didn’t really do what I wanted, namely being able to carry on browsing the same links as I was on my PC.
I also looked at Evernote. No native Evernote program for Ubuntu. You can of course use Everpad, a nice
solution but Evernote is a bit of an overkill for what I wanted.
Up until now I had resorted to emailing myself links and going to bed and reading the emails to pick up the links. Silly I know, use delicio.us I hear you say. The ‘word on the street’ is that Yahoo are going to stop that, so I took a look at Google Bookmarks instead.
On the Nexus there is an app for this called: Gbookmark. So far so good. I use Firefox on my PC, so I could drag the Google Bookmark button to the toolbar. Getting better.
Even better is the way you can categorize the links on Google Bookmarks.
Google calls these Labels, but you may just think of the as tags. Give each links a number of relevant tags and a list of them is then given on the left hand side of the screen.
When you have built up a large number of links over time, finding the one you want is simplicity itself.
You can either search for the term that you want, for example: Nexus and it will show you all the links that contain the term Nexus, or you can click on Nexus on the left hand side of the screen and you only get the links you have tagged with this. This all assumes of course that you have labelled some links with the word Nexus.
This may not be your cup of tea mug of cocoa, but it gives me exactly what I want.
Off to bed to look for a ‘Mug of Cocoa’ App 🙂
I eventually took the plunge and got myself a 32Mb Google Nexus 7
My choice was based upon the following
I turned it on and found developer mode so that I could root it, and went to bed.
The next day I switched it on and great, it upgraded to the new release of the OS that shipped that day.
Not so great, I went looking for developer mode to do my dirty deeds and lo and behold, it had gone.
I looked everywhere, but could not find it. Stumped!
I even tried R.T.F.M. – Computer support people will know what that means.
After much searching on the Internet I resorted to posting the problem on various BBS’s, sorry, users groups 🙂
Oooh just I hate doing that, it’s so not me. (I sound like a girly there) 😉
This is the solution for anyone lucky enough to be in the same position:
Go to settings -> About Phone, and tap it
Scroll down to build number
Tap it seven times, after the third tap you will see a dialogue that says “You are four steps from being a developer”
Keep tapping and you have got your developer settings back.
It couldn’t have been simpler 🙂
Thanks to nxtablet@googlemail.com for the info.
Now where is that spanner and wire cutters…………….
Since the EU has dictated to us that we can no longer buy washing machines with both a hot and cold feed, I thought I would share with you my Martin Lewis type money saving tip.
The EU says cold fill washing machines are more environmentally friendly than dual feed machines.
Huh, what do they know about washing 🙂
It costs approximately 3 times more money to heat water using electricity than gas so to get around it try the following:
Do you know what the pipe from the Poundshop costs? If so:
Ring 0909 123 456
choose from the following options:
1.   A carrot
2.   A Pound
3:Â Â Â A teapot
Calls should not last longer than 60 minutes and not cost more the £200
You could win Britney Spears for a night, losers a get a week.
Johnnie foreigner knows nothing about British ingenuity 🙂
Lines close 1st Jan 2022, don’t wait,
.
purplewelshy 
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