Following good practice I use public key authentication and Putty's Pageant to manage my password protected keys. This works great with Putty and Plink. I [...]]]> On windows I mostly use Putty as my SSH client. But in some cases for example when I use unison or rsync I use the ssh client from cygwin.

Following good practice I use public key authentication and Putty's Pageant to manage my password protected keys. This works great with Putty and Plink. I thought this would be great if I could use the same agent for cygwin too. As often the solution already existed in the form of ssh-pageant.

Here is a small tutorial how to set it up:

1. Download the prebuilt version of ssh-pageant from github (direct link).
2. Upack it and copy the ssh-pageant.exe to your cygwin's /usr/local/bin directory
3. You need to edit your .bash_profile file in order to start the ssh-pageant on opening a shell
   The method I use is different form the one described in ssh-pageant's readme as it only starts one instance of ssh-pageant and reuses this in subsequent sessions. It is based on the Github Help about ssh keys.

Add this at the end of your .bash_profile

# Setup SSH Agent
 
SSH_ENV="$HOME/.ssh/environment"
 
function start_agent {
  echo "Initializing new SSH agent..."
  /usr/local/bin/ssh-pageant | sed 's/^echo/#echo/' > "${SSH_ENV}"
  echo "succeded"
  chmod 600 "${SSH_ENV}"
  . "${SSH_ENV}" > /dev/null
  #/usr/bin/ssh-add;
}
 
if [ -f "${SSH_ENV}" ]; then
  . "${SSH_ENV}" > /dev/null
  ps -ef | grep $SSH_PAGEANT_PID | grep ssh-pageant$ > /dev/null || {
    start_agent;
  }
else
  start_agent;
fi

Now you should be able to login using cygwin's ssh.exe with the same comfort of putty.

It consists of activating LOOSE_PROVISIONING in your z-push config.php. If you are using Zentyal 2.0 this is located at /usr/share/z-push/config.php and [...]]]> Today I had the problem that my Nokia N900 Mail for Exchange could not sync with my Zentyal server via Active Sync. After some research I found a solution in the Zarafa forum.

It consists of activating LOOSE_PROVISIONING in your z-push config.php.
If you are using Zentyal 2.0 this is located at /usr/share/z-push/config.php and you have to change the line:

define('LOOSE_PROVISIONING', false);

to

define('LOOSE_PROVISIONING', true);

now it should work.
Unfortunately I'm not sure if this gets overwritten during the next update!

First you need to install the required tools for building software from [...]]]> Sometimes there is a bug in a package from ubuntu that is not yet fixed, or you just want to modify something in the source of a software. Here is an easy way to build your own package from the ubuntu sources.

First you need to install the required tools for building software from source

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Let's assume you want to build a package called foo and apply a patch bar.patch to it.

First you have to download the necessary build dependencies for foo

sudo apt-get build-dep foo

Now you are ready to download the actual sources of the package (Don't use sudo here!!)

apt-get source foo

This gives you a directory called foo-<version> you can now cd into it apply the patch and build the package

cd foo-<version>
patch -p1 < bar.patch
dpkg-buildpackage

Now you have a package called foo-<version>.deb in the same directory where you have run apt-get source. You can install it using dpkg.

sudo dpkg -i foo-<version>.deb

Put the following at the end of your ~/.bashrc

You can download it on Launchpad or directly form my site.

Installation instructions can be found here.

Additionally is now listed at Softpedia.

Today I decided to do something about it. From Linux I know that HPLIP has some pretty good driver [...]]]> Since I switched to Snow Leopard I was not satisfied with the printing drivers for my old HP OfficeJet 95. I used the included Gutenprint drivers. For text they worked ok, but images looked terrible.

Today I decided to do something about it. From Linux I know that HPLIP has some pretty good driver (hpijs) for most HP Devices. Fortunately I can use the same drivers for Mac OS X to. You need three packages to do this. More information can be found on the website of the Linux Foundation.

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/macosx/hpijs

This should help you get your old HP Printer working.

Unfortunately there was no script to start and stop Wuala on system start-up and shutdown. So I [...]]]> I recently wanted to install Wuala on my brand new media center PC running Ubuntu on it. It was not that hard because there is an excellent tutorial on how to setup wuala on a headless machine.

Unfortunately there was no script to start and stop Wuala on system start-up and shutdown. So I decided to create one.

/etc/init.d/wuala (download)

#!/bin/bash
#!/bin/bash
 
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          wuala
# Required-Start:    $network $local_fs $remote_fs
# Required-Stop:     $network $local_fs $remote_fs
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: start Wuala headless (wuala)
### END INIT INFO
 
WUALADIR=/home/wuala
WUALAUSR=wuala
 
WUALALOG=$WUALADIR/out.log
WUALAERR=$WUALADIR/error.log
 
uptest(){
if ps -u $WUALAUSR u|grep -v grep|grep loader3.jar >/dev/null;then
echo "Wuala is running"
return 0
else
echo "Wuala is not running"
return 1
fi
}
 
case "${1:-''}" in
  'start')
        # start commands here
        echo "Starting Wuala..."
        uptest || su $WUALAUSR -c "wualacmd > $WUALALOG 2> $WUALAERR &"
    ;;
 
  'stop')
        # stop commands here
        echo "Stopping Wuala..."
        uptest && su $WUALAUSR -c "wualacmd exit > $WUALALOG 2> $WUALAERR"
    ;;
 
  'restart')
        # restart commands here
        $0 stop
        sleep 1
        $0 start
    ;;
 
  'status')
        # status commands here
        uptest && su $WUALAUSR -c "wualacmd showStatus"
        uptest && su $WUALAUSR -c "wualacmd connectionInfo"
        uptest && su $WUALAUSR -c "wualacmd showSettings"
    ;;
 
  *)    
        # no parameter specified
        echo "Usage: $SELF start|stop|restart|status"
        exit 1
    ;;
esac

It is a very early version with not much error checking, so use it at your own risk. I just posted it in case somebody might find it useful.

To use it just save the content to /etc/init.d/wuala and run

$ sudo update-rc.d wuala defaults

Update: Added the necessary LSB informations
Update 2: The file can now be downloaded: /etc/init.d/wuala.
Upadte 3: Use wualacmd instead of wuala. (Thanks to http://www.synergeek.fr/2010/06/wuala-sous-linux/ for the hint)
Upadte 4: The new version checks if wuala is already running for the given user.

I found a nice tutorial how to enable the Support for Intel VT on a Sony Vaio, with Firmware. Just follow the tutorial on this site.