Category Archives: Linux General

The Western Digital MyBook Live Duo is a nice cheap NAS for home use.  Can be set to RAID1 for redundancy.  The first nuisance I ran into was for making public shares read-only to the world and write-able to specific … Continue reading →

Like many “technically minded” families we have started to accumulate a startling amount of data at home.  A couple hundred gigs of storage on the file server used to be more than adequate.  I did a pretty good job of making sure … Continue reading →

In Linux: To batch decrypt with gpg: echo {yourpassphrase} | gpg –passphrase-fd 0 –decrypt-files *.pgp To batch unzip: unzip “*.zip”

I hate manually cleaning out all of the old kernels here is a script to do it for you: dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge … Continue reading →

  This was written for Fedora, not sure how many other other distros it applies to. There are three ways to change your runlevel:  * While the Computer is Running:  1. Open a Terminal.  2. Become root.  3. Type:  init … Continue reading →

  I played with 2 options: TrueCrypt and FreeOTFE TrueCrypt has a Windows and Linux GUI making it pretty easy to use cross platform.  It also do some pretty cool encryption of the boot drive to secure the whole computer, but I haven’t messed with that yet. FreeOTFE has cool because it has a WIndows GUI and can automount under linux if you encrypt a whole partition as opposed to a volume (file) stored on a partition.  I really wanted to go with FreeOTFE for the automounting, but ran into a deal breaker issue.  Windows can only mount a single partition from a USB drive, so I couldn’t have a small  partition to run FreeOTFE from (so it was portable to any Windows computer) and have a 2nd large encrypted  partition for the data. Configuring FreeOTFE and Linux see http://emcken.dk/weblog/archives/164-encrypted-usb-drive-in-ubuntu.html. My notes just in case the above link ever goes away: sudo apt-get install cryptsetup sudo modprobe dm-crypt ## If you haven’t rebooted sudo cryptsetup –verbose –verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sdb5 sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb5 sdb5 # Based on fat32 or ntfs sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/mapper/sdb5 -n “tpearsall” sudo mkntfs -f /dev/mapper/sdb5 sudo cryptsetup luksClose sdb5