Ubuntu Server 8.04 Post Install Tip #2: Shell Goodies

OK, I promised a friend some time ago that I’d post all of my post-install procedures and I’ve not quite followed through with that so I’m doing a few before finishing up my three part post on the “Home Hacker’s Network”. These are all just little hacks I’ve come across and modified to suit my needs. I like this one a bunch as it gives me a nice shell prompt when I login as well as when I use screen (although the gnu screen configuration part is mutually exclusive to the shell modification part).

So lets get started…

Ubuntu Server 8.04 Post Install Tip #1: Auto Updating

On a headless server that you have at home or for testing I like to make sure that all security updates and trivial updates are done automatically. A good sys admin will shy away from this practice for a good reason, updates can mess things up. In a production environment or where the server setup is very complex I can understand the need to manually run updates. For me, well I’m lazy when it comes to my home machines and generally don’t have too complex of setups. Also, in my experience, I’ve hardly ever seen an apt security or trivial update cause any harm (desktop linux I have seen issues though). That being said, I like to force security and trivial updates to happen daily.

GNS3 on Ubuntu 8.04 – Choosing and Using your IOS

As promised here is the post regarding choosing and using an IOS image that will fit your study needs.

If you followed the first post in this series you are technically now ready to start loading up images and making labs of your own. You will need to get your hands on some IOS images (legally of course).But which IOS should you use?

GNS3 on Ubuntu 8.04 – Install Guide

GNS3 is a frontend for dynagen (which is a scripting language for dynamips). Getting it to work nicely in Ubuntu was a bit of a pain in the arse but I was able to get it to work in a manner I’m happy with. This setup will essentially encapsulate a large portion of the install to one directory in /opt. Some libraries and executables will be installed through apt though, but not many. I previously wrote part of a writeup for this on Ubuntu 7.10, I’d ignore that in favor of this one which is much more up to date and polished.

Converting a Physical machine to a vmware file

Just an FYI, don’t try to use the vmware converter program to convert a windows 2000 workstation to a virtual machine. It just doesn’t work. It takes hours and when it is done it tries to setup the disk as a scsi device but doesn’ t install the drivers. Even if you install the drivers ahead of time you may get a BSOD on boot about an inaccessible boot device. Instead use VisionCore’s vConverter. It worked great the first time for me (and then a second!).