Forest BB

The Internet in the cafe, wired and wireless, is now working again. I assume it will work again in the office too.

The server had a hard drive fault and couldn't boot up again until a filesystem check was run, The password is needed to run the check. I had to connect a keyboard and monitor to it (courtesy of infoseed). But after the filesystem check it seems to be running well. This does sort of suggest that more hard drive faults may occur in the future though...

I've got all the info now about how to remotely login to the server from inside or outside the forest, the password, and various commands that can be run to diagnose and fix problems. Now that we have the info these instructions should be used instead of restarting the server by cutting the power (which hurts it). Is there a good place to post this info? It would have to be on a private message board. The old web and computers one?

The password should not be stored only in the heads of just one or two people. This causes all sorts of problems if those people drift away. So... I should put it somewhere safe that people know about.

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I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...
Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!

Maybe post a sticky in the old web & comps forum for now.

Good work, btw.

It might be handy to have a hard copy around - unless people memorise the instructions, it will be too late for them to look on the BB if the internet is down.

Some combination of ssh, known keys, putty and sudo might be cool. You could create a user on the server who is allowed to run ifup (or something else that gets the connection back) with sudo and set up key authentication (without password) for ssh between the office machine and the server. Until we get Linux put on the office box, putty should work. You could even have a shortcut on the desktop to do all this.

I would love to be trained in this ssh sudo putty stuff...

Between the two of us I'm sure me and Swithun could arrange that. I could probably learn a fair bit from Swithun also. Maybe the three of us (and anyone else interested) should meet for a tutorial? Someone bring a laptop to use.

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I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...
Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!

I'm thinking about it again, and we would ideally have some way of doing it without having to enter a password. We could modify sudo to only require a password once (this might even survive reboots). Either that or we could chmod 4755 ifup, so that it is run as root by who ever runs it. But sudo is a better solution if it works.

There is a manual for putty here. Chapters 7 and 8 are the ones to read.

You generate a pair of private and public keys on the Windows machine using puttyGen. Then the public key is copied to the server and added to the authorized_keys file. Using plink (a command line ssh client for Windows), you can ssh into the server without having to enter a password and execute a command (ifup ppp0 or something like that). This Windows command can be put into a shortcut and hidden among the others on the desktop.

We need admin access to the office machine - so we can install putty, puttyGen and plink. If someone wants to do this ahead of time, they are all here. I found a problem with the 0.58 release, but the snapshot worked fine (for putty). If you have access, Neil, then this won't take 2 minutes, so we can do it on the day. When shall we meet?

'Fraid I don't have admin access to the pc. Duncan?

I can meet at the weekend if that suits. Anytime after about 3pm on Friday. How's that?

Sorry for not replying to this. Maybe we can still do it sometime. I have my hands full until March though. For now, I started a thread in the old web & computers forum to collect info.