Misc Admin - Laptop PCI, Bubba Static IP, More Disks

Laptop PCI Conflict

For a while, my laptop BIOS had been sporadically reporting a PCI conflict on boot, with no other symptoms.
It's dual boot Windows XP Home and Ubuntu, and after the latest Window Update it lost its on-board network adapter, both in XP and Ubuntu. Rolling back the update fixed Windows, but somewhere some persistent state made the PCI conflict happen around half the time, and if it did happen Ubuntu would not see the card, or be able to recover.
The logs said 'try pci=assign-busses', so I did (in GRUB use e to try it once, edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to make it permanent), and the adapter reappeared and (so far) there have been no conflicts on rebooting. In addition, Ubuntu can now see the SD card, (presumably that is what it was conflicting with) which means I don't have to boot into XP to snarf the photos from my camera.
Now if only the wifi button was broken enough to appear in the logs and explain how to fix it...

Bubba and Static IP

On Friday my new excito Bubba home server arrived. I plugged it in, switched it on and all was good.

Mounting Bubba Shares

There was a little playing around to get Ubuntu to see the Samba shares, which I also put on the excito forum thread which gave some clues:
The server appears in Nautilus when you choose Places > Network, as ftp, sftp and is also under Windows network.
Browsing into the server, it requests user and password as expected, adds them to the keychain, then shows the files.
For a one-off mount:

fortinbras# mount -t smbfs //bubba/home /net/bubba/home -o username=*****,password=***** 

Following the instructions at justlinux.com for adding to /etc/fstab, the following works with mount -a when run as root:

//bubba/home    /net/bubba/home     smbfs credentials=/home/pete/.sambacreds,uid=pete 0 0
//bubba/storage /net/bubba/storage  smbfs credentials=/home/pete/.sambacreds,uid=pete 0 0

On next reboot, the mount points appear in Nautilus, but you can't mount them as a user.
To get mount working for users, you need to set suid root on smbmnt and ensure that the mount point is owned by the user doing the mounting.
I haven't tried enabling mounts for more than one account; if you add lines to fstab for each user, it adds icons for the mount points to everyone's accounts; trying to use ~ for the mount point and credentials doesn't seem to work either.

Backup of tincancamera.com

I couldn't find a recursive authenticated ftp client for the Bubba - its version of wget doesn't accept the --ftp-user arguments - so I've used wget with htpp to crawl the site, which gets everything except the access logs. I hadn't read the access logs, and they were putting me over the hosting's quota (they just grow rather than rotating as I'd expect them to), so I got them and deleted them off the server, so I'm using 3MB of the 5 I'm paying for rather than 11.

Static IP

I'd like the Bubba to be on the net, but I don't have a static IP. I'm with Pipex, who are fast and reliable if not the cheapest at the moment, but in addition to their stated charge of £1.25 a month require that my existing service be upgraded to a current plan (the current plans are 8MB instead of 1MB for the price I'm on), but would mean a new 12 month contract. I'm moving in three months, so that would mean paying for nine months I'm not here at £26.24 a month, which is silly - it would make adding a static IP for three months cost £79.97 a month, 1p less than twice what Pipex charge for a dedicated server. I've mailed them to see if they'll give me a static IP on my current £24.99 a month for a reasonable set-up fee, but haven't heard back yet.

More Disks

I'd bought three more 18.4GB disks for my Netras off ebay (Seagate ST318437LC x 3 for £29.89 including p+p), which arrived this morning. After popping down the road to AJM Micro for two dozen mounting screws, they are now installed and (following the guide here - docs.sun.com is nearly as slow as del.icio.us) each give a 16.7G zfs file system for use as a data area for mucking around with:

tercel-1# zpool create data c0t1d0
tercel-1# zfs create data/fs
tercel-1# zfs list
NAME                   USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
data                   104K  16.7G  24.5K  /data
data/fs               24.5K  16.7G  24.5K  /data/fs
tercel-1# df -h /data/fs/
Filesystem             size   used  avail capacity  Mounted on
data/fs                 17G    24K    17G     1%    /data/fs

TME