Monthly Archive for June, 2010

manually changing a linux password

Published
by
admin
on June 11, 2010
in Technical
. 0 Comments

Unable to login to a new install of openembedded 2007.12 due to this strange bug where a blank root password is created by default but is unacceptable.

The solution:

sudo apt-get install makepasswd
echo "password" | makepasswd --clearfrom=- --crypt-md5

password     $1$iFxwhLFZ$URYvnqplm5MXYEsGF8qLW0

generates an MD5 hash for the password (in this case, ‘password’) which is then copied into the ‘root’ entry in /etc/passwd

nb you should never use “password” as your password, Nicky

symlinking to an NTFS drive with Apache in Ubuntu

Published
by
admin
on June 2, 2010
in Technical
. 0 Comments

Baffled by my inability to reconfigure apache .htaccess to symlink to an NTFS mounted through fuse…

Options +FollowSymLinks

Just doesn’t seem to work.
However, the permissions on the target need to be set so the www-data user can read the files, and by default this is set umask 007, giving

tim@herge:~$ ls /media -la
total 48
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2010-05-28 17:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 2010-06-02 12:53 ..
drwxrwx--- 1 root plugdev 28672 2010-06-01 15:55 data

Which isn’t readable by apache. Ths solution? Edit /etc/fstab to something like

# /media/data was on /dev/sda4 during installation
UUID=0068197468196A24 /media/data ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=000,gid=46 0 0

And Apache can follow the symlink to your hearts content.