Ubuntu 13.10 connect to MS VPN Server

I was not able to make a VPN connection to a MS site. I tried Cisco Anyconnect (openconnect), Cisco Compaitble VPN (vpnc ), OpenVPN or PPTP (the default)

This was a real source of frustration and the "IT guy" kept telling me that I should just install Windows and have done with it.

Turns out that this is SIMPLE to fix.

Setup a new PPTP Connection Type.

Click the "Advanced" button.  I disabled EAP but when I clicked Use Point-to-Point encryption(MPPE) under "Security and Compression" the window above for "Allow the following authentication methods:" changed and EAP was greyed out.

I then selected "128-bit (most secure)" from the "Security:" drop down menu and clicked OK

I was then able to successfully connect to a MS VPN Server.

Hope this helps... I know in the future it will definitely save me time and effort when setting this up again.

So there Mr. MS "IT guy" ... 

Netbeans 7.4 bold menus in Ubuntu

I have suffered with this problem many times when using Netbeans in Ubuntu and I finally decided not get to the bottom of it.

The problem started only after I installed Wine.  Wine install a whole load of fonts so this was definitely where to look for the problem.

I found out that if I remove the fonts-unfonts-core package my menus go back to normal.  to remove the package run the following

sudo apt-get remove fonts-unfonts-core

I still had a smaller problem in that the menus don't have a border and when they are drawn over a busy development screen it takes me longer to find the item I am looking for.

I found the following tip when trying to fix the bold menu issue and have now made all my netbeans installations look the same.  I think this is a much cleaner theme for netbeans.  It makes it far easier for me to use netbeans at least.

You need to run netbeans with the following switch "

--laf Nimbus

So your command to launch will look as follows

"/home/whatever/netbeans-7.4/bin/netbeans" --laf Nimbus

Mount my SD Card in Ubuntu 12.04

I had several problems mounting my SD Card in Ubuntu.  From NOTHING happening (my worst case of issue ... How can some-one troubleshoot with NO, ZERO messages etc ... to the partitions being mounted but readonly ... So I could never install Raspbmc (or any distro for that matter) onto my  Raspberry Pi 

Until I came across a post on Ask Ubuntu which pointed me in the right direction.

Turned out to be a permissions issue. 

First thing to do is to check the permissions on the hardware device mounting your card. You'll need to find the device name. To do this run the following command:

sudo fdisk -l

Your device will probably be something along the lines of /dev/sdb1, in my case the SD Reader was /dev/mmcblk0p1.

Next you need to get the permissions on this device:

sudo ls -l /dev/mmcblk0p1

Replace "/dev/mmcblk0p1" with your device location. The output will look something like this:

brw-rw---- 1 root disk 179, 1 Feb 3 21:58 /dev/mmcblk0p1

This tells us the device is owned by User 'root' and group 'disk' You need to be a member of group 'disk' to be able to write to the SD card. You can check which groups your a member of with

groups username

In my case I was not a member of the 'disk' group, I rectified this with

sudo usermod -g disk username

This adds you to the group 'disk' which should allow you to now read & write to the SD card

The BIG thing for me was adding my user to the Group 'disk' which sorted everything out.  Thanks to Cage for pointing this out.

Hope this helps.

73

Reading .eml files in Win7

I use webmail (Google) however some of my colleagues insist on using MS Outlook.

 Often when I get an email from them that contains another email that they forwarded the additional message arrives in an attachment called noname.eml

 This freaks me out ... and I have spent much time looking for an app that will read these files (there are some available but I can't really recommend any that stand out as being an elegant solution for me).

I stumbled onto a very simple solution today.

1. Simply download the file (noname.eml) from your original email
2. Rename it to noname.mht 
3. Open it with Internet Explorer 

 No need for any additional software .... which suits me.

Ubuntu Server Disable screen blanking

This is so simple however I always seem to forget how to do it.

I have an Ubuntu server and often want to run htop over a few days while testing something. The problem is though that the screen keeps going blank. This is fine but then I quickly want to see what the current performance is at a glance while walking past. I don't want to have to press a key to get the screen live again.

As root run the following

setterm -powersave off -blank 0

Here are a few more interesting things you can do with setterm.

Custom menus in Windows Start Menu

I like to keep bunch of portable utility apps on my Windows machines that I use from time to time. Normally I store these apps in C:\Utils and then just access them via Explorer but recently I have been using one of my new favourite apps (MobaXterm), to access my Linux media centers, a lot and it's becoming a bit of pain to always go via Explorer.

So with that in mind I decided to see if I could create a custom menu in my Start menu and guess what, you can.


To do this all you need to do is:

Right click the Start button and select Properties.
Click the Customize... button

Select one of the following menus that you are not using.
Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Recorded TV or Videos.
I went with Recorded TV.
You can either use Display as a link or Display as a menu.
A link will just be a shortcut to your folder but a menu will display a pop out list, I chose menu because it's one less click.

Click the Start button and you will see the new menu, right click it and select Properties.
Add the folder or folders, you which to appear in your new menu, with the Include a folder... button. While you're there remove any default folders you don't want to appear.

Lastly right click on the new menu again and select Rename to give it a nice name and with that you are done.

Fix VirtualBox Time Sync

Today I needed to do some testing on a VirtualBox VM to ensure that our software handles crossing over midnight correctly, this meant that I either needed to change the time on my VM or wait until midnight to do my testing (yeah that's not going to happen).

That's no problem you might say, ah but you'd be wrong for if you change the time and wait a few seconds then the time will reset itself. Once again I hear you say "no problem, disable 'synchronisation with the Internet time server" and once again you'd be wrong and the reason for this is that VirtualBox syncs the time between your Host and Guest machines.
To prevent this from happening you need to stop your VM and run the following command:

vboxmanage setextradata "VMs Name" "VBoxInternal/Devices/VMMDev/0/Config/GetHostTimeDisabled" "1"

Just replace VMs Name with the registered name (how it appears in VirtualBox) of your VM and voilà problem solved.

Note: If that doesn't work you can also modify the vbox file of your VM manually. Open the file with your favourite text editor and add the following line

<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/VMMDev/0/Config/GetHostTimeDisabled" value="1"/>

under the <ExtraData> element.