I have been busy migrating from Windows 7 RC to full retail version of Windows 7. It has taken over 1.5 full days (which includes half a day formatting a brand new 1TB hard drive).

During the course of putting things back onto my speedy fresh install I found a problem when I started up Thunderbird. There were duplicate system folders such as Local Inbox, Sent box, etc. Because they are system folders there is no option to delete. It had been a while since I started it back up from my old install and got some emails in only one of the 2 Inboxes.

After a while I found the problem. It was Dropbox and the way it handles conflicted files / folders.

Prerequisites

Take a back up of the profile which contains everything for a user. This includes emails, settings and more. To find where the user profile is go to Tools > Account Settings.

For each account listed click on the Server Settings and at the bottom on the right side of the window there is a textbox with the label Local directory: Copy the directory after ~\Profiles\. Make sure Thunderbird is not running before a copy is taken.

Do not forget to backup the Local Folders too. Select Local Folders and there is a textbox with the same label.

Removing Duplicate Folders

Close Mozilla Thunderbird if it’s still open. Inside the profiles directory there is a folder called Mail. This is where each email account has it’s own folder and there is also the local folder where emails are stored on the computer. Go into each of those folders and look for files or folders where it has the computer name and the description conflicted copy and a date stamp. Check which copy is the latest version (and where the back up may come in handy) using date time stamp of the file, size of the file and the conflict date stamp. Delete the duplicate or remove the original and rename the conflicted file exactly the same as the original file.

Summary

A slight pain but it’s worth it if it allows me to access my email offline on multiple computers.

Related posts:

1. Sync Mozilla Thunderbird Using Dropbox
2. Thunderbird HTML Signatures
3. Microsoft FolderShare

That’s it. It should install and even add the printer automatically.

Related posts:

1. Setting Up CUPS (Print Server) On Ubuntu 8.04
2. Installing IPP Printer On Ubuntu
3. Microsoft Word Crashing Frequently

I wanted to have the Windows partition and the user partition on separate drives. I have done this in the past on a Linux computer and it was very painless.

The advantage to this setup is that most of the personal data such as things stored in My Documents, My Music, etc and the Windows specific stuff like installed programs, patches, etc are stored on a separate partition whether it’s on the same or different drive. This degree of separation allows the Windows partition to be wiped and started fresh without affecting the personal files.

I had time during my fresh install to play about with various setups and have listed the options in the following section.

Be aware that not all programs store settings/preferences in the user directory so this is no replacement

I am not responsible for any damage or problems caused by the below procedure.

Final note is that I tried many combinations but some how managed to get it to work. Whilst the steps may not be 100% correct it should be a good guideline to see the process through. I shall update it should I come across it again.

Prerequisites

Before starting ALWAYS ALWAYS back up all the necessary files. Even though this design is suppose to negate the need to back it is still advised to backup in case something goes wrong.

Have a Windows 7 Install CD and CD Key ready.

Time!

Mounting Options

1. Mounting a drive to a directory – I was very keen on using this technique when I saw in the Disk Management utility. It sounds like the method used in Linux and would make it fairly transparent to the user.
2. Separate sub directories within users – This option makes it very simple to do because Windows 7 has the option of moving all the directories under the users one such as Pictures, Music, Search, etc. Just specify the new location and Explorer will move the files creating the directory along the way and taking care of permissions.
3. Change the %UserProfile% in the registry so that it is pointing to another drive.

Mounting A Drive To A Directory

This was my first choice so I wiped my system and went about to do this. The steps described in the superuser website are as follows:

1. You boot with the install media.
2. At the screen with the “Install Now” choose “Repair your computer”
3. You will be asked if you want to “Repair and Restart” by the System Recovery options, choose “No”.
4. Then Make sure that Windows 7 is listed as one of the installed OS’s available for recovery, it’s selected and them press next.
5. You will be given a list of recovery tools, chose “Command Prompt”.
6. In the command prompt you will be using Robocopy to copy c:\Users to d:\Users
7. Type robocopy c:\Users d:\Users /mir /xj
8. /mir tells robocopy to mirror the directories, this will copy all files and permissions.
9. /xj is very important, this tells robocopy not to follow junction points. If you forget this, you will have a lot of trouble.
10. Make sure no files failed to copy (FAILED column = 0).
11. Remove the old Users Folder from the c: drive: rmdir /S /Q C:\Users
12. Create a NTFS Junction that points to the new Users folder: mklink /J C:\Users D:\Users

The problem with the above method is the drives letters in recovery mode may not be using the correct drive letters when in normal Windows. For example drive C: is the windows drive and drive Z: was the user drive. In recover mode it generally assigns drive letters incrementally so in order to get the drive to mount on Z: the user drive needs to be on the 24th SATA port. This is unrealistic.

Also after performing those steps you would find the user to be locked out because of the user mapping has changed. To fix this boot into safe mode and login and do the following steps outlined in Nigel’s blog

What now? Well I found additional registry entries with REGEDIT under

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

There was 1 line for each profile. Crucially if a profile is bad there are 3 things worth checking
a) Ensure the key name doesn’t end in “.bad”
b) Ensure the RefCount value is 0
c) Ensure the State value is 0

Having gone through all those steps it made the OS unstable. I’m not sure if it’s a hardware issue but there seemed to be long seek times or Windows was taking a lot longer to follow the symbolic link. Whilst it worked, it hangs and long load times was not acceptable to me.

Separate Sub Directories Within Users

This is the easiest setup and I started with using this as my solution when the above method did not work for me. The problem with this was that it left the user directory e.g C:\Users\Danny on the same drive as the Windows partition and I do use that directory (as well as my Desktop which can be mapped to another drive) as my dumping ground. Not totally satisfied I found a workable solution described below.

Change the %UserProfile%

This is the final approach I took. It worked in the end but there was a lot of confusion when I did it but I ended up with the result I wanted.

Before changing the variable the files must be copied to the new drive. To do this I used the above method of dropping into command line, copying the files to the new location. Follow steps the steps in Mounting A Drive To A Directory section. Before closing the registry edit the attribute ProfileImagePath in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList to the path of the new user directory. Reboot and it should be done.

Summary

Whilst the last method worked. I’d like to go through it again to ensure the steps are correct but I’m sure it more or less sums it up. I’m happy I got the result I wanted but wished the symbolic link worked. I’m looking at separating the install directories as well such as the typical C:\Program Files directory so that the Windows partition only contains Windows related files.

Mount second drive as c:/Users in Windows 7.

Fixing User Profiles in Vista

Related posts:

1. Samba GUI Config
2. Sync Mozilla Thunderbird Using Dropbox
3. VirtualBox With Ubuntu Quick Review

Related posts:

1. Header 11 Image
2. New Website Theme Changes
3. Tequila Lives On And Is Live

Change all idata.o2.co.uk username to mobile.o2.co.uk.

MMS, change idata.o2.co.uk to wap.o2.co.uk.

Data Settings for Pay & Go and Pay Monthly (non iPhone tariff) customers

Related posts:

1. iPhone 3G Thoughts
2. iPhone O2 Tariffs
3. Free VPN For The iPhone

Related posts:

1. WordPress 2.8.3
2. WordPress 2.3 Upgrade (Update)
3. WordPress 2.3.3 Upgrade

Episode 551

Related posts:

1. Podcast Shout Out
2. energy@home Mention On GNC#518
3. GNC #476 Email

The command to do this is:
sudo mount -t iso9660 -o loop /home/danny/filename.iso /media/cdrom

where “/home/danny/filename.iso” is the path to the ISO file and the latter “/media/cdrom” is the mount point. In this case it will mount it where the CDROM would normally be mounted on.

Mount ISO as CD-rom not as a folder

Related posts:

1. NFS Server
2. Setting Default Linux Shell
3. Formatting A Floppy Disk In Linux

Network File Share (NFS) is a protocol for sharing storage. It is quite common in Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices and is a standard compared to Samba which is Microsoft specific but has been ported to Linux.

Install NFS Server

Install the relevant software:
sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server nfs-common portmap

Configure NFS Server

Configuring NFS server is relatively simply. Edit the file /etc/exports file and add all the directories available as a share. The format should be as follows

/media/cdrom 192.168.0.1/24(rw,async)

Using the above string this would share the CDROM to any computer with the IP range 192.168.0.1-192.168.0.254 that has read and write permissions and requests can be process asynchronously.

Specific IPs can be given to each share like this:

/media/cdrom 192.168.0.1(rw,async) 192.168.0.1(ro,async)

Computer 192.168.0.1 has the permissions described in the above example and the computer with 192.168.0.2 only has asynchronous requests and read only access to files for that share.

When specifying mount points note where the spaces are and are not because spaces are read by the system so

/media/cdrom 192.168.0.1 (rw,async)

is invalid because there is a space between the IP address and the parenthesis.

Once all the shares have been configured it is necessary to restart NFS to see the changes:
sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

Mount NFS Share On Linux

Install the NFS client if the computer does not have a NFS server itself:
sudo apt-get install portmap nfs-common

To mount the share manually from the terminal type the following:
sudo mount 192.168.0.1:/media/cdrom /media/share
First is super user command sudo then mount command, IP address of NFS server followed by the path to share. The last parameter is the local mount point so in the above example it will mount the CDROM drive from the server onto /media/share directory of the client computer.

To make the mount more permanent edit the /etc/fstab file and the following line, one for each NFS share.

192.168.0.1:/media/cdrom /media/share nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr

The only part that needs to be changed is the IP address, NFS share point and the mount point. This is highlighted in bold in the example above. The rest should be fine left as is. This change should mount the share when the computer is started.

Mount NFS Share On Windows 7 Ultimate Edition

NFS support does not come as standard with Windows so it has to be installed. Also I only found the feature in Windows 7 Ultimate Edition and not the Professional. I believe there is a Business Edition in between but do not know if it has the support for NFS.

Go to the Control Panel and on the left hand side click on Turn Windows features on or off hyper link. It will load a list of software in a tree / node structure. Find Services for NFS and tick Client for NFS as a minimum.

On the start menu right click on Network and select Map network drive. If this option is not in the start menu go to Computer and right click on Network from the left hand panel. A wizard will start for mapping a network drive.

Select the drive letter to be assigned to the NFS share and for the Folder enter the address [server]:[path] for example 192.168.0.1:/media/cdrom
Tick Reconnect at logon if you want it to connect on start up and click Finish to end the wizard.

The only problem with mounting the NFS on Windows is every time Computer it takes a longer to scan and load the drives because it scans the NFS to get the size and amount used on the NFS.

Summary

NFS between Linux machines is perfect and a good way to share files. Mounting a NFS makes the local share look as if it was it was local drive.

For Windows I’d stick to using Samba because it doesn’t take a while to scan the shared drive every time the drive is highlighted to get the drive information such as amount of space available. It’s not a nice to administer two services doing the same thing but it works.

NFS Server and Client Configuration in Ubuntu

Related posts:

1. Mount ISO File In Linux
2. Change MAC Address In Windows
3. Print Server (CUPS)

The network will go down during this process so it’s best to stop or wait till all downloads or any other network related activity has stopped.

Right click on Computer and select Manage.

Go to Device Manager on the left hand side list to display all the hardware usually categorised by type. Drill down into Network adapters and select the Network Interface to be changed.

Right click on the Network card and select Properties.

Go to the Advanced tab and look for Network Address in the Property: list. In some cases if this property is not listed it can be added in from the same window. Selecting the Network Address will change the right hand side to what can be changed. By default this is set to Not Present. To enter a custom MAC address select the Value radio button and enter in the MAC address with no spaces or colons in the textbox provided. OK all the windows to accept the changes. To undo this change simply change the selection of the radio buttons from Value to Not Present.

The optional steps below allows a reserved IP address to be re-assigned to the new MAC address.
Either restart of go to Start Menu > Run…. type in cmd and press enter. A DOS window should appear. type in ipconfig /release to disconnect all network adapters and ipconfig /renew to get a new IP.

How to Change or Spoof MAC Address in Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003/2008, Mac OS X, Unix and Linux

Related posts:

1. NFS Server
2. Bypass Blocked Websites Using SSH Proxy
3. Installing IPP Printer On Ubuntu

I found the Video plugin for MythTV 0.21 to be inadequate for streaming to the Sony Playstation 3. It didn’t update fast enough when you dropped a video into the UPnP directory and also there was no external way of telling it to refresh it’s list of files without starting up Myth Frontend.

MediaTomb

MediaTomb is a UPnP server which can run as a standalone or as a daemon. It uses an XML configuration file for it’s settings (pretty neat stuff) and is pretty small in size. The software comes with it’s own web server so you don’t have to install a full apache install to get to the control panel and it uses SQLite by default so no big database backend to be installed.

Install & Configure MediaTomb

Install MediaTomb and ffmeg thumbnailer
sudo apt-get install mediatomb ffmpegthumbnailer
That’s it for the install!

edit the file config file in /etc/mediatomb/config.xml and change the following settings:

Enable PS3 support change this:

<protocolInfo extend=”no”/><!– For PS3 support change to “yes” –>

to

<protocolInfo extend=”yes”/><!– For PS3 support change to “yes” –>

and also

<!– <map from=”avi” to=”video/divx”/> –>

to

<map from=”avi” to=”video/divx”/>

Add the line
<pc-directory upnp-hide="yes"/>
below
<webroot>/usr/share/mediatomb/web</webroot>
so that it looks like this
<webroot>/usr/share/mediatomb/web</webroot>
<pc-directory upnp-hide="yes"/>
This hides the full directory path from the Playstation so it can only view the directories added and not the full system.

Add the following to enable thumbnail previews. I have found this does not work 100% of the time.

Enable transcoding
<transcoding enabled="no">
to
<transcoding enabled="yes">

Add the following transcode mappings under <mimetype-profile-mappings> tag:

<transcode mimetype=”video/divx” using=”video-thumbnail”/>
<transcode mimetype=”video/mpeg” using=”video-thumbnail”/>
<transcode mimetype=”video/mp4″ using=”video-thumbnail”/>
<transcode mimetype=”video/x-ms-wmv” using=”video-thumbnail”/>

Add the following settings between the <profiles></profiles> elements. Not the parent is plural and each profile is singular.

<profile name=”video-thumbnail” enabled=”yes” type=”external”>
<mimetype>image/jpeg</mimetype>
<accept-url>yes</accept-url>
<thumbnail>yes</thumbnail>
<resolution>128×128</resolution>
<agent command=”/usr/bin/ffmpegthumbnailer” arguments=”-i %in -o %out -s 128″/>
<buffer size=”524288″ chunk-size=”512″ fill-size=”1024″/>
</profile>

Restart MediaTomb service sudo /etc/init.d/mediatomb restart If it fails to restart then double check the config file for errors.

Go to the machine in a web browser on port 49152 e.g http://localhost:49152

On this web page configures the directories available over UPnP. The Database section shows what directories are visible / registered to MediaTomb and Filesystem shows the computer directories that can be added for DLNA / UPnP visibility. When a directory is added MediaTomb scans the directory and register them so they show up on the Playstation. These can include music, videos and pictures.

In the top right hand corner there is a plus “+” with two arrows around it. Clicking on it loads a new page in the main window, replacing the file lists in the directory. This is the page for setting how often it scans for changes.

Go to the Playstation, turn it on and go to the relevant category e.g photo in the menu. There should be a MediaTomb server in the list. If it does not appear go towards the top and scan for more media servers to look for MediaTomb.

Summary

The software is pretty self contained but I would have liked the option to use Apache and MySQL because those are already installed on my system.

MediaTomb does the job for now and whilst I cannot get the thumbnails to work on all the media it still does a brillant job of streaming the media to the Playstation. Unfortunately it’s not integrated into MythTV so records will still have to be done via MythTV but this is not a problem because all recorded TV shows are registered in the database.

A problem I did encounter was that I added multiple directories but reguardless of where they reside on the computer, all videos appear in one directory on the Playstation. I’m not sure if this is a bug or how it’s suppose to work.

[HOWTO]:Stream DivX/XviD to a PS3 with firmware 2.10 using MediaTomb and Ubuntu 7

Related posts:

1. dvd::rip
2. Ubuntu Music Streaming Server – Ampache
3. MythWeb Database Access Denied

energy@home project page

Related posts:

1. energy@home Twitter Integration
2. energy@home Project Update v0.4a
3. Recording CurrentCost Data & Viewing It On The Web

Gravatar’s website

Related posts:

1. WordPress and Postfix
2. WordPress Built-In Media Library Non Relative Links
3. Automatic WordPress Upgrade To 2.7.1

Assuming VSFTPD has been installed (in the default location) edit the file /etc/vsftpd.conf and check there are security certificates installed and configured.

There are two entries which start with either:
dsa_cert_file
dsa_private_key_file
or
rsa_cert_file
rsa_private_key_file
Each specifying a file path to where the key and certificates are located.

The last step is to enable SFTP by adding the following line:
ssl_enable=YES
Save and exit the file and restart the FTP server sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart

Related posts:

1. My Performance Tweaks To Ubuntu
2. Enabling Remote Access To MySQL
3. SSH On Multiple Ports

Go to the command line as an administrator. This can be achived by going to Start Menu and typing cmd in the search bar. Search for cmd.exe under Programs, hold Shift key and right click on cmd.exe. At this point you can let go of the shift key and select Run as administrator.

A dialogue box may warn you when starting the the program but OK it to start the program. Type:
powercfg -energy
and press enter to start it. The program will monitor your computer for 1 minute. In this time do what you wish.

Once it has finished it will print out the location of the report which is in a HTML (web page) format. You may need to copy to a suitable folder for your browser to open it.

Tekzilla Daily Tip #511

Related posts:

1. Windows 7 Sleep & Wakes Up Unexpectedly / Instantly
2. Windows 7 Monitor Calibration
3. Windows Vista Start Bar Search

SSH tunnels are very useful for all sorts of things. One of these uses include proxy. If you have SSH access you can set one up very quickly.

I do not condone any misuses of any I.T equipment, software or any other kind described in this article. All practices should be used within the law and policy set by your region. Any examples are given are done so to highlight the uses this article may provide.

Uses

By using your own SSH proxy you can by pass firewalls or blocked websites by directing the data through this connection and out from your SSH server.

For example at a work place they block websites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. As long as you can connect to your SSH server the web traffic can be re-routed through this connection without the company seeing what is happening when the data is being re-routed apart from you have a SSH session (which may raise some eye brows if you do not have a legitimate use in your daily activities).

Pre-requisites

A server running an SSH server. The remainder of this article will be done on a Ubuntu box.

Install SSH server by entering the following command in the terminal:
$ sudo apt-get install openssh-server

The default configuration should suffice and you can use your local accounts to log in.

Establishing Multiple Ports

It is generally a good idea to have your SSH server listening to more than just the default port (which is 22). Most places may ban this port to stop SSH session going out of an organization potentially leaving a connection open for unwanted outsiders.

To work around this look at my earlier article on how to set up multiple ports on the SSH server.

Using Proxy On Windows

Download Putty from Putty’s website. It’s just a small program that lets you connect to a SSH server amongst other protocols.

Starting the program up will show a window with a tree like navigation to the left and settings pane to the right and a bunch of buttons at the bottom. The following sections are based on the nodes on the left hand side of the window.

Session

Enter the IP address of the server and the ports configured above. Ensure the Connection type is set to SSH.

In Saved Sessions enter a name to call your connection so you do not have to enter the above and the following details every time. Do not press the Save button till all the settings have been set.

Connection > SSH > Tunnels

Enter the port your web browser will be using in the Source port box.

Leave Destination blank and select Dynamic and Auto radio buttons. Click the Add button to add the connection tunnel to the list. Multiple tunnels can be entered as long as different ports are used.

At this point you can go back to the Session page and save the session by clicking on the Save button. To load the connection next time, select it from the list and click on the Load button.

Click on the Open button to initiate the connection.

A warning my come up if it’s your first time connecting to your server via SSH. Accept it and it will prompt for a username then password. Enter your details pressing enter at each stage to move onto the next.

Once you get in it’s time to configure the web browser.

FireFox

Go to Tools > Options… Select the Advanced button and go to the Network tab. Click on the Settings button in the connection area. A new window should pop up.

Select Manual proxy configuration and set the HTTP Proxy to localhost and the source port set in the Putty section. Ok to all the dialogues and your done.

Internet Explorer

Go to Tools > Internet Options. In Internet Options window go to the Connections tab.

Click on the LAN settings button to reveal another window.

In the Proxy server settings tick the box for Use a proxy server for your LAN… and enter the address as localhost and the port as the source port in Putty. Save and close all dialogue boxes and windows.

Summary

A neat trick to stop people snooping at your browsing habits or just to avoid blocked sites. Sites may load slower because it has to go from your local machine, to the proxy server and out to the Internet and back again.

Related posts:

1. SSH On Multiple Ports
2. Installing IPP Printer On Ubuntu
3. Auto Login & Lock For Linux & Windows

I checked all my config settings for both VSFTP and Apache but ended up restarting both services which made it work. I did not see any errors in VSFTP logs and no relevant entries in Apache. One those strange occurrences I guess.

Related posts:

1. Apache Tuning
2. Awstats
3. MediaTomb DLNA To Playstation 3

As you can see the value for total energy used is currently way off but it’s a preview of what’s to come.

There are two options: tweet hourly summary and daily summary. These can be turned on and off. I am using python-twitter library which does not use oauth authentication so the client description comes up as API which is not nice.

Related posts:

1. energy@home 0.4
2. Recording CurrentCost Data & Viewing It On The Web
3. TweetStats

Related posts:

1. WordPress 2.2.1 Theme Breaker
2. WordPress 2.1
3. WordPress 2.3.1 Installed

Related posts:

1. WordPress 2.0.3 > 2.0.4
2. January Exams
3. Dan Has Problems…