Win XP Shares

Since i had my part of Harddisk failures i implemented a backup system (rsync and cron) to my linux server to prevent any dataloss. But i had some error messages and never got the time to look into that matter, until today.

I was never sure if it is a Windows or a samba problem but first what my script does:
1.) connect a windows share through samba mount.
2.) backup via rsync the data to my linux system
3.) disconnect.

So everythin i have to do is to share a directory under xp and that's all... or is it not. Working through my google results i learned that there are some difficulties to think of. First: i don't like the guest account and i left it disabled. I just used the "easy" sharing model of xp and that worked fine.

Ok, so where is the Problem: The Problem is when you are sharing directories under a folder that is not accessible by everyone (for example, individual folders under "Documents and
Settings").

Although i clicked on share this Directory and User have all rights, windows don't give you this rights. You have to disable the "easy sharing" model and then go to the folder permissions (of the shared directory) and on the security Tab.

There you can find a setting which tells that if there are permission settings on the parent directory (which there are for Documents and Settings) it will use them instead of anything else. Which meant: Nobody has rights on that Directory except the User who owns the individual parent folder...

%$&!! only windows can be so complicated. That's why i like linux. You tell the right permission to a folder and that's all, nothing more....

So all you have to do is to disable that parent overwrite.. (or to be exact: enable the overwrite parent settings checkbox).

Now i don't get any permission denied errors anymore!

Monkey Island

My collegues and i were talking about it over months before we finally could agree on a date, but we did and just 5 minutes ago we got through: Playing Monkey Island 1 once more over my video beamer with the cordless mouse and keyboard from my colleque.

Here is an image from the test (if it works on the beamer):

sync your google calendar with your ipod

I just bought a black 60 GB iPod for myself. (I was looking forward it a long time) Of course one of my first questions was: how will i get my google calendar data to my ipod.

Well i found a small program which does that, but the catch is, you have to do it manually when your ipod is connected.
As a programmer i would hope that iTunes would be more flexible than just standard Outlook connection.

Here is the Program: The Calendar works fine, but i was not able to sync my Contacts with that other tool:
http://johnny.matthews.googlepages.com/getcals

ide troubles

After i got my Raid Array working i had another Problem with the debian kernel i upgraded (kernel-image-2.6.8-11-amd64-k8), my ide harddisk was not working..

Tracking the problem i found that there were no hd devices in /dev. I checked the config of the kernel and the kernel uses ide as a module. Ok, now all i had to do is to load the right module.

Since i was not very familiar with installing specific modules, or knowing which module was the right i had some troubles getting it working. ide-cd and ide-disk were loaded, still something was missing.

Today i found it: ide-generic. After loading it with modprobe everything was there in /dev and i was able to mount the disk. Now all i had to do is to add it in /etc/modules.

Promise Raid at Linux

For two days now i have been tracking a problem on my new server. Grub was not able to read the updates debian at the menu.list. I was triing almost everything, but everytime i booted, the Menu from Grub did not change, until i found the Problem this night.

The Reason i had so much trouble was that the Promise (378) Raid Array was not recognized right by sarge. So every change i made was written to the second Disk, while the first Disk was the one i booted from...

After some research i found out that Promise has stopped supporting drivers for their controllers after kernel 2.4.22 (or so.) So the only good way is to create a linux software raid instead.

Took some time to get that information.

If you want to create a Raid 1 system with mdadm you can try that:

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --chunk=64 --level=raid1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hda1 /dev/hdc1

Some times /dev/md0 is not there yet, so you can either add it manually or add --auto to the mdadm string and it will create it automatically.