My Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 Experience

Took a leap of faith with my Ubuntu lol

I managed to successfully upgrade my Ubuntu from 8.04 to 8.10 :) Took some guts having not done a proper full backup, I did above half of copying my data. Anyway this is what I done.

Unlocked upgrades to "Short term" releases and then clicked for updates and finally clicked "Upgrade to the latest Ubuntu release".


Changed all configs to the latest one(Accidently kept one old one).
Rebooted.
Had issues with X, but eventually it knows.

Anoying issue for me was, had to recompile VMWare :/ and fix my Compiz configs caps.

I'm happy anyway :)

Firewall in Linux

Firewall, determines what applications and services, ports, ips are allowed in and out of your machine.

Best one is to use the recommended software. As of 8.10 Ubuntu, they recommend "ufw", which is command based "terminal".

Strong Advice, you don't need a GUI, use the commands "ufw"
See the offical Wiki entry here.

Also don't need a GUI frontend to ufw because it already is a frontend to some else already complicated.

What really governs all the Rules?
Firewall management on Linux/Ubuntu is managed by "iptables" and setting those up are complicated at times. "ufw" and "firestarter" are frontends to "iptables". Use either one or the other.

Example of how complex "iptables" comared to "ufw" is:
ufw: sudo ufw deny from 10.100.0.5
iptables : sudo iptables -A INPUT -s 10.100.0.5 -j REJECT

But if you want a GUI
Think you can install it from "Applications->Add/Remove" and search for "Firestarter", just don't bother with "ufw".

Other Frontends
gufw : Frontend to ufw, even though ufw is a frontend to iptables. Seems silly
lokkit and Guarddog : Frontend to iptables, these I feel seem a bit complicated but it's what ever you feel comfortable with in the end.





Pipe Viewing

Found an article that seems to help show the progress of piping things from place to another in nix.

Example 1 (From Article)
To know the progress of this pipe command: compress this log

$ gzip -c access.log > access.log.gz

You Run

$ pv access.log | gzip > access.log.gz
611MB 0:00:11 [58.3MB/s] [=>      ] 15% ETA 0:00:59

Example 2 (From Article)
If you wish to see more details

$ pv -cN source access.log | gzip | pv -cN gzip > access.log.gz
source:  760MB 0:00:15 [37.4MB/s] [=>     ] 19% ETA 0:01:02
gzip: 34.5MB 0:00:15 [1.74MB/s] [  <=>  ]

How to get It?
Course to have that nice command, make sure you either get the latest tar ball or run some installing utility like this.

$ sudo aptitude install pv

Made by Andrew Wood