Info Zone

Today, I finally made a really clean install of my ubuntu system. Most times, I have been upgrading from one release to another. This chain of upgrades caused my system to be horribly slow to the extend that, I really couldn’t do anything with my machine.I also had issues with sound so I therefore I decided to give my machine a fresh install to clean up all the riffraffs my chain of upgrades have been leaving behind.

This time, I decided to experiement a bit, not only that, in fact I had no CD writer available to burn the downloaded iso, so I decided to do the installation over the LAN. Few googling got me all I needed to do such stuff and I’m going to share with you the step by step of what I did.

Requirements:.

• Apache
• netboot installer image for i386 or 64bit.
• A Pen drive
• Of course, ubuntu alternate iso

Procedure:

1. Install apache if its not installed by issueing
   

   sudo aptitude install apache2

2. Download the netboot installer image for gutsy by issueing
   

   w g e t -c –tries=0 <URL>

   I downloaded i386 because that is my architecture type. If yours is a 64bit go for that instead.

3. Download gutsy alternate iso and not the desktop, that is if you don’t have it downloaded already, by issueing
   

   w g e t -c –tries=0 <URL>

4. Now mount the downloaded iso to a directory. I mounted my to /mnt by issueing
   

   sudo mount -o loop /path/where/iso/is/saved /mnt

5. Create a symbolic link so that the content of /mnt can be browsed over http. This can be achieved by issueing
   

   sudo ln -s /mnt /var/www/ubuntu

   When you go to http://ip.address.of.machine/ubuntu with your browser, it should display the content of /mnt.

6. Prepare the pendrive as a bootable pendrive by issueing
   

   gunzip /path/to/boot.img.gz
   dd if=boot.img of=/dev/sdb

   Now pendrive is ready for booting. Note my pendrive was detected as sdb. To check how yours was detected, use the dmesg command

7. Stick pendrive into the machine you want to install gutsy, then reboot. Change boot sequence so it boots from pendrive. Remember the machine should be on the network.
8. Remove pendrive when language selection options show up. For saftey.
9. Follow wizard till you get to the option to select a mirror of ubuntu archive. At that page, scroll up untill you see “enter information manually”, select that, then enter the ip address of the machine which the iso has been mounted.
10. Follow the rest of the wizard and that should get gutsy installed on your system

Remember to edit /etc/apt/source.list and change all the ip address entries to a mirror archive near you after a successful install. I in particular used gh.archive.ubuntu.com because that is for my country Ghana

Benefit of doing such installation. You don’t get to burn any CD or DVD so you don’t get to waste money. You’re also some how guaranteed a trouble free installation provided you get a continues network connection. No bad CD or DVD issues which may halt installation at some point. No CD or DVD ROM reading noise. You get a silent install provided you don’t have a noisy HDD.

Of course there is a draw back. You must start installation again when you loose connectivity between the installation machine and the hosting machine.

That is all the nerves behind installing gutsy over the network. Isn’t that trival.

This is something off what I normally write about but I need a space to air my feelings of a school I attend. I attend a school that is really pinching on my freedom, interest, comfort and everything that will make me enjoy life as a student at the school. I know I’m not the only one suffering, almost everyone. You should see students faces in class and on campus, everyone is just not happy. I went to this school with the expectation of getting something out of the ordinary but it has turned out to be the contrary.

I got disappointed the very first day when lectures began. When I was filling the admission form, I chose morning school based on my personal schedules so I can combine school,work and other stuff I enjoy doing but to my surprise, I was put on the afternoon school( I wasn’t informed about this, it was just put into my throat to swallow ). I kept mute and tried my best to accept. Now I had to re schedule, which I did quietly( its great to have a boss who understands ).

Now to the school lab policy. We use to enjoy the school labortory very much until recently, a new unfriendly policy was passed and now I don’t enter into the lab as I use to. The new policy is that, any student who want to use the lab has to deposit his or her student’s ID card to the security guy down there before anyone can enter the lab. So when the good samaritan decides to leave the lab, then everyone has to go out if no one is willing to sacrifice his or her ID card. What a wack crazy school. If its security you want to check, why don’t you just ask everyone to enter into the lab with his/her ID period. Depositing ID card here and there is just a plain dumb policy. I almost forgot, you can’t enter the lab with your bag.

Now to the crazy of all policies. Just recently, a dress code was enforce on each and everyone. You’re to wear a by force shirt and a by force flying tie as a way to enforce decency in the way we the students dress. ** Yes I totally agree ** if you want to enforce decency on us but enforcing a dress code on us is just a ridiculous thing to bear. I go to afternoon school, I don’t have a car of my own, I go with regular bus, had to stand in the sun for couple of minutes to get a bus to school and back to the office. Imagine the kind of pain I’m going to go through. Hot sun with shirt and tie OMG. This policy has given the security guys some form of upper hand over we the students. I was recently sacked from the school by a security man because I was in an african wear not shirt and flying tie ( it was the day when the dressing code was enforced ) and I had to miss a mid semester exams. Now I have lost 30% already( if I’m lucky and explain to the lecture and he gives me a chance to write it, then no need to worry other wise … ) of that course.

I fail to understand why a dressing code is being enforce on us. If its decency, just check the way we dress and leave us alone to wear the kind of dress that makes us comfortable and decent looking. Shirt and tie is not the only way to dress decent ah. They must as well sew us a uniform, then I know I wear a uniform to school. Now I have to budget for a new set of clothes. Something I have never planned doing.

As for the school SRC, I wonder the kind of job they do in favour of us. They just sit and accept all sort of dictatorship from the school authorities and just don’t comment on our behalf, they even don’t tell us what is being planned that is going to pinch us. To me they’re dormant SRC I’ve ever come across. I’m waiting for the day they will call for SRC meeting, I’m going to walk in there and air my opinion about them.

My advice to anyone planning to go back to school. If you are choosing a school, its great to check their website for information on courses, admission, fees and anything on how to get into the school don’t get seduce with the kind of information you get on their website and hear on radios, news paper, etc. If you really want to know the internals of the school whether it meets your interests and what you want, find a honest student of that school and throw some queries at the person. They are the right people to tell you the kind of information you need to justify whether this is the right school for you or not. Honestly I have really lost interest in the school because of all these uncomfortable, unfriendly, rigid policies coming out making me perfom badly. I’m trying my best to cope but the interest keeps fading each time a new policy comes out. I’m not against policies that will make the school better but they should consider our interest, comfort and freedom when planning on such policies not just theirs. There are other unfriendly policies which I just don’t want to comment. As for my school I don’t think I’m going to complete with them if situation doesn’t change.

Most often, I do get the chance to get access to people’s passwords, especially to their email accounts and I have noticed, most of them use personal information for their passwords, Yes we all know its hard to be memorizing passwords but using such means to generate passwords with the intension of easy memorization and remembrance is a compromise to security. Some use lose personal information such as their last names, mum’s name, lovers name, sister’s name , birthday, etc just any easy to remember personal information but they do forget these are things which can be easily guessed by close relations or friends. In effect such way of generating passwords is insecure.

Now that you know how insecure you’re password is, I’m going to show you how to generate secure and easy to remember passwords. Lets go through the don’ts when it comes to generating passwords.

1. Avoid Personal Information: As much as you can, avoid the use of personal information for passwords, these are easily guessed by anyone close to you.
2. Don’t Use Short Characters: Short characters for passwords are easily cracked with password cracking tools.
3. Avoid The Use Of Real Words: Real words  such as helpme,gaming,hey,you, etc are easily cracked. A little password cracking tool will get them to have your password.
4. Avoid One Password For All Accounts: Because you can’t memorize all those gazillions of passwards, you choose to use one password for all accounts, that is really a bad practise, when someone get hold of that password, it means, that person has access to all your accounts.

To the dos

1. Keep Characters Long: Always keep your password characters very long. At least 8 characters should be okay even though most web applications requires at least 6 characters long but that is not enough, it doesn’t pay a penny to add two characters to those normal six characters.
2. Mix With Other Character type: As a healthier and secure practise, always mix your passwords with other character types.Eg !,#,@,%,^,&,*,(,etc
3. Cultivate The Habit Of Using Passpharse: Passphrase are means of remembering your password. This is when you use a favourite phrase or a sentence to generate a password. An example could be, “I go home every sunday” password “!goh0meeverysund4y”. You see from the above sentence, I created a nice good looking, long, secure and easy to remember password. I replaced the “I” with ! , the “o” with 0 and “a” with 4. Isn’t that easy?. Now tell me you’ll forget this kind of long password.
4. Renew passwords: Try your best to change your password frequently say every 3 weeks.