LDAP Authentication in Apache2 on Ubuntu

Today I needed to help a co-worker setup a development server that mirrored the setup of our production server as close as possible.  Our production server is Red Hat based, and the laptops that we use for development are running Ubuntu, for the most part.  On Red Hat, I custom compiled the apache installation so that we could get things exactly how we wanted them.  On Ubuntu, I wanted to just use the default apache installation, but needed to get the LDAP authentication working for the .htaccess files.  After much looking through synaptic, and browsing the internet, I stumbled upon something that pointed me in the direction of using a2enmod.  After issuing the following command:

sudo a2enmod authnz_ldap

and restarting the server, my authentication began to work perfectly.  I was very happy to find this, and I think it's a great method of enabling optional modules for certain tools.

openSuse 11.1 vs Ubuntu 9.04

Recently, there were a couple of new Linux distribution releases that have been causing quite a bit of buzz around my workplace. Many of us have become fans of Ubuntu, but have used Suse for quite a while, so we like to stay informed of where each of the distributions is currently at. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop, and had the opportunity to install openSuse 11.1 on an identical laptop for a co-worker. This gives me a moment to briefly compare a few of the things I found in the very short time that I had with the Suse box.
The first thing that I didn't like with Suse is that the wireless card, which in this case was a broadcom card, didn't auto-install. I had to search the internet, and finally found some pages that referred to running the following scripts:

/usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware
/etc/init.d/network restart

After these scripts, the wireless worked as expected. I found it kind of sad that I needed to connect to the internet and do some searching when the scripts were already with the installation. I wish it would detect that I had that type of card, and offer to run them for me. I liked Ubuntu much better, as it seemed to handle this in a fashion that would be easier for a new user to get running.

Also, openSuse seemed to be trying too hard in the looks department. It had a lot of transparency and floating menus. Kind of weird. Just didn't have a really appealing look to me.

Creating a list of machines on your NIS domain

If you're on a Linux machine that authenticates via NIS, you can very easily generate a list of all the Linux/Unix machines that are using that NIS server to authenticate. The command is:
ypcat hosts
You can also list the users that are authenticating against this server:
ypcat passwd
One situation in which this becomes very useful is if you have a heterogeneous network and people are running different shells. Part of the output of this second command is to tell you what shell people have as their default login shell. If these are set differently, you could be getting different environment settings and behavior.

Finding multiple files with the find command on Linux

After fighting with the find command for quite a while yesterday, and trying to figure out it's regular expression parsing engine, one of my co-workers just let me in on a very useful function of find. You can specify multiple "-name" options on a command line if you seperate them with a "-o". For example, if you want to find all the files on your system named kids.txt and money.txt, you could issue the following command,
find / -name kids.txt -o -name money.txt
Pretty handy. Hope this helps you out if you are ever in this situation!

Ubuntu 8.04 on VMWare Player

I've been working on getting an Ubuntu virtual machine running on my Ubuntu laptop so that I could test things without messing up my main laptop, and was having a very difficult time getting things working right. The biggest problem is that the keyboard repeat rate appeared to be set very fast, and each time I hit a key, I'd get multiples of that key. I found a blog entry that seems to have helped:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=692842
This entry basically says that you should add acpi=off to the kernel line of your guest OS.
Worked great for me!