After some searching across the web I found that there wasn’t a very good write up on the step by step procedure to enable a TFTP daemon on Ubuntu (my choice for linux servers). I had actually messed around with the tftpd package, but in the little bit I was able to find I determined I wanted to use the ‘atftp’ and ‘atftpd’ packages available in Ubuntu’s universe repositories due to more adoption in instructions that were available. In what I’ve been able to determine, both the server daemon (atftpd) and the client program (atftp) are necessary on the server (computer). The reasoning, as best as I’ve been able to determine, is that the server (daemon) only makes the files available. The client (program) does all of the “work” in negotiating connections between each other, so a client (program) is necessary on both the server (computer) and the client (computer). I hope that made sense.

So that you have a baseline of expectations, I’ll be open with the specs and configuration of the server I’m using:

• Ubuntu Server 10.4 Lucid Lynx x86 (32 bit)
• Dual 1.4Ghz Pentium3 CPUs
• 512MB RAM
• Running as Guest OS on VMWare ESXi 3.5 Update5

Now, let’s get atftpd installed.

1. Get Root.

   sudo -i

2. Install atftpd.

   apt-get install atftpd

3. Edit atftpd’s configuration.

   pico -w /etc/default/atftpd

   change “USE_INETD=true” to “USE_INETD=false”

   ctrl+x, enter, y

4. Start atftpd.

   invoke-rc.d atftpd start

5. Add the tftp directory.

   cd /srv

   mkdir tftp

   chmod 777 tftp

   chown nobody:nogroup tftp

6. Restart atftpd.

   /etc/init.d/atftpd restart

7. Install the client (program).

   apt-get install atftp

8. Done!

At this point, use your favorite SCP client (program) to upload any firmware files to the /srv/tftp folder. Once it is uploaded, point the tftp location in your firmware update process to your newly deployed tftpd server. Easy enough!

Thanks for visiting, if you have any questions feel free to comment below and I’ll do my best to reply and help you out.

If you run into this same issue with a memory error and the following error in the server console window:

workthreadpool.cpp (296) : Assertion Failed:CWorkThreadPool::StopWorkThreads: Some threads required forcible termination.

The fix is to update your cfg/mani_admin_plugin/gametypes.txt with the one generated here at the Mani Admin Plugin’s site.

It took me a bit to find this fix, so hopefully the search engines were nice to you and directed you here.

1. sudo -i
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get upgrade
4. apt-get install build-essential binutils linux-headers-$(uname -r)
5. mount /dev/scd0 /cdrom
6. cp -a /cdrom/VMwareTools* /tmp/
7. cd /tmp/
8. tar -vxzf VMwareTools*.gz
9. cd vmware-tools-distrib/
10. ./vmware-install.pl

CD-ROM mount point may vary. Accept all defaults for vmware-install perl script.

This post won’t outline how to use Synergy, but rather just how to take care of the little things that will keep it from being a good experience on Windows Vista/7. I’m writing the rest of this post for those that are already familiar with Synergy, and instructions are targeted at Windows 7 Professional users.

Anyways, I was running into problems with my Synergy client on my home-office setup. I have a laptop docked with a second monitor for my office computer (operating as the Synergy client), and then a single monitor rig in portrait-orientation for my home computer (operating as the Synergy server). I use Display Fusion, which runs as an administrator-level service on my desktop, and I use the multi-monitor taskbar available on the paid version of the software. I was unable to use the Synerg-ized mouse to select a window on that Display Fusion taskbar, and considering that was my 24” monitor where a lot of my work takes place it would be a huge problem if the laptop didn’t have a keyboard. On top of that, every time the client computer would prompt for UAC approval for various things, I would lose the ability to use my G5 mouse and G15 keyboard on my office laptop.

I knew you could auto-elevate privileges, but just hadn’t taken the time to do it. Let’s get that out of the way, as that’s the first thing I noticed in the problems I was having.

Step 1. Open secpol.msc

Step 2. Set UAC Behavior for Administrators to ‘Elevate without prompting’

Next up is configuring Synergy to run as Administrator. I want to note that this was my initial guess as to why it wasn’t allowing me to Auto-start on computer start, however even after forcing it to run as Administrator and installing the Auto-start service, it still wasn’t working. I found out this is due to the way the System user interacts (or rather doesn’t) with the user’s desktop.

Step 3. Run Synergy as Administrator.

Right click on the shortcut for Synergy, and click the Advanced… button. Check the “Run as administrator” box.

Step 4. Auto-start Synergy on Log-in

Step 5. Start Synergy!

Follow these steps on both the server and client if they’re both Windows 7 machines, it’s just that simple.

Things I knew I wanted:

• Exchange Support
• WiFi and/or Mobile Internet that does not suck.
• Decent Camera (the BB8830 doesn’t have a camera)

The only decent mobiles out there that had Exchange Support for email were Windows Mobile 6.1 powered phones. I was also looking to not appear too greedy, so I tried to keep the budget for the new phone under $150. With our provider, the only real option at this point was the Samsung Omnia. I wasn’t upset with that, because it appeared to have fairly good user ratings. I received the phone and was pleased. It connected to Exchange without any trouble, it had an 802.11 radio, and a fantastic camera with more features stock than the iPhone.

Every few weeks I am the On-Call technician for the ISP/hosting company I work for. I’d like to be able to attach my cell phone to my laptop and be able to handle 95% of the work that I would typically be responsible for while on-call, which only requires a stable internet connection for RDP or SSH. I began to look for tethering options and came across WMWifiRouter in my searches. I was a bit skeptical because my wireless network has a reputation for disabling certain “features” that may allow the user to do more than they want to provide, but I gave it a go. Here were the necessary steps to make this work for my phone:

1. Enable Internet Connection Sharing on your windows mobile phone.
2. Restart the phone.
3. Install WMWifiRouter.
4. Restart the phone.
5. Run WMWifiRouter.
6. Connect to the wireless ad-hoc network it creates (see image) from your laptop or other wireless device.

From there, you should be able to browse the internet, download files, run a speed test, and connect to your office VPN to scare the night technician by printing to the network printer.

I did some searching and there wasn’t anything super awesome out there that would keep me away from using the command line interface of VLC. So, the first step was to install vlc. I also use screen so I can log out of my SSH session and just use the web interface available on VLC, so I’ll include steps for using screen.

sudo apt-get install vlc screen

During or after installing vlc, you might as well set up the port forwarding on your router for access to the web interface. Log into your router and open up port 8080 to your server. If you are not trying to stream over the internet or don’t have a persistant dynamic or static IP address, you can skip this step. Check http://www.portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/routerindex.htm for information on how to port forward on your router.

The next step was to get into screen and start the media daemon.

screen
 vlc -I http

You can then press ‘CTRL’+'A’ followed by pressing ‘D’ to detach from your screen instance and log out of your server (this is the glory of screen). You can reconnect to screen later by entering ‘screen -r’ at the shell of your server. I use screen for all of my console-based server daemons or anything I want to have run while disconnected from the SSH session I’m in (HLDS, SRCDS, VLC, ‘apt-get upgrade’, ‘tail -f’).

Then browse to your server by going to http://your.server.ip:8080/ . You should be greeted with an html representation of the VLC interface you may be familiar with on your computer. It will look something like this:

At this point you can toggle the Stream Output by clicking on the icon that has three staggered arrows pointing to the right (on the default theme). From here you want to check the ‘UDP’ box enter your external IP and a port (default is port 1234 on VLC UDP client) to use for streaming. This method makes it easiest for connecting the client side for streaming, which in most cases is ideal. If you’re going to set this up for less savvy users simplifying their end makes it easier on you as the admin, TRUST ME.

Next, open up UDP ports 1234 on the client router forwarding it to the viewing computer again this won’t be necessary over LAN and won’t be possible from a NAT’d server. Start VLC on the client computer and open Network Stream (CTRL+N) and click OK.

Back on the Web Interface, open the file and play it. If you don’t have any port forwarding or NAT issues, you’re done!

UNLESS-
The first 2 episodes I have are not encoded with anything special, so I was able to stream them without adding any extra codecs to my server. However, episode 3 needed xvid codecs.

Here’s the steps to add the “non-free” w32codecs:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install w32codecs

Restart the vlc daemon and you’ll be able to play xvid (and I assume divx as well).