Ubuntu troubles

mount: Cannot allocate memory

November 14, 2014, by No comments yet

Trying to mount -a on a linux system with windows share was giving me the following error

mount: Cannot allocate memory

The problem seems to be on Windows system where share is located. Quick and temporary workaround is to restar Lanmanserver service and retry mount -a.

Permanent fix that should help is to edit a registry setting and restart the service as below:

reg add HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters /v Size /t REG_DWORD /d 3 /f
sc stop LanmanServer
sc start LanmanServer

Setting the Date and Time in Linux

October 8, 2008, by No comments yet

Run the date command to make sure you have the correct time:

[root@server /root]# date
Thu Sep 20 11:00:06 CDT 2001
[root@server /root]#

If your timezone is correct but the date and/or time needs updating, the following commands will update the date and time. The second command is needed in order to push the date and time into the PC clock.

[root@server /root]# date 092011082001
Thu Sep 20 11:08:00 CDT 2001
[root@server /root]# hwclock --utc --systohc
[root@server /root]#

Howto: Backup and restore your system!

August 3, 2008, by No comments yet

Hi, and welcome to the successful backing-up and restoring of a Linux system!

Most of you have probably used Windows before you started using Ubuntu. During that time you might have needed to backup and restore your system. For Windows you would need proprietary software for which you would have to reboot your machine and boot into a special environment in which you could perform the backing-up/restoring (programs like Norton Ghost).
During that time you might have wondered why it wasn’t possible to just add the whole c:\ to a big zip-file. This is impossible because in Windows, there are lots of files you can’t copy or overwrite while they are being used, and therefore you needed specialized software to handle this.

Well, I’m here to tell you that those things, just like rebooting, are Windows CrazyThings ™. There’s no need to use programs like Ghost to create backups of your Ubuntu system (or any Linux system, for that matter). In fact; using Ghost might be a very bad idea if you are using anything but ext2. Ext3, the default Ubuntu partition, is seen by Ghost as a damaged ext2 partition and does a very good job at screwing up your data.
Read more →

PAM unable to dlopen

August 3, 2008, by No comments yet

/var/log/auth.log is getting littered
On my server my /var/log/auth.log was filled with lines like this

PAM unable to dlopen(/lib/security/pam_smbpass.so)
PAM [error: /lib/security/pam_smbpass.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory] Read more →

Putty and mc – annoying â character

August 3, 2008, by No comments yet

Look in PuTTY options, you need to change the character encoding.
Ubuntu uses UTF-8 and PuTTY’s default is ISO-99xx_something (or Latin-1).