Tag: Ubuntu

NTP Client Setup – Ubuntu 22.04

BlakeLeave a comment

The following tutorial will cover how to enable the NTP client on Ubuntu. When working with Linux servers, the system time must be accurate. The best way to do that is by using the Network Time Protocol.

The first step is to install the NTP client.

sudo apt install ntp

Before we begin configuration, let’s back up the default NTP client config. We will use today’s date in the command.

sudo cp --archive /etc/ntp.conf /etc/ntp.conf-COPY-$(date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S")

Open the config file using your favourite text editor. In my case, I will be using nano.

sudo nano /etc/ntp.conf

The first thing we want to do is comment out the current servers that ships with Ubuntu. Add a # in front of all the “pool” lines.

Head to NTP Pool and find the closest pool address to your machine. In my case, I am in Canada, so I’m going to add the following to the bottom of my ntp.conf file.

You can do this all in one command if you would like.

sudo sed -i -r -e "s/^((server|pool).*)/# \1         # commented by $(whoami) on $(date +"%Y-%m-%d @ %H:%M:%S")/" /etc/ntp.conf
echo -e "\npool ca.pool.ntp.org iburst         # added by $(whoami) on $(date +"%Y-%m-%d @ %H:%M:%S")" | sudo tee -a /etc/ntp.conf

We will restart the NTP client service once you have saved and closed the config file.

sudo service ntp restart

Let’s check to see if the service is running.

sudo ntpq -p

The following output should show.

Output of the ntpq command. This is showing the list of server NTP is getting time from.

That’s it! Your box will always get its time from the ntp pool; no more out-of-sync log files.

This tutorial was found in the How-To-Secure-A-Linux-Server GitHub repository. If you have any questions, please drop a comment below.

Deploying a Discord bot in Docker

Blake

A few months back I did a video on Fusion Terror’s YouTube channel. Fusion has actually been a summer student at my current place of employment for the last year. I had mentioned a few times how easy it is to get Node working in a Docker container.

I asked him if his audience would be interested in this type of content and he said yes! Away I went to film my first YouTube video.

Took me an entire morning to get things right but here is the final product.

If you want to code from this video, you can subscribe to his Patreon here.

I keep reflecting back on this and thinking about all the other ideas I have for videos. Maybe it’s time to start my own thing?

Linux Mounting Partitions

Blake

Most Linux distribution include auto mounting for different file system types. Specific distributions, you need to mound some file systems your self. The following commands will allow you to mount different file system types.

To list all partitions attached to the system, use the following commands.

fdisk -l

First thing, create a mount point for this new file system.

mkdir /media/drive

You can create this folder anywhere on the system. Most distributions mount all drives to /media.

Mounting FAT or FAT32:

mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /media/drive/

Mounting NTFS:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /media/drive/

Un-mounting the drive:

umount /media/drive/

Synergy with Ubuntu & Windows

Blake

Synergy let you share a single mouse and keyboard across multiple computers. In the following example, thewall is going to have our server and laptopnew is going to be our second computer. thewall, is to the right of laptopnew. thewall is also our linux box running Linux Mint (gnome). laptopnew is running Windows 7 x64.

First thing we need to do is install Synergy on our two machines. On the linux box run:

sudo aptitude install synergy

Next we need to install Synergy on our second computer. The version of Synergy in the Ubuntu repos is version 1.3 so we need to install that version. Click here for the download list.

Once you have it installed on both machines we need to create our configuration file. The following is an example of my configuration file.

gedit ~/.synergy

Configuration file:

section: screens
thewall:
laptopnew:
end

section: aliases
laptopnew:
192.168.1.24
end

section: links
thewall:
left = laptopnew
laptopnew:
right = thewall
end

section: options
screenSaverSync = false

end

For this to work correctly you must use the hostnames of both machines. Now we can open a terminal and run:

synergys

This will start the server; next we want to hit the start button on the client. You should now be able to move your mouse between the two computers! Synergy also allows you to copy and paste (text only) between the machines.

To get the synergy server to run on startup we can just add it to the gnome startup. Menu -> Preferences -> Start Up Applications.

The next time you reboot Synergy should start automatically. That concludes this tutorial, if you have any questions or comments please leave them below.

Mounting Windows Share using smbfs in Kubuntu

Blake

On my new Kubuntu box, I wanted to mount my “My Documents” folder that resides on a Windows Server 2003 R2 box. I have always had problems mounting folders due to the nature of Active Directory.

In KDE you can easily mount a share using the built in wizard, but I wanted to mount it as folder so I could access it using command line. First thing to do is install smbfs.

sudo aptitude install smbfs

Next thing we want to do here is make a folder to mount this remote location. I’m going to make it in the /media folder.

sudo mkdir "/media/My Documents"

The quotes are there to allow spaces in the directory name.

After that is this interesting line. If the share your connecting to  has any spaces in the name, you will need to put that option in quotes. Here is my complete line.

sudo mount -t smbfs -o username=blake,password=PASSWORDHERE "//server/UserData/blake/My Documents" "/media/My Documents"

I have made this into a script so I can easily run it when I need to connect.

I hope this has helped you getting your Linux box talking to your Active Directory protected share.