the

Little Projects

of Shawn M. Jones

In my effort to deal with the economic crisis, I’ve began looking at lower cost alternatives to renting my own server. I would like to affirm that eSecureData is an excellent hosting service that has given me far more than I could have expected. Their prices and hardware offerings definitely eclipsed those of Layered Tech.

At this point, though, with the availability of services like flickr and Picasa, I no longer need the disc space for my photos that pushed me to begin renting a server. Also, with the services and amount of space available on Gmail, I no longer need a server for my mail either.

So, I’ve gotten myself a Google Apps Account and am moving items over to Blogger as you read this. I’ve been running Gmail, as part of Google Apps For Your Domain, for more than two weeks now and am quite happy with the results.

This will save me roughly $65 per month on server rentals and free my time up a bit. If you need a simple web hosting service with email, I heavily suggest Google Apps.

As I’ve been testing out Gmail for my domain, I read in “Google Apps: The Missing Manual” that the Google Toolbar had all kinds of nice buttons that integrated nicely with Google Apps. The problem is, with initial install, that the Google Toolbar would only work with my initial Google account and not the one associated with my domain, where my central email would be accessed.

This site gives information on how to change the Gmail button to act the same, but for Google Apps for Your Domain (cutely abbreviated GAFYD in the article):
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2008/02/23/google-toolbar-for-firefox-make-the-gmail-button-work-with-google-apps/

Welcome to 2009 folks!

So, as noted in earlier posts, I decided the best way to share files between my Ubuntu 8.10 and Windows XP installations on my laptop was to use an NTFS partition for my home directory/My Documents.

Unfortunately, applications like wine issue serious warning messages or refuse to function all together.

Being lazy, I ignored this until I needed one of these applications.

At current, I’m attempting to mount the partitions with specified permissions and ownership.

UUID=4F975E2D139676A9 /media/HOME     ntfs    defaults,umask=077,uid=1000,gid=1000 0       1

The important entries are:

• umask=077-This entry sets the permissions on all NTFS-mounted files and folders such that only the owner has access. This satisfies many applications, such as ssh, that require that files are only accessible to their owner.
• uid=1000-This entry sets the ownership on all NTFS-mounted files and folders such that the owner is me. This solution is only useful because I’m the only one using this machine.
• gid=1000-This entry sets the group for all NTFS-mounted files and folders such that the group is my primary group. This solution is only useful because I’m the only one using this machine.

This allows wine to work and gets rid of messages from gdm. I’m not sure what other applications may object to these permissions being set as such on the home directory. If I want to run anything on files in the home directory that relies on a user other than me (such as a web server), it won’t work.