GASP!

Never fear, it’s not that hard. Just a few commands and you’ll be up and running with your new hard drive installed on your server. This article will assume the physical drive is already installed on your machine.

I am going to make a couple of assumptions here, for the sake of simplicity for this article. The first assumption is that the new drive will be mounted to the directory /data. The next assumption is that you want this directory to be both readable and writable by all users on the system. Another assumption is that you will want the drive to be formatted with the ext3 file system with just one partition. Finally I will assume you want this drive to be automatically mounted upon boot of the system.

With that out of the way, let’s get down to business.

Once you boot the machine with the new drive log into the console and issue the command:

dmesg

Near the bottom of the output you should see where the disk is located. it will be something like:

/dev/sdb

So let’s assume it is on /dev/sdb.

If you can’t figure it out where the drive is located  with dmesg issue the command:

sudo fdisk -l

The above command will report something like:

/dev/sda1 * 1 18709 150280011 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 18710 19457 6008310 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 18710 19457 6008278+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

But will include a listing for your new drive. If you only see listings for /dev/sda* then your new drive has not been recognized and there is a problem with the physical installation.

Once you know where your drive is located (again we’ll use /dev/sdb for our example) it’s time to create a new directory where this drive will be mounted. We are mounting our drive to the directory /data so we’ll create this directory with the following command:

sudo mkdir /data

Now let’s make it available to all users:

sudo chmod -R 777 /data

With a place to mount the drive, it’s time to format the new drive. The formatting will be done with the command:

sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb

When this is complete you are ready to mount the drive. Before you edit fstab entry (so the drive will be automatically mounted) make sure it can be successfully mounted with the command:

sudo mount /dev/sdb /data

If this is successful let’s create an entry in /etc/fstab. open that file with the command

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Now add the following entry at the end of that file:

/dev/sdb /data ext3 defaults 0 0

Once you save that file, mount the drive (without having to reboot) with the command:

sudo mount -a

To make sure the drive mounted successfully issue the command:

df

The above should include in the report:

/dev/sdb   /data

If that’s the case, success! You can run one file test by trying to write a file to the new drive with the command:

touch /data/test

If you can write that file all is well.

Final thoughts

Yes it is a bit more complicated than adding a new drive when you have GUI tools available, but it’s not anything that can’t be accomplished by the average user. If you are not afraid of the command line, you can add a second drive in Ubuntu with ease.

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Remove VirtualBox OSE

This is the easiest part of the tutorial. All you need to do is open up a terminal window and issue the command:

sudo apt-get autoremove virtualbox-ose

Once the OSE version has been removed it is time to install the closed source version of VirtualBox.

Installing closed source VirtualBox

The first thing to do is to add the proper sources to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. Open up that file, with your favorite editor, and add the following line to the end of that file:

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian jaunty non-free

Now save the VirtualBox repository key on your machine (for the sake of simplicity place it in ~/Downloads) and issue the following command:

sudo apt-key add ~/Downloads/sun_vbox.asc

which will add the repo key to your system. Before you run the install update apt with the command:

sudo apt-get update

Now you can install the closed source version of VirtualBox with the command:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-2.2

During the installation you will also have to OK the compilation of the proper kernel module. If you do not do this you may not be able to create any VMs.

The last step for the installation is to add your user to the vboxusers group. Do this with the following command:

sudo gpasswd -a USERNAME vboxusers

Where USERNAME is your login. You will be prompted for your username.

Configure USB

Now it’s time to configure the system to allow USB support. You have to get the user ID of the vboxusers group. To do this issue the following command:

grep vboxusers /etc/group

which will report something like:

vboxusers:x:123:

What you need to now do is add a line to the /etc/fstab file. This line will be (if we stick with the user ID report you see above):

none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=123,devmode=664 0 0

With that file saved you are ready to reboot and start up VirtualBox with USB support.

Final thoughts

There are a lot of reasons why you would want to have USB support added to VirtualBox. For those iPhone owners out there it will give you a means to administer your phone without having to have a separate machine (or dual boot) in order to do so. This also greatly expands the capabilities of VirtualBox. The only downfall is you are giving up the open source version in order to gain USB support. For many this will be a worth wile trade-off. For others, giving over to closed sourced software isn’t worth having USB support. It would be nice, however, if Sun would open source the USB supported version.

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From the command line of course. Yes there are plenty of GUI tools that will allow you to connect to a Samba share easily, but they don’t help you set up anything to connect automatically. For that you will need to employ a few command line tools. But once it is finished, your system will be seamless.

What you will need

First I am going to assume you have your Samba server set up and you are able to connect to it from other machines. Outside of that you will need only one piece of software installed on your Linux machine: smbclient. This will be in your distributions’ repositories so just open up your Add/Remove Software utility, search for smbclient, select it, and click Apply.

Once smbclient is installed you are ready to go.

A test

Let’s first test to make sure your Linux box can see the Samba share. You will need either sudo or root access to do this. Issue the command:

smbclient //IP_TO_SAMBA_SERVER/SHARE_NAME -U USERNAME

Where:

• IP_TO_SAMBA_SERVER is the IP address of your Samba server.
• SHARE_NAME is the share you want to connect to.
• USERNAME is the user name you connect to the share with.

If all is well you should see something like this:

Enter wallenmusic’s password:

Domain=[MONKEYPANTZ] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 3.2.5]

smb: \>

If you see that you can type quit and then hit the Enter key to escape this prompt.

Setup

The first thing you need to do is create a directory to mount the Samba share to. I created the directory /data with the command:

sudo mkdir /data

Once that directory is created you can then mount it with the command:

mount -t smbfs -o username=USERNAME //IP_TO_SAMBA_SERVER/SAMBA_SHARE /data

Where:

• IP_TO_SAMBA_SERVER is the IP address of your Samba server.
• SHARE_NAME is the share you want to connect to.
• USERNAME is the user name you connect to the share with.

Now if you check the /data directory you should see a listing of the contents of the Samba share.

Automount

Let’s make that share automount at boot. This will require editing your /etc/fstab file, adding an entry for this Samba share. In this file (again you will have to have either root or sudo access) you will add a line like this:

//IP_TO_SAMBA_SERVER/SAMBA_SHARE  /data smbfs username=USERNAME,password=PASSWORD, 0 0

Where:

• IP_TO_SAMBA_SERVER is the IP address of your Samba server.
• SHARE_NAME is the share you want to connect to.
• USERNAME is the user name you connect to the share with.
• PASSWORD is the password for the Samba user

Once that entry is saved unmount the /data directory with the command:

umount /data

so you can test your automount entry.

Now, enter the command:

mount -a

If there are no errors you should see the contents of the Samba share in the /data directory.

That’s it. Congratulations, you now have an automounted Samba share on your Linux machine.

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What fstab does

As said earlier, the /etc/fstab file is a means to map devices to locations so the devices can be used. Typically when you plug in an external device that device will show up as a device in the special directory /dev. Most externally connected usb devices will show up as a variation of /dev/sda. But if you try to access that device through the /dev directory you’ll have no luck. Instead you have to map the device to a regular, mountable directory so the device can be used. Without the fstab file only the root user would be able to do the mounting and the mount command would always be something like “mount /dev/sda2 /media/mp3″. When the root user mounts a device in this way only the root user will have write access to the device. In the case of an mp3 player that means only the root user will be able to add music to the device. That’s where fstab helps out. You can create an fstab entry that will allow standard users to mount and unmount devices as well as write to those mounted devices.

Typical fstab entry

The structure of an fstab entry is:

device   mounting_directory      filesystem_type     options    0 0

The device will always be assigned once you have plugged in what it is you are going to mount. The easiest way to find out what has been assigned is to open up a command terminal and enter the command dmesg. Using dmesg will require you to keep issuing the command until the kernel has recognized the device. Or you could enter the command tail -f /var/log/messages (must be run as root). Using the tail command will keep follow the output of the messages log file which will give you all the information you need.

With the understanding of where you get the device location in hand let’s move on to the mounting_directory entry. This is quite simple: Create a directory, as a sub directory under /media named after the device you want to mount. For instance, if you are going to mount a USB thumbdrive you can create a directory called /media/thumb or if you need to mount your iPod you can create a directory called /media/ipod. This directory is where you will be mounting your device. When the device is mounted there you will go to that directory to manage the devices’ data.

The next section, filesystem_type, describes the type of file system you wanting to mount. Linux supports quite a large selection of file systems such as: cramfs, efs, ext2, ext3, vfat, fat, nfs, udf, sysv, smbfs, minix, msdos, reiserfs, hpfs, hfs, iso9660, and many more.  There is also the auto file system type which means the kernel will discover the type.

The options section of fstab is where things start to grow a bit more complex. I will explain the more common options:

• auto/noauto: The auto option is default and means the device will be mounted automatically. The noauto options means the device will not be mounted automatically. By “automatically” I mean either at boot or when the command mount -a is issued.
• user/nouser: The user option allows all standard (and root) users to mount the device. The nouser options only allows the root user to mount the device.
• ro: Mount the device in read only mode.
• rw: Mount the device in read/write mode.
• sync/async: The sync options writes data to the device on the fly (as soon as a command is issued) whereas the async option writes data later.
• suid: This allos suid and sgid bits to be effective on the mounted file system.
• defaults: Use all default options (rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser, and async)

The final section is actually the dump/fsck section. Basically if you set these bits to 0 (off) the mounted devices will not be checked by either dump or fsck. You will rarely, if ever, need anything but zeros here.

Final Thoughts

So there it is. The basics of the oft-confusing fstab file. Later we will get into some sticker fstab issues, but for now you should have a pretty sound understanding of how fstab works.

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