I was pondering what to do about disk encryption on an unattended server. If you want an uninterrupted boot sequence, you can’t use full root disk encryption or it will ask you for your passphrase during init. You can apparently do some fudge to put dropbear (mini SSH daemon and shell) into your initrd, so you can enter your passphrase over SSH, but that seemed hacky. I’d rather a serial console on a terminal server, for those servers with serial ports or LOM’s.

When I said in my previous post that the Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade went fine, I spoke too soon…… It seems that the normal Sys-V init system has been replaced by upstart, which is Ubuntu’s attempt at speeding up the boot process by initialising services in parallel. The result being, that /etc/rc.local is no longer the last script to run, and the init scripts are pretty much run in random order, causing all sorts of race conditions.

I finally decided to upgrade my fileserver from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, as 10.04 LTS is due end of April, so its easier to upgrade version-by-version than jump two. It actually went without issue, I had already gathered the .deb’s needed for PIPS and iScan for my printer/scanner and tested them on a 9.10 virtual machine, although by the looks of it, Gutenprint5 now has Epson RX425 drivers built-in, however I’ve seen reports that the colours are too dark.

Had a few problems with Fedora 12, so thought I’d make a note of some fudges fixes I’ve found: Lag issue with Skype – people hear you a couple of seconds after you talk, or you press a number button and don’t hear the sound for a couple of seconds. No problem on F10. Discussed in this forum thread, fixes from here seemed to work for me – or a fudge is to prevent Skype being the first program to use PulseAudio.

Today I’ve been building a noarch RPM specfile for setting up a Nessus environment with custom [signed] plugins. This is quite a good starting point, not really a tutorial though. rpmbuild signs the plugin using nasl as per these instructions, but to automate it I had to remove the passphrase from the private key I was using, as rpmbuild won’t be able to prompt for a passphrase! The command to do that is: