Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Mount a Windows share on Linux

This article describes how to set up a share from a Linux box to a Windows box. Samba has to be installed.

To test if your Linux machine sees the shares on the Windows box:
smbclient -L -U

  • Make a directoy for the mountpoint:
mkdir /mnt/

  • Mount the share:
mount -t smbfs -o username=,password= /// /mnt/

Note: The syntax -username=,password= saves the password.

  • Create a symbolic link to the mounted drive:
ln -s /mnt/ /


Hobbit System Montoring | Debian

Hobbit monitors your hosts, your network services, and anything else you configure it to do via extensions. Hobbit can periodically generate requests to network services - http, ftp, smtp and so on - and record if the service is responding as expected. You can also monitor local disk utilisation, logfiles and processes through the use of agents installed on the servers.
Before you install, make sure you have Apache web server installed.


apt-get install apache2

Configure /etc/apach2/sites-enabled/000-default

Example: Apache conf here.


Install hobbit packages

apt-get install hobbit hobbit-client hobbit-plugins


By default hobbit only allows connections from local host. Append the IP addresses you want to allow here in all three of the Allow from[...] lines like shown here

vi /etc/apache2/conf.d/hobbit

Allow from localhost ::1/128 192.168.0.5


In this case I have added the 192.168.0.5 but you should replace it to the one on your computer

Restart apache

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart


Now you can access the hobbit monitoring console on this location http://youservername/hobbit/ (Make sure you include the trailing slash)

Client Install

apt-get install hobbit-client hobbit-plugins

Server Configuration for Client Data

vi /etc/hobbit/bb-hosts

Example bb-hosts:


Note:  Be sure to use the fully qualified name of the server along with the IP Address.  If you do not, you will not get all or any of the information desired.

If desired, you may use the local configuration file to monitor more finitely.   This also requires adding "--local" setting to FILENAMEHERE.  I found that in Ver. 4.2.0 if you must copy the hobbitd_client file from the "hobbit-server".

WordPress & PhotoGallery Plugin Tips

After installing WordPress and adding the PhotoGallery Plugin, I ran into an upload issue.  Sadly the plugin did not provide any errors to indicate that there was an issue.  It simply acted as if it had finished but never auto generated the thumbnails or properly uploaded the photos.

As a troubleshooting measure, I installed another "Gallery" plugin.   As luck would have it, it provided server statistics AND gave a warning, stating that due to my current settings, I would likely encounter a problem uploading photos.  This was VERY helpful and I quickly found the settings that needed to be changed in my PHP.ini file (see settings below).  I would have continued with this plugin but found the lite version to be very restricted and not as user friendly.  So I reactivated the PhotoGallery plugin and it now works as expected.

PHP.ini Settings:

1upload_max_filesize = 64M
2post_max_size = 64M
3max_execution_time = 300

Sunday, August 16, 2015

Gmail SMTP & OwnCloud

While trying to configure gmail SMTP on my OwnCloud installation, I continued to run into an authentication issue.  Oddly enough, I have several other areas where I have this working without issue (server & webcam) and so I'm no stranger to the configuration and setup.  I was nearly stumped when I found a solution that may help others as well.

I finally found the following "https://accounts.google.com/UnlockCaptcha".  Captcha was causing the hiccup.  By unlocking the account, all was back to normal and emails could be sent from my cloud server. 

My OwnCloud 8.1.1 config is as follows;

  'mail_smtpmode' => 'smtp',
  'mail_from_address' => 'mygmailacct',
  'mail_domain' => 'gmail.com',
  'mail_smtpsecure' => 'tls',
  'mail_smtpauthtype' => 'LOGIN',
  'mail_smtpauth' => 1,
  'mail_smtphost' => 'smtp.gmail.com',
  'mail_smtpport' => '587',
  'mail_smtpname' => 'mygmailacct@gmail.com',

  'mail_smtppassword' => 'MyPassword',