How to install DHCP server in ubuntu 12.04 (Precise) Server

A DHCP Server assigns IP addresses to client computers. This is very often used in enterprise networks to reduce configuration efforts. All IP addresses of all computers are stored in a database that resides on a server machine.

A DHCP server can provide configuration settings using two methods

Address Pool

This method entails defining a pool (sometimes also called a range or scope) of IP addresses from which DHCP clients are supplied their configuration properties dynamically and on a fist come first serve basis. When a DHCP client is no longer on the network for a specified period, the configuration is expired and released back to the address pool for use by other DHCP Clients.

MAC Address

This method entails using DHCP to identify the unique hardware address of each network card connected to the network and then continually supplying a constant configuration each time the DHCP client makes a request to the DHCP server using that network device.

Install DHCP server in ubuntu 12.04

In ubuntu 12.04 ISC DHCP server is a transitional package for dhcp3-server so you have to install the following package

sudo apt-get install isc-dhcp-server

There are two main files /etc/default/isc-dhcp-server and /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf which we will need to configure so lets take the first.

Configuration of DHCP server

First you need to configure /etc/default/isc-dhcp-server file so you need to edit the file using the following command

sudo vi /etc/default/isc-dhcp-server

You should see similar to the following

#Defaults for dhcp initscript
#sourced by /etc/init.d/dhcp
#installed at /etc/default/isc-dhcp-server by the maintainer scripts
#
#This is a POSIX shell fragment
#
#On what interfaces should the DHCP server (dhcpd) serve DHCP requests?
#Separate multiple interfaces with spaces, e.g. “eth0 eth1?.
INTERFACES=”eth0?

Replace eth0 above with the name of your network interface that you want the server to lease addresses on.

Save and exit the file

Now you need to configure /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf file for this edit this file using the following command

sudo vi /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf

Once it opens you should see similar to the following

#
#Sample configuration file for ISC dhcpd for Debian
#
#Attention: If /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf exists, that will be used as
#configuration file instead of this file.
#
#
#The ddns-updates-style parameter controls whether or not the server will
#attempt to do a DNS update when a lease is confirmed. We default to the
#behavior of the version 2 packages (‘none’, since DHCP v2 didn’t
#have support for DDNS.)
ddns-update-style none;
#option definitions common to all supported networks…
option domain-name-servers ns1.example.org, ns2.example.org;
option domain-name “yourdomainname.com”;
default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 7200;
#If this DHCP server is the official DHCP server for the local
#network, the authoritative directive should be uncommented.
#authoritative;
#Use this to send dhcp log messages to a different log file (you also
#have to hack syslog.conf to complete the redirection).
log-facility local7;
#No service will be given on this subnet, but declaring it helps the
#DHCP server to understand the network topology.
#subnet10.152.187.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
#}
#This is a very basic subnet declaration.
subnet 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 10.0.0.150 10.0.0.253;
option routers 10.0.0.2;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option broadcast-address 10.0.0.254;
option domain-name-servers 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2;
option ntp-servers 10.0.0.1;
option netbios-name-servers 10.0.0.1;
option netbios-node-type 8;
}
#option routers rtr-239-0-1.example.org, rtr-239-0-2.example.org;
#}
#This declaration allows BOOTP clients to get dynamic addresses,
#which we don’t really recommend.
#subnet 10.254.239.32 netmask 255.255.255.224 {
#range dynamic-bootp 10.254.239.40 10.254.239.60;
#option broadcast-address 10.254.239.31;
#option routers rtr-239-32-1.example.org;
#}
#A slightly different configuration for an internal subnet.
#subnet 10.5.5.0 netmask 255.255.255.224 {
#range 10.5.5.26 10.5.5.30;
#option domain-name-servers ns1.internal.example.org;
#option domain-name “internal.example.org”;
#option routers 10.5.5.1;
#option broadcast-address 10.5.5.31;
#default-lease-time 600;
#max-lease-time 7200;
#}
#Hosts which require special configuration options can be listed in
#host statements. If no address is specified, the address will be
#allocated dynamically (if possible), but the host-specific information
#will still come from the host declaration.
#host passacaglia {
#hardware ethernet 0:0:c0:5d:bd:95;
#filename “vmunix.passacaglia”;
#server-name “toccata.fugue.com”;
#}
#Fixed IP addresses can also be specified for hosts. These addresses
#should not also be listed as being available for dynamic assignment.
#Hosts for which fixed IP addresses have been specified can boot using
#BOOTP or DHCP. Hosts for which no fixed address is specified can only
#be booted with DHCP, unless there is an address range on the subnet
#to which a BOOTP client is connected which has the dynamic-bootp flag
#set.
#hostfantasia {
#hardware ethernet 08:00:07:26:c0:a5;
#fixed-address fantasia.fugue.com;
#}
#You can declare a class of clients and then do address allocation
#based on that. The example below shows a case where all clients
#in a certain class get addresses on the 10.17.224/24 subnet, and all
#other clients get addresses on the 10.0.29/24 subnet.
#class“foo” {
#match if substring (option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 4) = “SUNW”;
#}
#shared-network 224-29 {
#subnet 10.17.224.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
#option routers rtr-224.example.org;
#}
#subnet 10.0.29.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
#option routers rtr-29.example.org;
#}
#pool {
#allow members of “foo”;
#range 10.17.224.10 10.17.224.250;
#}
#pool {
#deny members of “foo”;
#range 10.0.29.10 10.0.29.230;
#}
#}

From the above file you need to configure bold options and change domain name where it says yourdomainname.com

Finally you have to restart the dhcp service by using the following command

sudo service isc-dhcp-server restart

DHCP server testing

You can check if your dhcp server is working properly bt running the following command

sudo netstat -uap

Orginal Article 

Linux 3.4 Released

"This release includes several Btrfs updates: metadata blocks bigger than 4KB, much better metadata performance, better error handling and better recovery tools. There are other features: a new X32 ABI which allows to run in 64 bit mode with 32 bit pointers; several updates to the GPU drivers: early modesetting of Nvidia Geforce 600 'Kepler', support of AMD RadeonHD 7xxx and AMD Trinity APU series, and support of Intel Medfield graphics; support of x86 cpu driver autoprobing, a device-mapper target that stores cryptographic hashes of blocks to check for intrusions, another target to use external read-only devices as origin source of a thin provisioned LVM volume, several perf improvements such as GTK2 report GUI and a new 'Yama' security module."

Fedora Utils

Fedora Utils lets you install codecs and additional software, fix problems, tweak and cleanup your system, view system information and much more with just few clicks. This littile tool allows you to add additional repositories and install application that are not available in the main fedora repository. It adds the RPM Fusion repository which contains

gstreamer-plugins-bad-free
gstreamer-ffmpeg
gstreamer-plugins-bad
gstreamer-plugins-ugly

Which should make totem play audio and video for any file format in Totem -- the default media player shipped with Fedora.

Can be installed by running the following command in terminal.

su -c "yum localinstall http://fedorautils.sourceforge.net/fedorautils-latest.noarch.rpm"

Fedora Utils Features

---

• Add current user to sudoers
• Enable autologin for current user
• Set yum to keep cache
• Install yum tidy-cache plugin
• Add repositories - RPMFusion, Google, Adobe, Chromium, Skype
• Enable touchpad clicks
• Install multimedia codecs
• Install Adobe Flash
• Install Java Runtime Environment
• Install wine with gecko
• Install Google Talk plugin
• Add colors and fortune messages to Terminal
• Set SELinux in permissive mode
• Install Microsoft fonts
• Install Jockey driver installer (From Parsidora repo)
• Install essential software
• Fixes - Fix font smoothing, Fix bad theme in root apps, Fix rpmdb error, Fix gnome keyring, Fix picasa not starting, Fix anaconda causing revisor not to start, Fix MPlayer driver error, Fix ntfs-config not starting
• Install Gnome Shell Extensions - GPaste, Media Player, Weather, Alternate Status Menu, Dock Extension, Places Menu, User Theme, Window Navigator, Zeitgeist
• Install Software - Google Chrome, Picasa, Google Earth, HandBrake, Skype, WinFF, Unico Theme Engine
• Clean up system
• Optimize boot by turning off unnecessary services
• Show system info

Gnome3 customization -- Changing the Panel Colour and make It Transparent on Ubuntu 11.10 Desktop Edition

The /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/panel-border.svg is the main file to be changed to change its appearance. Now wake the gimp expert in you

$: sudo gimp /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/panel-border.svg

modify the file as you wish here i deleted the whole image

ctrl + a and Del

then took the brush tool choose colour black (default), set Opacity to 52 and made the brush image large enough to cover the full image painted once in the image then choose a colour, set Opacity to 100. Painted a line in the bottom, this will appear as the bottom border. Saved it as panel-border.png, because in gimp does not support saving a file in .svg format. Now open up the file /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css

$: sudo nano /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css

goto the section

#panel {
 color: #ffffff;
 background-color: black;
 border-image: url("panel-border.png") 1;
 font-size: 8.5pt;
 height: 1.86em;
 }

change the line border-image: url(“panel-border.svg”) 1; to

border-image: url("panel-border.png") 1;

save the file
reload the gnome3 desktop by hitting Alt+F2 then enter r and hit Enter

Gnome shell will work without 3D acceleration in Fedora 17

From a message posted on Nov 3 to fedora mailing list by Adam Jackson the currently rawhide[1] fedora will have a gnome-shell that no longer treat llvmpipe as an unsupported driver. This means you can run gnome-shell even on VirtualBox or any other VM or on a hardware without 3D support.

So the Gnome shell will be available to everyone What about Gnome fallback which was executed when 3D acceleration was not available. It will no longer be required.

Still the work on software rendering of Gnome shell is only 10% complete. (When i wrote this post).

Fedora launched community knowledge base

Following the recent release of Fedora 16, the Fedora Project has announced the launch of its new Ask Fedora community knowledge base and support forums.

The new site is powered by Askbot, an open source Q&A forum written in Python and Django, which allows community members to ask and answer other users' questions related to Fedora. Before Ask Fedora, the three primary resources for users were the project's IRC channel (#fedora in irc.freenode.net), the mailing lists and FedoraForum.

Users can sign into Ask Fedora using their Fedora identity or any OpenID, including those from Google or WordPress. Information on how to participate can be found in the Ask Fedora FAQ and on the Ask Fedora wiki.

My ask fedora profile url is http://ask.fedoraproject.org/users/668/vishnu-pradeep/

Install htop

htop is an interactive process viewer for Linux. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses. Install Htop in fedora using following command:

sudo yum install htop