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“Star Wars” – an a cappella tribute to John Williams. It’s incredible, found on Be The Signal.

No slower human movement has ever been officially recorded than that of two umpires sludging towards each other to confer over the light, like a pair of amorous teenage tortoises unsure of whether to make the first move, or two unhappy commuters trying to miss the same train. — Andy Zaltzman at The Confectionery Stall on Cricinfo. From The Masterplan

I’ve just got back from a week in Sweden (more on that in a later post) but it was Sophie’s 21st birthday party last Saturday and it was fabulous! It was held in “arguably the most remote country house in England” a few miles from the Scottish Border; a fabulous house called Stonegarthside Hall near Kershopefoot.

For the full photo gallery from the party, please CLICK HERE!

I can highly recommend CellarTracker if you have a reasonable collection of wine…not only are most well-known wines in the database already but the reviews are very useful, as are the ‘drinking windows’.

After my stay in Geneva and my great visit to the Montreux Jazz Festival, it was time to move on. I took a beatiful train journey through Switzerland to Zurich, where I changed trains for the the Cisalpino high speed line through the Swiss Alps to a small town called Bellinzona in the Swiss-Italian canton of Ticino.
This area has to be one of the most beautiful regions in the world and appears in many films where the scenery often looks like it has been inserted with CGI…there´s no way it could be real…
Bellinzona is a small town close to the larger towns/cities of Lugano and Locarno, both on beautiful lakes. The town is nestled in a valley with three large castles strung across the narowest part. It´s quite a climb to reach the highest one, especially in 30 deg heat but well worth it for the views.

My three days in Geneva have come to an end and it was a great place to start my trip. I know the city back to front so while I did take the time to wander round the lake front and through the Old Town, my stay was more about meeting up with old friends.
I spent a very chilled evening on Geneve Plage and yesterday managed to drop in to the Montreux Jazz Festival. I’ve been before and if anything it has improved. For starters, you can’t get a much better location; palm tree lined shores of Lac Leman, mountains towering round on all sides and the entire lakefront transformed into foor stalls, boutiques and music stages.
The beauty of the Festival is that the majority of the acts are free to watch and only bigger names require tickets. Should you wish, you can see this year everyone from 30 Seconds to Mars and The Ting Tings to Lenny Kravitz and Sheryl Crow!
Anyway, I took along a group of fellow backpackers and we spent the day watching the likes of the Oxford Uni Big Band.
Needless to say, pictures and videos will be up on Flickr when I get the chance!
Right, next train to catch, this time to the stunning Bellinzona in the Swiss-Italian canton of Ticino.

The first leg of my trip is almost over. I was on the 09:26 Eurostar from shiny St Pancras to Gare du Nord and happily arrived early…to be greeted by muggy wet conditions. Ah well, I had not planned on spending any time in Paris this time as I’m saving it for a weekend break in the Autumn. Anyway, I made my way to Gare de Lyon and sat around reading and people watching all afternoon…trying to get rid of my poorly-timed man flu!
I’m writing this from a rather busy TGV train to Geneva and according to my GPS we’re travelling at around 160mph…not sure about its accuracy but we certainly seem to be moving fast.
Right, back to playing Scrabble in French with some random fellow passengers!

Update: The TGV broke down last night. Something about lightning hitting the points, which I thought was a purely English excuse. Anyway, arrived into Geneva Cornavin about 23.15 and checked in to the Youth Hostel at 23.30.

I decided a long time ago that when I finally finished studying, I’d take a trip around Europe to make the most of the free time I have before I start working.
I start my training contract at the law firm on 6th August and so have around a month to travel. Too little time to have a decent holiday in Asia or the USA, long enough for Europe…so I designed my own ‘Grand Tour’.
I will be Interrailing around Europe from Wednesday 2nd July for 27 days and this is my route plus a fairly random collection of thoughts:

Geneva, CH
Bellinzona, CH
Venice, IT
Vienna, AT
Bratislava, SK,
Prague, CZ
Berlin, DE
Amsterdam, NL

The only non-train journey will be my flight home to London from Amsterdam with Easyjet.
I’ll use Eurostar to Paris and then the TGV onwards to Geneva.
I have booked a sleeper train between Venice and Vienna.
I will be seeing friends in Geneva, Venice, Vienna and Bratislava, but otherwise travelling on my own.

Accommodation is entirely in youth hostels, which are cheap and easy to book online.

I’m taking one large Berghaus rucksack with a smaller Deuter daysack stowed inside. Clothing has been easy and I’ve made numerous purchases from the Craghoppers range, as they are light, easy to wash, quick drying and many have inbuilt SPF ratings!

My final issue is a technological one. I will be taking my Blackberry Curve/8300 with me and have paid for a European unlimited data plan for the month (~£23.00). I’ll carry around a small 8mp Olympus digital camera and have 2 2Gb xD cards for it. I’m hoping to drop into internet cafes and/or friends houses to upload my photos directly to Flickr, but am also taking a sturdy OCZ Rally 8Gb USB memory stick for simple offline transfers if I fill up my xD cards.

I’ve tried numerous mapping sites, many “Web 2.0″ style travel planning tools and none have been entirely satisfactory. Unfortunately my Blackberry does NOT have GPS built in (unlike the latest models) so my desire to geotag my photos has hit a stumbling block. I’m debating splashing out £25 on a GPS receiver so I can make notes of locations in the Google Maps for Blackberry application but this is a less than ideal solution. Any suggestions are most welcome!

Another problem with international travel, especially backpacking, is financial arrangements. UK banks, and especially the major high street banks (excluding Nationwide) are terrible at adding on extra/inflated charges to overseas transactions. Therefore, I have opened an offshore Euro-denominated account with debit card, so the majority of my transactions will now attract no charge at all….much preferable to carrying around large amounts of cash or traveller cheques.

Finally, here is the link to a rough route plan in Google Maps: Grand Tour Map

I last wrote in January which is, quite frankly, appalling. My apologies, if anyone is actually reading this.
A quick rundown of what has been happening since then:
February saw me sit the first set of LPC exams, those relating to my compulsory subjects. I had a week in which to sit exams in Criminal Litigation, Civil Litigation, Property and Banking. It’s fair to say they were tough; open book exams are far more difficult that you’d imagine. Anyway, I feel I did pretty well in them and am actually looking forward to getting my results.
I then had a week away in Barcelona with about 50 other LPC students. All I can say his I had a much needed break and it was rather messy…ahem.
Following Barcelona, it’s been rather quiet. I have started my electives and am studying Public Companies & Equity Finance, Acquisitions and Banking & Debt Finance. Following my year in an investment bank, I have a slight headstart on most people but in any case, the electives are enjoyable and see me in college 3 or 4 days a week, which is nice.
I’ve had a couple of trips up to Durham to visit old friends and am off up North again this weekend at the start of my (strangely late) Easter holiday.
All in all, not much to report but just thought I’d check in!

I’ve noticed a steady stream of visitors from the UbuntuForums site; while I have not updated this in a while (as my server is running smoothly and has done for 2 years now) I am happy to answer any questions as best I can. Ask away in the comments!

Introduction:
I’ve had a home-built server sitting in my flat for a while now but have never got round to setting it up as much more than a personal networked storage device.
I was then hit by some very strange memory/motherboard problems which cropped up during my exams, so it’s taken me a while to get things up and running again.
Anyway, after a few days (I’m slow and learning) I have a pretty useful family backup server which, touch wood, is running very very well.

Requirements:

Solution:

The Server – Hardware
Gigabyte GA-MA770-DS3 AMD 770 motherboard w/ Athlon 64 3Ghz and 1Gb of RAM
2 x WD Caviar IDE 320Gb drives
2 x WD Caviar Black SATA 640GB drives
1 x Netgear Gigabit switch to speed up transfers from my desktop to the server
…and all the other hardware essentials.

The Server – Software
Ubuntu 8.10 LAMP server w/ various additions & modifications, including:
Webmin
Torrentflux
SAMBA
Hamachi
rsync
uShare
Squid (Details coming soon)

The Clients
Hamachi VPN installed on each, all connected to one network with an extremely strong password
SyncBack installed on each, with schedules set up, frequently for critical folders (essays, presentations etc) and less frequently for bulk folders (music, videos, photos)
LogMeIn Free installed on each and linked to my LogMeIn ITReach account

The Software:

SAMBA
User-specific SAMBA shares for each user/client, meaning each client only has access to their own backup folder, whilst I have access to all folders.
I also have a drop-box type SAMBA share in which anyone can save any kind of file, which is useful for sharing photos, lists etc when email won’t do.

As an aside, I found this quite tricky to set up and am happy to share my .conf file with anyone who needs it. I set up users on the server matching each client that would be connecting to SAMBA, making sure the passwords exactly matched. (The current setup means that when a client updates its password, I need to manually update each SAMBA password. With a small number of users, this isn’t too difficult).

I have included the main steps below:

Install SAMBA:

sudo apt-get install samba smbfs


Edit the configuration file:


sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf


Find “netbios name” and replace YOUR_HOSTNAME with whatever you chose on installation (e.g. UBUNTU)

Find “workgroup” and replace YOUR_WORKGROUP with the name of the workgroup configured in Windows
(To find out the Workgroup name in Windows:
- Right click on “My Computer”
- Click the 2nd Tab entitled “Computer Name” and find the name of the Workgroup)

Find this section:


####### Authentication #######
# "security = user" is always a good idea. This will require a Unix account
# in this server for every user accessing the server. See
# /usr/share/doc/samba-doc/htmldocs/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/ServerType.html
# in the samba-doc package for details.
; security = user


Uncomment the security line and make it look like this:


security = user
username map = /etc/samba/smbusers


This configures SAMBA to use the smbusers file for looking up users.

Create a SAMBA user:


sudo smbpasswd -a username


Add that user to the smbusers file (1):


sudo nano /etc/samba/smbusers


Add that user to the smbusers file (2):


username = "username"


Now you can create SAMBA shares by either using Webmin or editing “/etc/samba/smb.conf” as above.

While the file looks complicated because it is extensively commented, each share at the bottom of the file really just looks like this:

[User1-laptop]
comment = User 1's Laptop Backup
path = /media/disk1/user1-laptop
browseable = yes
read only = no
valid users = user1 greg

Replace User1 with the username of each client, repeat for each client and make sure you are also added as a valid user.

Once you’re done, run “testparm” to check you have no errors in the conf file. Once that’s fine, run:


/etc/rc.d/rc.samba restart


Should you run into any problems, the Ubuntu forums are your saviour and if you’re still stuck, try the SAMBA HowTo documentation. A very good HowTo can be found here.

Installing Hamachi on the Ubuntu server is far from zero-config but a careful reading of the forums soon sorts out various problems with upx-ucl-beta and other unexpected steps. As above, I am happy to share my solutions but this page from the Hamachi Wiki should be all you need.

I have added uShare to serve up my videos to the XBox 360 via UPnP, plus HandBrake CLI so I can backup my (legally bought) DVDs straight to a chosen format on the server.
To round off the media backup tools, I added automated CD backups to MP3 using ABCDE.

Despite the impressive up-time of Google’s Gmail, I am happier having a local backup of my Gmail account. Following this tutorial I installed Getmail and now have a .mbox file on the server updated daily.

When I am away from home, access to the server is relatively straightforward. Using Putty, I create a local SOCKS proxy and connect to the server’s address (maintained using DynDNS) over port 443, which is rarely blocked by any corporate or personal firewalls. Then, it’s a simple matter of configuring Firefox to use the local proxy (127.0.0.1:PORT#) to send all traffic and DNS requests through the SSH tunnel to the server.
Crucially, this also allows me to browse Webmin, Torrentflux, uShare and other web interfaces directly from my browser, wherever I am. As the server is running Hamachi, I can also address each client using it’s Hamachi IP address (5.*.*.*).

I have made use of secure features on the dd-wrt firmware to allow me to use an SSH tunnel to the server for when I’m stuck behind a restrictive firewall, therefore translating the port 443 incoming traffic to the correct SSH port for forwarding on to the server.

The Result:

• Each computer backs up to the server on a staggered schedule with SyncBack, via Hamachi. I have a central repository for all family photos, all my music plus an accessible backup from which to restore files should anything happen.

• I have a way of browsing the internet securely when using an unsecured WiFi connection when ‘roaming’.

• Each client can choose to use a Squid proxy running on the server when browsing on an unsecure network as the server has an Hamachi address (5.*.*.*) and so appears as a local computer to each client. I recommend FoxyProxy for easy selection of proxies.

I picked up a special offer on LogMeIn ITReach a few months ago and find it invaluable for synchronizing my network drive and my files on my home desktop, although I cannot connect to the server using this method, instead using Putty and the DynDNS address. LogMeIn Free is far more limited in terms of features but is fine for simple tech support purposes.
Overall, I’ve been extremely impressed with LogMeIn, especially the security offered. For example, as well as an account login and password (plus the remote computer’s credentials) I am sent a one-time 8 digit
key to my email (and therefore my Blackberry) each time I log in.

As an aside, I’ve recently started using the wonderful DropBox and now instead of carrying a USB stick with my PortableApps suite on it, I have all my portable programs (including Firefox 3) in the DropBox folder. If I’m on a computer which allows me to install DropBox, great. Otherwise, I can simply download a Zip file of Portable Firefox to use temporarily.

Please leave a comment if you’ve found this useful or would like any help with what I’ve done.

To Do:

Code snippets for Hamachi installation
Putty setup screenshots/links