Windows 7: Thunderbird: Add Security Exception

I was using Mozilla Thunderbird 10.0 for email.  I suddenly got this message:

Add Security Exception

You are about to override how Thunderbird identifies this site.

Legitimate banks, stores, and other public sites will not ask you to do this.

Server Location:  imap.exchange.iu.edu:993

Certificate Status

This site attempts to identify itself with invalid information.

Wrong Site

Certificate belongs to a different site, which could indicate an identity theft.

Below that, there was an option to "Permanently store this exception" and buttons to Confirm Security Exception or else Cancel.  Canceling didn't achieve anything:  the same dialog came right back.  I was afraid to click anything else.  The site in question was linked to Indiana University, which seemed legit.  I had gotten something like this before, using an earlier version of Thunderbird, but there the problematic email account had been Hotmail.

I wasn't sure why I was getting this.  A Mozilla page said, "The problem usually arises when the mail server's certificate is invalid for some reason. . . . Often this problem takes care of itself, in that the mail server provider will realize that they have made an error with their certificate and will replace it with a corrected version."  I had started getting this program maybe a year earlier.  I didn't know if this meant that I was the only person at Indiana University using Thunderbird, or what the explanation might have been.

I didn't find anything on point in Indiana's knowledgebase.  A search led to advice to make a change in Server Settings.  To get there, I had to click Cancel with the "Permanently store this exception" box checked; otherwise the dialog wouldn't budge.  Even so, I had to click Cancel a bunch of times to get out of there.  I went into Thunderbird > Tools > Account Settings.  I went to the Server Settings heading under the listing for the Indiana University account on the left side.  The advice seemed to be that, in that area, I should go to the Security Settings area and set Connection Security to None, instead of its present setting of "SSL/TLS."  Doing that changed the Authentication Method from "Normal password" to "Password, transmitted insecurely."

I wasn't sure about that.  I looked further down that same thread.  Someone else seemed to be saying that the address should be imap.exchange.iu.edu.:993, with a period before the colon.  Staying in the Account Settings dialog, and looking specifically at the list of options on the left side, I moved from the Server Settings option down to "Security," the last option for the Indiana University email account.  There, I went into Certificates > View Certificates > Servers tab.  I saw that I had certificates here for Mozilla, Google, Yahoo, etc.  It seemed like a legitimate list.  I decided to go with the advice, which was to go into Add Exception and type https://imap.exchange.iu.edu.:993.

Before I finished that, I took another look at the Mozilla page.  They said that the mail server provider (i.e., IU) should provide the necessary connection information.  They said that the Add Security Exception option that I was just about to finish would make my email through that account nonencrypted and visible to third parties.  Writers in another recent thread indicated that they, too, were having this problem.  The list of certificates (for e.g., Google, Yahoo) seemed to indicate that they had done what was necessary to provide email security at some level, but Indiana University had not.  I tried another search, but it led to surprisingly few hits, among which the main relevant reaction was puzzlement.

The Mozilla page seemed to be saying that you have three options in this kind of case.  You can ask the mail server people to get it together.  You can add a security exception -- or, as it appeared in my case at least, you would have to add a security exception if you wanted the program to be usable.  Or you could switch to a different account.  I wasn't sure whether switching to a different email program would provide another possible solution.

OpenDNS Instead of the ISP for DNS Service

I was wrestling with networking problems in Windows 7, when I came across this quotation on the OpenDNS website:

Rid your household of annoying, intermittent Internet outages. Switch to OpenDNS and immediately notice a faster, more reliable Internet experience. Join the millions who've already unbundled their DNS service from their ISP's Internet connection.

I had not realized that the two could be separated.  For that matter, I really had no idea what DNS service was.  But OpenDNS was free, so I signed up.  I went to their settings page.  In essence, they told me to go to Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center > Change adapter settings > double-click on Local Area Connection > highlight TCP/IPv4 > Properties > Use the following DNS server addresses > Preferred DNS server = 208.67.222.222, Alternate = 208.67.220.220.  (The default setting there was "Obtain DNS server address automatically.")  It wasn't in their instructions, but I clicked "Validate settings upon exit" before clicking OK and closing out of there.  This ran Windows Network Diagnostics, which said, "Troubleshooting couldn't identify the problem."  So that sounded good.  OpenDNS then gave me a webpage where it said, "Success!  You're now using OpenDNS."

I really had no idea what this meant.  But it seemed to be the solution to a part of a cluster of networking problems I was having at this time, as described in other posts in this blog.  So I was happy about that.

Windows 7: Multiple Monitors, Multiple Computers: Possibilities

I planned to be using Windows 7 on two computers.  At the start, I had two monitors, each dedicated to its own computer.  I wondered if I could set up the system so that I could use both monitors for computer A, and could also use both monitors for computer B.  I also wondered if I could use monitor A to see what was happening on both computers A and B at the same instant.

My first search led to ads for KVM switches, but that wasn't what I wanted.  I did look into KVM switches at Newegg, just in case someone had invented a switch that would do everything.  But then realized I wasn't going to read through all those product descriptions to see if any of them had the possibilities I wanted.  A different search got closer to what I wanted.  Actually, it went well beyond it.  There were possibilities I hadn't even imagined.

One possibility was that of Synergy, which had originally been Synergy and then became Synergy-Plus and was now back to being Synergy.  It looked like the Synergy concept ws that I could have two or more computers, each having its own monitor, and I could have just one keyboard and one mouse, and would move among these computers simply by moving the mouse to the left or right, until it left one monitor and then appeared on the next.  No KVM switch; just move the mouse to switch computers.  The connection was by ethernet -- just get all computers on the same network.  They said you could also copy and paste between the computers.  But apparently Synergy wasn't entirely stable yet; that was their stated goal for 2012. For that reason, I decided I would prefer a KVM for now, if necessary.  Presumably a problem with the network would render all computers other than the server (i.e., the one to which the keyboard and mouse were connected) unavailable.  Bruce Tyson pointed out that there would also be a problem if the user wanted to access the BIOS of a slave or client computer during bootup.  It seemed like it might be a good idea to have a spare keyboard and mouse handy.  Another possibility:  Input Director.  This Windows-specific freeware application seemed to have the same concept as Synergy.  These sorts of programs seemed to have the same idea as a KVM switch that would allow one keyboard (e.g., that on a laptop) to take control of another computer even if it did have its own keyboard and mouse.

Bruce Tyson also pointed me toward web-based sharing services, Virtual Network Computing (VNC), and remote desktop software.  These apparently all were, or could be, variations of "headless" computing, where the keyboard, video, and mouse (KVM) are all connected to just one computer, which is then linked to others whose contents may display on that monitor.  He also noted that some monitors have dual inputs, which could be plugged into separate computers, but that the user would have to switch between them using buttons on the monitor.  That would prevent simultaneous viewing of two computers and would also be klunky in daily use.

It seemed that GoToMyPC.com was one of the leading web-based services.  But when I looked into it, these appeared to be simply ways of accessing the computer remotely.  At $10/month or more, it was pricey.  LogMeIn and others seemed to offer good free alternatives.  I decided I didn't want a web-based service, even if it did exactly what I wanted, because it would be relatively slow and it would be vulnerable to anything that might go wrong with the modem, the network connection, etc.

According to Wikipedia, VNC was both platform-independent and remote-capable, and some versions were "optimised for Microsoft Windows."  A list of versions indicated that UltraVNC (free) was the most advanced mainstream version and was the basis for several others.  Current alternatives for connecting a few Windows PCs included EchoVNC (free), RealVNC (free+), SmartCode VNC Manager ($129+), SupportAnyPC ($149), TeamViewer (free), and TightVNC (free).  Among these, a RealVNC feature comparison page indicated that its free version was not compatible with Windows 7.  Wikipedia pages for the free versions indicated that RealVNC was similar to UltraVNC, but the latter had more features; EchoVNC differed from UltraVNC in being more firewall-friendly; Teamviewer was mostly for remote control of computers; and TightVNC likewise had spun off a firewall-friendly variant, RemoteVNC ($25 per computer), among others.  A Wikipedia comparison page, only in it formative stages at this point, named Skype, TigerVNC, and xpra as other free Windows-compatible remote desktop programs.  The Wikipedia pages just linked for those additions indicated that TigerVNC was a fork of RealVNC; that Skype was (of course) primarily for VoIP; and that xpra (currently a beta product) used an approach that differed from that of VNC; but it later looked like xpra was not for Windows.  For my purposes, the survivors of this discussion were EchoVNC, TigerVNC, TightVNC, and UltraVNC.

I looked at a Wikipedia page showing a comparison of Java remote desktop projects. I was not sure what this was about. The project that seemed most feature-rich at this point was WallCooler VPN, so I looked into that. This actually led to a page for Vedivi, which seemed to be in the business of giving people access to remote computers at a low monthly price.

Eventually I figured out that there are many remote desktop protocols.  VNC was one; Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) was a Windows-specific alternative.  There were others.  I eventually found a chart that, although officially for Mac, pulled together some of this.  Revisting the Synergy and Input Director webpages (above), I saw that Synergy was not a VNC project; I was not clear what type it was, and likewise for Input Director.  Supposedly Microsoft's own version of RDP was currently called Remote Desktop Services, previously Terminal Services; but when I went looking for it, I wound up in Remote Desktop Connection (RDC).  A search led me to a description that sounded like what I was looking for.  I wondered why someone would have bothered creating Input Director, with its Windows orientation, if this feature already existed in RDC.  I decided to start by trying to use RDC, to see what would happen.  That would be the subject of another post.

Connecting Network Attached Storage (NAS) to a WinXP Guest in VMware: FAIL

I had two desktop computers running Ubuntu 10.04.  On one of them, I was running VMware Workstation 7.1, with Windows XP SP3 as a guest operating system in a virtual machine (VM).  I had just figured out how to network these two computers using Samba shares within a home network, where the two computers were connected via ethernet cables to a shared router.

Now there was a new question.  Could I add a Synology DS109 network-attached storage (NAS) device (essentially an external hard drive enclosure designed for network backup and file serving) to this network?  Of course I could, in the sense of running an ethernet cable from the Synology to the router; but what I was wondering was whether I could make this work despite the fact that the software for the Synology was available only for Windows and Mac, and not Linux.

It was a question, in other words, of whether I could run the Synology software in Windows XP in a guest VM.  I gave it a whirl.  I ran the Synology installation CD and went through the steps to set up the Synology Server.  This opened the Synology Assistant, a setup wizard; and after a moment, it gave me an error message:

No Synology Server was found on the local network.  Please make sure:

1.  Synology Assistant is not blocked by the firewall of your computer OS or anti-virus applications.

2.  Synology Server and your computer are both connected to the network.

3.  You have switched on the power of Synology Server.

Option 1 was the only one that seemed to explain the situation.  I decided to back up and make sure that I could see a shared folder on the other computer from within Windows.  In my first try, I set up that shared folder on an NTFS partition, and that led to a separate investigation of the difficulties of sharing an NTFS partition in Ubuntu.

That wound up taking longer than expected, so in the meantime I just focused on the link between the Synology and the computer in which I had VMware running.  I noticed that, in Ubuntu's Places > Network, it listed three items:  ANTEC (the name of this computer), Windows Network, and WINXP8 (the name of the computer running in the WinXP VM).  Plainly, Ubuntu was seeing Windows.  Was Windows seeing Ubuntu?  Or did it need to?  A first answer was that, of course, you could go into Windows Explorer > Tools > Map Network Drive and (assuming you had VM > Settings > Options tab > Shared Folders set up) you could gain access to NTFS and ext3 partitions outside of the drive C that existed inside the virtual machine.  These drives would be visible in Windows Explorer > My Network Places > Entire Network > VMware Shared Folders.

I tried running the Synology setup wizard again.  It gave me the same error as before.  I did a search and found webpages describing how to use NAS freeware to use another computer as an NAS device.  This raised two thoughts.  First, possibly I could use some software other than Synology's CD to make contact with the NAS device.  Second, perhaps I should consider using another computer myself, in lieu of the Synology unit.  I decided to go ahead with the Synology project for now; I could return or sell the device if it really wasn't what I wanted.  I probably could have assembled another computer at equal or lower cost, with far greater potential storage capacity, with more RAID options, with a more powerful processor (for e.g., checksum calculations) if needed, with what might prove to be more options in the choice of software packages and commands to manage and adjust it, and with more flexible hardware troubleshooting options (i.e., more than just fix it or replace it) in the event of malfunction.  Its drawbacks would include time and expense for software and hardware selection, learning, installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting; physical space requirements; power consumption; and noise and heat generation.

For the time being, I searched Synology's website and found a post raising the thought that perhaps a Windows connection was crucial only for the initial setup of the Synology device.  So I rebooted the computer into Windows XP instead of Ubuntu and ran the Synology setup CD from there.  This time, the wizard found the DiskStation right away.  So, really, I probably could have set the thing up using my laptop.  It seemed to be just a matter of connecting a Windows-based computer to configure the hard drive that I had inserted into the NAS unit.

Following the Quick Installation Guide, I looked for a Browse option in the Synology Assistant, but didn't see one.  Instead, in the Management tab of the Assistant, I double-clicked on the DiskStation entry, and that seemed to be the correct thing to do:  it opened a different Setup Wizard, or maybe a continuation of the same one.  The wizard said, "Please input the path of installation file."  Maybe this was where I was supposed to browse to the .pat file?  Sure enough. Browse brought up four different .pat files.  I chose the one for the 109 and opted for One-Click Setup.  It warned me that all data in the hard drive would be deleted.  I hoped it meant the hard drive that I had inserted into the NAS unit.  Lights began flashing on the unit.  It went through several steps:  Apply network settings, Format hard drive, Install DSM (DiskStation Manager) to hard drive, and Write configurations.  For my 2GB drive, the whole process took about 20 minutes.

When it was done, it said, "System has been installed successfully."  Then it just sat there.  Now what?  The other programs on the CD's Installation Menu were Data Replicator, in case I wanted to use the unit for backup rather than as a file server, and Download Redirector, for some purpose I didn't fully understand.  For lack of any better ideas, I rebooted into Ubuntu > Places > Network.  The list of places was the same as before.  I tried another search of the Synology website.  The product page for the DS109 definitely said that the unit was "designed for data storage and sharing among Windows, Mac, and Linux."  But how?

I knew I was desperate when I thought that perhaps I should consult the User's Guide.  But then -- what's this?  When I went to the downloads website, I saw that Synology Assistant was also available for Linux!  I had no idea.  I downloaded that and, while I was at it, also snagged what appeared to be a more recent DSM patch (.pat) file.  The User's Guide on the CD was for DSM 2.3, but the one online was for DSM 3.0, so I copied that too.  Apparently DSM was the firmware updater.  The included instructions were incorrect, as I eventually figured out.  All I had to do was to navigate to the folder where I had put the downloaded .tar.gz file ("cd /LOCAL/Synology") and the accompanying install.sh file, type "install.sh," designate /usr/local as the target directory, watch a bunch of error messages roll by, accept its offer to try again by sudo, copy and paste the command it offered to create a symbolic link, and then type "SynologyAssistant."

With that, Synology Assistant was up and running, and it found the DiskStation.  I double-clicked on it.  It opened a webpage in Firefox.  Having used the One-Click installation previously, I knew there was no administrator password, so I just clicked right on in.  Now I was looking at Management and Online Resources icons.  Management gave me all kinds of options.  I noticed I was in DiskStation Manager 2.3; did this mean that there was no DSM 3.0 for Linux?  On the left side, under System, I clicked on DSM Update.  Ah, of course.  This was the part where I got to Browse to the new .pat file I had downloaded.  It said, "Transferring data to the server.  Please wait."  This time, it was done in under 10 minutes.  It then confronted me with a signin screen.  I could not just click on through; it demanded that I enter something.  I tried Administrator without a password.  No go.  I tried my normal Ubuntu login.  Aha! . . . er, no.  That wasn't it either.  The hell.  I was locked out of my own NAS.  I wasn't alone.  Several other people had experienced this just within the last few days.  I suspected it was due to some quirk in newly released software.  I posted a "me too" note on it in Synology's moderated forum and waited.

But then -- reverting again, desperately, to the manual -- I noticed I was supposed to log in as "admin" with no password.  That worked, and now I was in DiskStation Manager 3.0.  I clicked on "Set up a volume and create a shared folder."  That opened Storage Manager.  I selected Storage > Create and that put me in Volume Creation Wizard.  The only option that wasn't greyed out was ISCSI LUN.  The manual didn't define that term, but Wikipedia said it was short for Internet SCSI, where SCSI is short for Small Computer System Interface.  The idea seemed to be that you were using the Internet instead of cables to create a SCSI setup.  LUN was short for "logical unit number."  An ISCSI LUN was apparently just any one of a set of drives in a SCSI array.  In other words, I was creating a logical drive.  So I went with that.

That gave me a choice of some more properties.  One was Thin Provisioning (default = yes), which was said to increase efficiency.  I was supposed to say how much of my 2TB (actually, 1829GB available, according to the dialog) I wanted to allocate to this first volume (default name:  LUN-1).  I was going to be backing up this file server to a 2TB drive, so I didn't worry about splitting the volume to a size that would match the external drive.  I thought it might be a good idea to have more than one volume, in case one went bad or needed maintenance.  The manual said that, on my unit, I could have up to ten.  I looked at my data and decided to go with three volumes of 600GB each.  (This would be changing later.)  Finally, there was an iSCSI Target Mapping option.  Again, the manual didn't explain this.  I found a website that sort of halfway did.  Eventually I just decided to go with the default, which was no, thank you.  I clicked Next > Apply and, in a few seconds, it was done.  I repeated for the other volumes -- or, I guess, LUNs, not volumes.  Then I clicked on the icons this process had created.  Each indicated that it had a 600GB capacity, but none of them actually seemed to have taken a bite out of the 1.8TB total.  Apparently that was how Thin Provisioning worked.  Then, to finish up with Storage Manager, I went to the HDD Management tab > Cache Management > Enable Write Cache.  I also ran a quick S.M.A.R.T. test.

This was all very nice, but I wasn't sure what it was actually accomplishing.  There weren't any new partitions appearing in Nautilus.  I wasn't sure if there were supposed to be.  I bailed out of Storage Manager.  I was looking again at Quick Start.  It said that now I needed to create a shared folder in the Synology.  I followed its link.  It put me into Control Panel - Shared Folder.  I clicked on Create.  In Create New Shared Folder, I set up a folder for LUNDATA, the first of my three LUNs.  It wouldn't let me select "Mount automatically on startup."  I gave both admin and guest read/write privileges for now.  I did the same with the other two LUNs.  I was confused, though:  after completing that step, I still didn't have anything to show for it.

It seemed that Chapter 7 of the User's Guide was where I wanted to be.  It told me to go to Main Menu (i.e., the down-arrow icon) > Control Panel > Win/Mac/NFS if I wanted to enable file sharing.  But that gave me an error:  "You are not authorized to use this service."  So, oops, that meant I had gotten logged out for dillydallying.  (First of many times!)  After re-login, the Quick Start reminded me that next on the list was "Create a User and assign privileges."  It had admin as the system default user already.  I selected that one and clicked edit.  Spooky thing here:  admin did have a password.  I wasn't sure why I didn't have to enter it when logging in.  I wasn't allowed to change the name of admin or disable that account.  I decided to change the password to something that I would actually know.  Admin already had full read/write privileges to my three LUNs.  The guest account was disabled.  I left it that way.  The manual (p. 66) said that each user could also have his/her/its own "home" folder.  It was something I had to enable if I wanted it.  I didn't need it, so I skipped that.

So now I went back to Win/Mac/NFS.  The User's Guide (p. 59) said that the unit supported file sharing in Linux in SMB, FTP, NFS, and WebDAV.  I unclicked the boxes so that the Synology would not offer Windows or Mac file service, which I did not need (and did not intend to provide to anyone else).  Instead, I clicked the Enable NFS box which, the manual (p. 61) said, was for Linux clients.  I figured that, in my Windows XP virtual machine, I would access the folders or LUNs on the Synology as network drives, just as if they had been ext3 drives inside the computer.

The remaining tab in this part of Control Panel had to do with Domain/Workgroup.  I didn't know if I wanted or needed to have the Synology be part of a domain, a workgroup, or both.  But then I found that the Domain/Workgroup tab was greyed out.  As I might have assumed, "workgroup" and "domain" appeared to be Microsoft-specific.  If I went back and enabled Windows file service, the Domain/Workgroup tab became ungreyed.  So that explained that:  it wasn't something I needed in Ubuntu.

In the Control Panel > Groups section of the Synology DSM, I saw that the default "users" group had read/write privileges only to the public folder, which I had disabled.  It was just me, so I didn't need a group.  So I left that all as it was.  Next, in Control Panel > Application Privileges, it appeared I could give users access to specific Synology applications (FTP, WebDAV, File Station, Audio Station, Download Station, or Surveillance Station).  Admin wasn't listed.  I assumed it didn't need to be.  I had no other users, so I skipped that part too.

Chapter 3 in the User's Guide, "Modify System Settings," told me that in Control Panel > Network, I could choose among several types of networks.  In my version of the Network dialog, those options were LAN, PPPoE, Wireless Network, and Tunnel.  The choice for my purposes seemed to be between LAN and PPPoE.  The manual said that I should use PPPoE if I used a cable or DSL modem and if my ISP used PPPoE.  I didn't know how to check that.  It didn't sound familiar, so I decided to start with LAN, the default (first) tab.  It gave me an option of manual or automatic configuration; I chose automatic (which was, again, the default).  That seemed to be about all I could do there.  While I was in the neighborhood, I went to Control Panel > Time and set it to synchronize itself with an NTP server.  

Now it was time to set up shared folders (User's Guide, p. 69).  In Control Panel > Shared Folder, I saw the three LUNs I had set up.  So apparently a LUN was a shared folder.  I had already taken care of this.  But that raised some questions.  If it was shared, what more did I need to do so that the computer would see it?  Should I have set up a "target" when I was creating the LUNs?  And did I want to encrypt them?

If I clicked on the Encrypt box, the "Mount automatically on startup" option became ungrayed.  I would want to enable that option.  But I had to think about that for a minute.  It seemed that encryption would protect the contents of the Synology in case of theft or loss of the physical device.  But apparently it would not protect those contents while the computer was turned on.  Anyone who could get into my computer, either physically or via the Internet, would have access to those contents.  I wasn't presently requiring myself to enter a login ID when I turned on the computer, so anyone sitting in my position would still have access, despite encryption.  I hadn't yet reviewed the part of the manual having to do with Internet access to the Synology, but evidently I would also have the option of logging in to it from elsewhere.  On the other hand, I had once had the experience of not being able to get into a backup that I had encrypted.  I wasn't sure if I had mis-recorded the password or if the encryption system on that backup had somehow gotten corrupted.  On balance, I decided that it would probably be a good idea to password the Internet-accessible data on the Synology, and to start requiring myself to enter a password to log in on the computer (System > Administration > Users and Groups).  But then, when I entered the password for the Synology and clicked OK, I got a warning telling me, "The performance of the encrypted shared folder will be decreased" and "The encrypted shared folder will not be available via NFS."  That would have defeated the purpose of having the Synology.  So I backed out of that.  No hard drive encryption in the Synology.

Well, the Synology was still not showing up in Nautilus.  I searched the manual for "target," in case that was the missing ingredient.  The User's Guide (p. 41) explained, "An iSCSI Target is like a connection interface . . . . [A]ll the LUNs mapped to the iSCSI Target are virtually attached to the client's operation [sic] system."  So apparently I would map my three LUNs to a target, and Ubuntu would see the target.  As the manual advised, I went into Synology's Storage Manager > iSCSI Target > Create.  There was an option to enable CHAP authentication, where the server would verify the client's identity.  I went with that.  I didn't go further and enable two-way authentication; I didn't need the computer to verify that it was contacting the right NAS unit.  I mapped all three LUNs to a single target.

In Edit > Advanced, I had an option to have it calculate CRC checksums for header and data digests.  The purpose would be to reduce or prevent data corruption.  The calculation would burden the CPU in the NAS, but I suspected the cabling would be more of a bottleneck than the processor nonetheless.  One post said that CRC might be a good idea for data traveling through a router, as would be the case here.  A year-old VMware webpage pertaining to a different VMware product (ESX) said that data digest for iSCSI was not supported on Windows VMs.  I decided to start out with these checksum items turned on, and see what the performance was like.  I also had options pertaining to maximum receive and send segment bytes.  The manual didn't seem to have anything on that, and nothing popped out in several different Google searches.  I decided to leave those at their default values of 262144 and 4096, respectively.

I still didn't see the Synology in Nautilus, but now (as I viewed p. 72 of the manual) I believed that was probably because I had not enabled my own username (ray) to have access.  In Synology's Control Panel > User, I added that username and gave myself full read/write access to the LUNs.  But then, whoa, on the next page, the User's Guide said that, to allow a Linux client to access a shared folder, I would have to go into Control Panel > Shared Folders > select the folder > NFS Privileges > Create and set up an NFS rule.  The first box there called for Hostname or IP.  It looked like the best way to identify the client would be by its IP address.  What was the IP address of my Ubuntu computer?  Zetsumei said I should type "/sbin/ifconfig" in Terminal.  I did that and got a bunch of information regarding eth0, lo, vmnet1, and vmnet8.  Same thing if I just typed "ifconfig -a."  A search didn't shed any light.  The number for eth0 came first and looked most familiar, so I tried that, with no mapping and asynchronous enabled.  This still didn't produce anything in Nautilus, so I thought probably I should have mapped.  But to what?  The only options were "Map to admin" or "Map to guest."  How about "Map to ray"?

A search of the Synology website led to a thread that yielded more questions than answers.  For the first time, the thought crossed my mind that the quality of the Synology organization was possibly not as gold-plated as I had hoped or imagined.  Surely the manual could have been clearer; surely, at these prices, the people posting these questions deserved some enlightenment.  At any rate, links in that thread led to one of those multiyear Ubuntu discussions, this one dealing particularly with NFS.  It seemed I should focus on learning about NFS; among other things, some posters felt that it was far better than Samba for sharing files and folders.

So I did a search and found a recent webpage promising to show me how to set up NFS.  I guessed that the real problem might be on the client side, so I started with that part of the webpage.  First off, they wanted me to install some packages:  portmap, nfs-common, and autofs.  A check of Synaptic told me that Synology had not installed these.  After installing them, I looked in the manual for the Synology IP address.  On page 161 (after many references to the IP address), the manual said that I could find it in Main Menu > System Information -- not, that is, in Control Panel.  The IP address it gave was, however, the same as the default entry it showed in Control Panel > Network > Use manual configuration; it was not the number shown in the DNS Server box.  So in the client, following the instructions on that webpage about NFS, I typed "sudo gedit /etc/hosts.deny" and added a line that said "portmap : ALL."  Then I typed "sudo gedit /etc/hosts.allow" and added a line that said "portmap : [Synology IP address]," using the address I had just found in Main Menu > System Information.  Next, I typed "sudo gedit /etc/hosts" and added a line near the top that said "[Synology IP address] [Synology Server Name]," in the same format as the other lines there.  (The server name was shown in Main Menu > System Information.)

Continuing with the NFS webpage's instructions, I was supposed to type something along the lines of "sudo mount [Synology Folder] [Local Folder]."  For that purpose, I understood that Synology Folder = [Synology IP address]:[Synology Shared Folder].  But I was not sure what the Shared Folder part was supposed to be.  Was I supposed to refer to the LUN or the iSCSI Target on the Synology unit?  Since the User's Guide (p. 41) said that an iSCSI Target was "like a connection interface," and that all the LUNs attached to it would be attached to the operating system, it seemed that I would need only one target, as I had set it up.  But now that I had learned more about security on the Synology, I had changed my mind about the number of shared folders I wanted.  I just wanted two, each 900GB in size:  one to contain stuff that shouldn't be changing very often, and that only the administrator should have write privileges for, and one for everything else, i.e., for the stuff that I would want to be able to mess with on a daily basis.  So after changing the LUNs and target in Storage Manager, I guessed that I would be creating two folders using the pattern of "/home/[username]/[foldername]" (where "username" would be "ray" in my case) -- one for each of the two LUNs on the Synology.  One of them was called SYNDATA.  On that basis, I typed "sudo mount [Synology IP address]:[Synology 900GB folder name] /home/ray/SYNDATA."  This gave me "access denied by server while mounting [Synology Folder]."  Not a desirable answer, but at least it was a reply of some kind!

By now, I was completely confused, and more than a little irritated at how very long this was taking.  The NAS was supposed to be simplifying my situation, not making it more complex.

It did seem, at this point, that it might have been easier to troubleshoot this if I had been using a computer as my NAS:  I could have gone into it and typed various commands to maybe get a bit more insight on what was happening in there.  A search for that error message led to the suggestion that I type "/usr/sbin/rpcinfo -p" to see what ports the server was using, but that gave me a "No such file or directory" error.

I decided to put in a support request at Synology.  The form required me to enter the Firmware Version -- but, of course, this was not provided in the System Information dialog.  I just entered something that seemed approximately right.  It also asked for the serial number -- and that, they helpfully indicated, was located on the bottom or perhaps the rear of the unit.  After turning it around and risking unplugging it, doing gymnastics to hold it while typing, I realized that, well, they might have mentioned that that bit of information actually *was* in the System Information dialog.  But when I got down to the part where they were ready and listening to what I had to say, I was not sure what to type.  There wasn't an option of talking to (or even chatting with) a live person.  I had to type something.  But what?  How could I possibly explain all this in a few words?

What I needed, somewhere in the Synology software, was a tool that would tell me what was happening.  "You have connected to a computer" or "You have not connected to a computer," etc.  I wasn't sure -- I hadn't done much networking before -- but I suspected that I could get that kind of information by using regular Linux commands on a computer in a network.

I decided that what I would tell the Synology people was just that they should look at this post.  I had identified a number of areas they could improve; and if they really got on the stick, they might even be able to respond in time to help me, before I returned the unit to the vendor or resold it.  The unit had more than a dozen positive remarks from other purchasers at Newegg, so I was hopeful.  But meanwhile, I started a post on the alternative of using a separate computer to create my own NAS.

Ubuntu Do-It-Yourself Network Attached Storage (DIY NAS): A Preliminary Look

I had just done an enormous amount of work in an unsuccessful attempt to get a Synology DS109 network attached storage (NAS) device to work in my Ubuntu 10.04 system.  It was an expensive unit, on my budget, even if it was near the bottom of Synology's line of products, so I was hoping for good things from it.  But I was not able to figure out why it wasn't connecting with my computer.  So while waiting for a reply from Synology's tech support, I did a search for do-it-yourself (DIY) alternatives.  This post describes a bit of what I found.

What I was hoping to find, in a DIY alternative, may be summarized in this excerpt from the previous post:

I decided to go ahead with the Synology project for now; I could return or sell the device if it really wasn't what I wanted.  I probably could have assembled another computer at equal or lower cost, with far greater potential storage capacity, with more RAID options, with a more powerful processor (for e.g., checksum calculations) if needed, with what might prove to be more options in the choice of software packages and commands to manage and adjust it, and with more flexible hardware troubleshooting options (i.e., more than just fix it or replace it) in the event of malfunction.  Its drawbacks would include time and expense for software and hardware selection, learning, installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting; physical space requirements; power consumption; and noise and heat generation.

If the Synology unit had been easy to use, I wouldn't have been able to generate that list of potential advantages of a DIY alternative.  I accumulated that list during the process of writing up the hassles I was having.  So now it was a question of how true those observations really were.

One thing for sure:  if I had taken seriously the idea of building a NAS myself at the outset, I would not have bought the Synology unit.  I did, in fact, have an old computer sitting around, one that I rarely used, mostly just for troubleshooting random hardware problems.  I was willing to convert it to another function. So, right there, I did have much of the hardware that I would need.  Its case design would accommodate a number of drives, if I decided to build a RAID NAS that would require that.

That took care of some of the objections to a DIY NAS.  What about space, noise, heat, and power?  There was no comparison:  the Synology was such a cool, quiet, sleek little thing compared to that whole computer case and its monitor and keyboard.  Even if I put the peripherals in a drawer and managed the server remotely (assuming that was possible), there was still the noise from its fans and power supply.  The trade-up in expandability and flexibility (with e.g., RAID) would come at a cost.  And that was the real question:  did I want the additional capabilities badly enough to accept the drawbacks?

Then again, it occurred to me that I didn't absolutely have to have the server remain on constantly.  Couldn't it hibernate during slack periods?  For noise reduction, couldn't I park it in a closet?  This seemed like something worth experimenting with.

What about hardware hassles?  I could probably just plug in the drives and, optionally, a RAID controller and be done.  The Synology unit did not have a RAID option, and it did not come with a drive.  The DIY NAS would have more things that could fail, but failures did not happen often, and with an optional RAID setup it would be better equipped to absorb them.  In terms of hardware, the DIY NAS was the winner.

And software?  The Synology software package had a nice GUI that, for all its good looks, had managed to confuse me and had thus failed to deliver a working solution.  If the Synology people came through on my tech support request, I would be ahead of the game there; but my request had been so broad and confused that I doubted they would be able to help much.  If it was a matter of devoting another five or ten hours, I was leaning toward trying something new, rather than beating my head against the wall with more efforts to understand the Synology software.

I decided, though, that I had probably better take a closer look at the software I would be using.  Ubuntu came with software RAID, and I had already had a bit of experience with that.  But what about NAS -- what software would I use for that?  I had gotten the impression that NFS was a good alternative to Samba for a Linux network -- simpler and faster, but possibly not as secure and apparently not as good for interfacing with Windows machines.  The Synology unit used NFS.  But this didn't really answer the question.  What software -- really, what operating system -- would I use to manage the DIY NAS?  Sources cited on the Wikipedia page for FreeNAS made it sound like a great solution.  It was apparently UNIX-based, and thus was some kind of cousin to Ubuntu, but it seemed I would have to invest some additional time to learn FreeNAS.  Ubuntu Server seemed like a more familiar, better-supported, and more flexible alternative.  Openfiler was another possibility.  A lot of people swore by Windows Home Server; I just didn't want to pay $100 for the privilege of going back in the direction of relying completely on Microsoft software.  Going in a different direction, there also seemed to be routers with hard drive connections, though I wasn't fond of the USB connection offered by the one I saw.

Those thoughts led to a thread that made me ask whether I wanted an NAS or a home server.  The tradeoffs described above were echoed in another thread I found, but now the discussion had mutated a bit.  If I was going to use a computer as an NAS, it seemed I might as well make it a home server.  In fact, that's probably how I had been thinking of it anyway:  a machine that could do whatever a computer could do, including RAID as well as NAS.

By this point, a couple of things had happened.  I had downloaded a copy of Ubuntu Server and had decided to try setting it up on that old computer, to see how easy it would make things for me in terms of network storage and RAID options.  I had read enough webpages to persuade me that setting up a home server could be somewhat time-consuming and thus would ideally be approached, for my purposes, as a longer-term project:  install the operating system, tinker with the hardware, and gradually move toward comfort with its maintenance and other requirements.  And I had heard back from the Synology people via email, not once, but twice in the space of three hours in the evening, East Coast time.  They were offering to set up a TeamViewer session with me for the next day.  So my working plan, at this point, was to get the Synology going, if I could do so the next day.

Ubuntu 10.04: Ethernet Networking Two Computers and a Router

I had installed Ubuntu 10.04 on two desktop computers.  Both were connected by ethernet cable to a router.  This seemed like the basis for a network, so that the two computers could talk to each other directly.  I had not previously set up a network in Ubuntu.  This post describes that learning experience.

I started with a search for guidance.  This led to a thread that persuaded me to try Samba shares, with Webmin for my Samba GUI.  So I typed these lines, one at a time:

sudo apt-get install samba

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin_1.510-2_all.deb

sudo dpkg --install webmin_1.510-2_all.deb

sudo apt-get install -f

The last line was a response to the error messages.  Then, in Firefox, I went to https://localhost:10000 and, after confirming a security exception, I entered the same username and password that I used to log into Ubuntu on the computer.  This gave me a locally stored Webmin webpage.  I clicked "Refresh Modules" on the left side of the page.  When that process was done, I clicked on Servers, in the top left corner.  Sure enough, it said, "Samba Windows File Sharing."  I went through that same process on both computers.

Then I searched for information on how to use Webmin.  This led to the discovery that Webmin was not fully compatible with Ubuntu, which would explain why it wasn't available for download through Synaptic.  So now it was time to undo what I had just done:

sudo apt-get remove webmin

sudo apt-get autoremove

As an alternative, someone mentioned eBox.  It looked like eBox had had some hard times, but hopefully those were all behind us now.  So I went into Synaptic and marked ebox-samba for installation.  This brought the plain ebox platform and a boatload of other packages along with it.  One of those packages was ddclient, which asked me many questions that I could not answer.  I tried to fake it, just going with the defaults, but wound up with an "Empty host list" message telling me that I had failed in some significant sense.  With that taken care of, Synaptic went ahead and installed all these downloads, presenting me once again with the ddclient Empty host list before it was done.  Yet after all that, there was no eBox icon in my menu and typing "ebox" at the prompt just gave me "command not found."  So I used the same steps as above to remove eBox.

A different search led to a page that advised me to type this command:

sudo apt-get install samba samba-common system-config-samba

With that done, I went to System > Administration > Samba.  This brought up a Samba Server Configuration dialog.  There, it looked like I could go to File > Add Share to designate a folder that would be shared between computers.  I took these same steps on the other computer.  Then I specified a folder on one computer that I did want to share.  I made it writable, visible, and accessible to everyone.  I found that this had to be a folder; I couldn't share a whole partition.  Later, I saw in another source that I should also have gone into Preferences > Server Settings > Security tab, there in the Configuration dialog, and change Authentication Mode to Share and Guest Account to my username, so I went back and did that,  Then, back in Nautilus, I right-clicked on that folder and selected Sharing Options > Share this folder and allowed others to create and delete.  I right-clicked on the folder in Nautilus again and went to Properties > Permissions, but it was already owned by me with all kinds of rights and privileges.

That seemed to be all I was supposed to do.  But I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to go, on the other computer, to see the shared folder on the first computer.  Eventually I saw instructions to go to Ubuntu's menu > Places > Network.  There, it had entries for each of the two computers, plus something called Windows Network.  I found that, if I just double-clicked on the entry for the other computer and then waited patiently for it to do its thing, with no visible indication that it had heard me, eventually (after maybe ten seconds) it would get around to showing me the shared folder on the other computer.  And it worked:  I was able to retrieve a file from that other computer.

Ubuntu: Backup with Rsync

In a previous post, I got as far as concluding that rsync was the tool of choice for backing up my computer in Ubuntu 9.04. I didn't pursue it because I was short on time and patience for writing scripts at that point. But eventually the need for a regular backup system became acute. So this post logs the steps I took to make rsync and cron work for me.

First, here's what I wrote previously:

As an alternative to rdiff-backup, what people had actually mentioned more frequently was rsync. It did not have the incremental backup features of rdiff-backup, to my knowledge, but it seemed to be an established tool for backup purposes. So for now, at least, I thought I might try that instead. Once again, I did a Google search and got a package details page with no apparent link to any help files. Eventually I found what looked like the official rsync webpage and, after looking at their FAQs and some other pages, landed on their Examples page. It was intimidating.

This time, I went to their Documentation page. This gave me links to, among other things, Michael Holve's rsync tutorial. The tutorial said, "You must set up one machine or another of a pair to be an "rsync server" by running rsync in a daemon mode." I was curious, so I did a Google search for "what is daemon mode" and I got back, would you believe, exactly one page. One webpage in the entire known planet answered the question, "What is daemon mode?" Except it didn't really answer it. It just said, "It makes wget put standard output into a log file and not bug you while downloading." Accepting that as the best available answer (and ten points to the answerer!), I typed "rsync --daemon" in Ubuntu's Terminal and proceeded to the next step, "Setting Up a Server." After reading it, I decided it didn't seem to apply to me. It was for people who wanted to back up files between computers. I just wanted to back up to another drive.

So I went on to the tutorial's "Using Rsync Itself" section. Since I wasn't sure what daemon mode did, or if it was necessary, I killed that Terminal session and started another. I didn't know if that would shut off daemon mode, or if doing so was what I should do. I read the section and then checked another source of documentation, the rsync man page ("man" being short for "manual"). The man page would ordinarily be output in response to a Terminal command, but someone had put it here in html form, so that's what I used. It reminded me, first, to check Ubuntu's System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager to make sure I had rsync already installed, here on my secondary computer. I searched Synaptic for rsync and got back a couple dozen listed programs; rsync was among them and was shown as being installed. I looked partway into the man page and got an answer to one question I had from the tutorial. So here's how I translated what the tutorial was telling me. First, the tutorial listed these lines:

rsync --verbose --progress --stats --compress --rsh=/usr/local/bin/ssh --recursive --times --perms --links --delete \
--exclude "*bak" --exclude "*~" \
/www/* webserver:simple_path_name

The first thing to know was that this all represented a single command line. It was too long to fit on one line, though, so apparently the trailing backslash said, "This line continues on the next line." The command would be typed into a file and saved as a script, not typed directly into Terminal. I didn't know why the first line didn't end with a backslash. I decided I would want to experiment with this in a relatively safe place -- with a junk directory on my secondary computer, perhaps -- to see what it was doing.

So as the tutorial explained it, the first line of this example told rsync how to proceed: verbosely (i.e., with lots of information about what it was doing), showing a progress report, with statistics. The rsh part was for encryption, to be used optionally if you were sending your stuff online to another computer. I wasn't, so I decided to try leaving that off. I also didn't want to compress the output, because that made the process slower and required more attention from the CPU.

The second line of the example, above, told rsync to recurse -- to work through all of my directories and subdirectories under the folder that I would be naming. It also told rsync to preserve file timestamps and file permissions -- so if, for example, a file was readable only by root on the source drive, it would be the same way on the target drive. The -- links command was an instruction to preserve symbolic links -- not sure what that meant -- and the --delete command, as I understood it, would tell rsync to delete anything on the target that wasn't on the source. So you'd have a mirror, and not just an accumulation of backups of files that you have deliberately trimmed out of your file collection.

The third line of the example told rsync not to bother copying some kinds of files. I liked the sound of that at first, but then I decided I would rather be able to do a Properties comparison of source and target and verify that both had exactly the same number of files. So I decided to leave out this line when I used rsync.

The fourth line of the example named the source and target locations. I wasn't going to be using it with a remote source or target, so mine was going to look somewhat different from this.

On that basis, here's what I assembled as a test version of the rsync example from above:

rsync --verbose --progress --stats \
--recursive --times --perms --links --delete \
/media/DATA/Source /media/DATA/Target

I created a Source subfolder in my DATA folder and put a TestFile.txt file into it. I also created a Target subfolder in DATA. Then I copied those three rsync lines into a file in Ubuntu's Text Editor (gedit) and saved it to Desktop as TestRun. To make it executable, I went into Terminal, typed "cd /home/ray/Desktop" and then "chmod +x TestRun" and then double-clicked on TestRun and said Run. And, you know, it worked. Just like that. Not exactly as intended -- I had not only TestFile.txt but also the whole Source folder underneath my Target folder -- but, yeah, there it was. I deleted the Target folder and ran it again and, sure enough, it created the Target folder and then inserted a copy of the Source folder into it. Excellent!

Now it was time to try something a little bolder. I wanted to see how it worked if I tried to copy the whole DATA folder to an external drive. This part was a little confusing. The external drive seemed to have two different names. If I looked in /media, its name was simply "disk." But if I hit the Computer icon in File Browser, it came up as "193.8 GB Media." I decided the latter sounded more specific, so I would try that first. So now the third line of my TestRun file read like this:

/media/DATA "/media/193.8 GB Media"

I used quotation marks because there were spaces in the name. I saved TestRun and double-clicked it again on the Desktop. It didn't seem to do anything. I realized that I had probably made a mistake in that line, and tried again like this:

/media/DATA "/193.8 GB Media"

That didn't do it either, so I tried again, without the leading slash:

/media/DATA "193.8 GB Media"

That still didn't work, so I tried the other approach:

/media/DATA /media/disk

Still nothing. I went into System > Administration > Partition Editor (GPartEd), wiped out the target partition, and recreated it as a FAT32 partition. Now the drive was totally invisible to Ubuntu. I went back into GPartEd and reformatted it as an ext3 partition. Then I realized: it was an IDE drive, so apparently it would not be recognized until I rebooted. I decided to reboot into Windows (I had a dual-boot system) and format it as NTFS. I named it 186GB (which seemed to be the net amount of space available in NTFS format) and rebooted into Ubuntu. I revised TestRun's last line again:

/media/DATA /media/186GB

and ran it again. This time, it seemed to be working -- the external 186GB drive was making noise -- but I wondered why I wasn't getting a verbose indication of what was going on. I guessed that, if I wanted the verbose information, I would have to execute rsync on the command line, not in an executable script. While I was rooting around for an answer to that question, I was reminded that I could also use the shorthand versions of these commands. So instead of typing --verbose into the script, I could just type -v and whatever other letters I needed. In this approach, the final contents of TestRun, which were as follows:

rsync --verbose --progress --stats \
--recursive --times --perms --links --delete \
/media/DATA /media/186GB

could instead be expressed like this, if I understood the man page's Options Summary section correctly:

rsync -vshlEPtrip --del --delete-excluded --force \
--exclude RECYCLER \
--exclude "System Volume Information" \
/media/DATA /media/186GB

In that version, I added a couple other options that seemed appropriate, and also told rsync to exclude (i.e., don't copy) those extra folders that Windows XP seemed to put on every drive. I revised TestRun along these lines and, when the external drive settled down and it looked like the foregoing TestRun process had ended, I ran it again. But it didn't seem to make any difference. The extra folders were still there. I had understood that it would delete them. Part of the problem seemed to be that I had not used the syntax correctly. I was supposed to use an equals sign: --exclude=RECYCLER. But another part of the problem was that it was not clear whether the "exclude" command was supposed to work with directories. It didn't seem so. The man page just referred to excluding files. I tried again with equals signs, but still no change. I posted a question on it, but the kind response was unfortunately not able to resolve the issue.

Next, I tried a modified version of TestRun on the primary computer. I went through several revisions and wound up with this version, which seemed to work:

rsync -vchlEtrip --progress --del --ignore-errors --force /media/CURRENT/ "/media/OFFSITE/P4 CURRENT"

The partition being backed up, in this case, was an ext3 partition named CURRENT, and the target to which it was being backed up was a USB external drive named OFFSITE. (Some weeks have passed since I started this post, so there may be some discontinuity in my writing at this point.)

I did not run this command as a script within a file called TestRun that I would start by double-clicking on it, because I discovered that you would only get the detailed output if you entered the rsync command on the command line. I was able to enter all of the foregoing rsync command on one line. I did not need the "exclude" commands because this was not an NTFS drive formatted by Windows. I still had ext3 "lost+found" and Trash folders that got copied over in this way, but they were small, so it was OK.

As I think I may have said before, I got the selected rsync parameters by typing "man rsync" at the command line. It did take some trial and error to get this particular set. The resulting backup, when checked by right-clicking and selecting Properties, seemed to be virtually identical.

When I ran that rsync command, it showed me lots of detail on what it was doing. It concluded with this message:

rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(977) [sender=2.6.9]

Eventually, however, I did figure out how to do it.  Here is an example of an rsync command that worked for me:

rsync -qhlEtrip --progress --delete-after --ignore-errors --force --exclude=/.Trash-1000/ --exclude=/lost+found/ /media/CURRENT/ /media/CURRBACKUP

This one would back up what Windows sees as drive D (named CURRENT) to a partition that Windows sees as drive G (named CURRBACKUP).  Both partitions had to be mounted in Ubuntu before this would work.  I used a similar command to copy a folder on CURRENT to a USB jump drive named KINGSTON.  That gave me a portable copy of the current state of that folder, ready to take along.

The next thing I needed to do was to back up my blogs.  I started by just wanting to be able to back up a webpage.  I had discovered that all of the posts on a Blogger (i.e., Blogspot) blog like this one could be displayed in a single webpage, at least if you had less than 1,000 posts.  To do that, you just needed to go to this URL:  http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=1000.  I wasn't sure what would happen if you entered a larger number than 1000.  So now that I had that webpage, I wanted to know how to save a copy of it automatically.  Strangely, at this point, Google searches for any of these sets of terms

ubuntu "back up a webpage"
rsync "back up a webpage"
rsync "copy a webpage"

produced zero hits.  Eventually, it started to look like this was because I was barking up the wrong tree.  As described in a separate post, it seemed that what I wanted for this purpose might be wget, not rsync.