JonCellini.com

Linode turned 7 today – congratulations to Chris & the team!

Thank you for yet another free RAM increase to my VPS. I’ve been an extremely happy customer since 2006.

Props to the guys at Linode who wrote up a handy guide on how to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04.

I upgraded my VPS earlier this evening and everything was painless.

If your a terrible DBA like me here are the six steps to reset a forgotten MySQL root user password:

1. stop mysql

# /etc/init.d/mysql stop

The output should look like this:

* Stopping MySQL database server mysqld

   …done.

2. restart mysql without a password

# mysqld_safe –skip-grant-tables &

The output should look like this:

[1] 28808

100222 18:32:27 mysqld_safe Logging to syslog.

100222 18:32:27 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql

3. connect to mysql using the mysql client

# mysql -u root

The output should look like this:

Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.

Your MySQL connection id is 1

Server version: 5.1.37-1ubuntu5.1 (Ubuntu)

Type ‘help;’ or ‘\h’ for help. Type ‘\c’ to clear the current input statement.

4. set a new mysql root user password

mysql> use mysql;

Reading table information for completion of table and column names

You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Database changed

mysql> update user set password=PASSWORD(“NEWROOTPASSWORDHERE“) where User=’root’;

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)

Rows matched: 3 Changed: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> flush privileges;

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.09 sec)

mysql> quit

Bye

5. stop mysql

# /etc/init.d/mysql stop

The output should look like this:

* Stopping MySQL database server mysqld

100222 18:35:29 mysqld_safe mysqld from pid file /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid ended

   …done.

[1]+ Done mysqld_safe –skip-grant-tables

6. restart mysql

# /etc/init.d/mysql start

Who needs to remember passwords?

Congrats to Chris & the Linode team!

I also forgot to say thanks back in April for all the additional disk

I just noticed that Linode bumped up the RAM in my VPS by another 20%.

Thanks Linode!

Over the holiday weekend I took my old Sony VAIO notebook and loaded Ubuntu Linux on it. As a desktop / end-user distro I’m very impressed with Ubuntu – it is easy to use and configure. Unfortunately, I had some trouble getting my wireless card to work with WPA2 authentication to my wireless network at home. From looking at the Ubuntu forums it seems like this is a common problem. There are some helpful guides; however, none I found covered how to use WPA2 Pre-Shared Key authentication specifically. Fortunately by reading the man pages and some trial and error I was able to get it working.

Here are the steps:

• download the appropriate driver for your card -> Linksys WPC54G v3
• from the download extract the driver file (bcmwl5.sys) and inf file (LSBCMNDS.inf)
• fire up the Synaptic Package Manager and install wpasupplicant & ndis-wrapper
• open a shell and change directory to the location the driver and inf file were extracted to
• install the driver: sudo ndis-wrapper -i ./LSBCMNDS.inf
• check that the driver was installed correctly: ndiswrapper -l if it was installed correctly it should output “driver present, hardware present”
• write the module configuration file: sudo ndiswrapper -m
• load the module: sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
• add ndiswrapper to /etc/modules so the kernel module is loaded at boot time

Now on to the fun of configuring wpa_supplicant to handle the WPA2 authentication for the interface.

• open the /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file in an editor
• edit the network stanza as shown below substituting myssid and mypsk with the appropriate values for your network

network={
ssid=”myssid”
proto=WPA2
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
psk=”mypsk”
}

• open /etc/default/wpasupplicant in an editor
• change ENABLED to 1
• change the OPTIONS argument to have values appropriate for your adapter. For my WPC54G v3 I used the following:

OPTIONS=”-i wlan0 -D ndiswrapper -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf”

• open the /etc/network/interfaces file in an editor
• add entries for the wlan0 interface – on my notebook I desire the wireless card (wlan0) to be the primary interface. My configuration follows below:

# The primary network interface
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
pre-up /etc/init.d/wpasupplicant start
pre-up sleep 5

• and we are done

This leaves you with a wlan0 interface that will start automatically, is configured via DHCP, and prior to bringing the interface up the system will start wpa_supplicant to handle the WPA2 authentication so the card can associate with your WLAN.

I found the following to be helpful resources in getting it working:

• WiFi Howto
• WPA Howto
• Getting WPA2 to work on a Broadcom chipset
• WPA Supplicant website

Hopefully this is helpful to anyone else who is struggling to get it working.