Installing Fedora Core 3, Part 4

dyndns

dynds rocks my world! If you have a DSL-type connection like I do, your IP address is going to change once in a while. Dyndns gives you a subdomain in one of their domains for free that will follow your ip address whenever it changes. You just have to sign up, get a client program for your computer that keeps track of your public IP address, and promise not to harass the dyndns folks with IP address updates unless it really actually changed. It’s really cool! I can now ssh to my linux box from anywhere with its public name. It’s almost like I have a static IP address, except I really just have a static DNS name.

chkconfig:

I just learned from a knowledgable friend what the best way is to update which programs start up at which runlevel. Previously I had been directly modifying the symlinks in /etc/rc.d by hand. How uncivilized! chkconfig is really what you want to use instead.

printing

At some point I realized that linux wasn’t recognizing my printer in the same way that Windows 2000 didn’t recognize it. The workaround was the same: after booting, unplug and replug the USB of the printer into the computer. There may be some weird quirk with my USB hardware, or there may be something I’m not doing right, but if I do that then linux and cups can always see my printer.

smb:

One thing that wasn’t obvious to me, is that it is possible to do extensive configuration gymnastics with the pretty GUI system tools, and it will never tell you that the service itself is not running. I tried all sorts of things to configure Samba, and it never worked. Until I had the bright idea to actually check if smb was running. It was not. Once I started it I could share the printer with my Windows laptops at home. Maybe it’s me, but I just assume that those controls should be inactive and greyed-out if the service isn’t running. Or there should be a big button on the panel marked “Start SMB Now” if it is off.

NVIDIA redux

I finally found out why my nvidia permissions are changing. It was not PAM, but the culprit again was udev. What is necessary is to edit /etc/udev/permissions.d/*udev.permissions to tell it not to install the nvidia drivers with more restrictive permissions. Find the line with nvidia*:root:root:0660 and change it to nvidia*:root:root:0666.