After updating to 13.04 all my awesome pam_mount CIFS volumes to my Novell SUSE servers stopped working. Here is how I fixed it. It should also work for you if you are having issues. There is an undocumented (at least in the man page) option for CIFS mounts called sec. You can set it to ntlm or lanman. Try using either one and see if it can help fix your issue.

mount -t cifs -o sec=ntlm,uid=userhere,gid=100,dir_mode=0700,username=userhere,password=passwordhere //server/share/path /media/userhere/path

I you use pam_mount (I highly recommend it, especially in a business/educational environment) here is my default pam_mount.conf.xml file that I use. This file should go in /etc/skel so that all users use the file. You will also have to update this for all of your existing users.

.pam_mount.conf.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<pam_mount>

<volume user="*" options="sec=ntlm,uid=%(USER),gid=100,dir_mode=0700" fstype="cifs" server="server" path="share/%(USER)" mountpoint="/media/%(USER)/share" />

</pam_mount>

From Gawker: If you Wear Google's New Glasses You're an Asshole
Let me make this clear people. Every store, parking lot, highway, street light, restaurant  bar, health club, government building, your job, and many private residences are under surveillance 24/7. 
Guess what? People have had camera's, even instant ones, for decades. There have been video cameras in glasses, buttons, hats, pens for about that long as well. How they are all digital, smaller, and easier to hide. 
Someone explain to me how having an obvious camera on your person is being an asshole, but all the other cameras that you don't know about aren't? Why are these idiots ranting about all of the hidden cameras that are capturing their actions far more often than any person with any kind of recording device?
Let us take this idiotic techno panic to its logical conclusion shall we?

We've had a few workstations at work doing wonky things recently with time. I think perhaps some of it stems from our electrical grid's tendency towards power surges and the resulting BIOS weirdness that can happen sometimes after that.
I decided that our workstations needed some extra help. We have a round robin set of time servers internally. So I set out to create a script that reconfigured the Windows ntp daemon to keep our workstation clocks sync'd properly.
Here is my end result.
 

I have trouble typing my 16 character password in a Terminal session. It really requires having the ability to move the cursor with the arrow keys and interleave characters. This makes my passwords crazy hard to crack.

The down side is that I can't type them in a text only environment easily in the least. Of course, in Linux this is crazy simple to handle. I just use a utility like gksudo or kdesudo to graphically launch a new terminal session with root permissions. On a Mac its not so easy on the surface. 

I compiled cocoasudo in the hopes that it would act like gksudo, but it doesn't really. At least it can't launch Terminal as root. This is pretty much what I needed.

So I looked around at other options and found this simple little bash/apple script.

#!/bin/sh
export bar=""
for i in "$@"; do export bar="$bar '${i}'";done
osascript -e "do shell script \"$bar\" with administrator privileges"

This works great! I saved this script as osudo (as in Osascript sudo). I can then run

osudo /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/MacOS/Terminal&

This will pull up a nice graphical authentication box where I can type my crazy password and launch a new terminal session (sometimes behind the existing one --annoying!) with root priviliges. Perfect! 

I've been sprucing up my Ubuntu desktop in my home office in the last week or so. The home built desktop cobbled from spare and on sale parts is quite nice really. Although it could use a bit more RAM.

This is my gaming rig, for the most part. So I do have a Windows partition on it. But often, even with some games, I could just be booting virtually into Windows through Ubuntu rather than rebooting from scratch. Especially if I'm just playing Ultima Online on a free shard.

So today I started doing some research. First I installed VirtualBox and the Extension Pack.

sudo echo \
"deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian precise contrib" \
> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list

wget -q \
http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc \
-O- | sudo apt-key add -

VBoxManage extpack \
./install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.2.6-82870.vbox-extpack

Then I looked to see how my partitions were set up. The easiest way to do this is to run 

Is trying to securely login over LDAP making you crazy? At my job we use Novell eDirectory. All of our old Macs were setup to login using insecure connections to our directory. This makes me crazy. So I finally bit the bullet and figured out a way to get this to work properly.

First export the CA certificate from server.name.com with the following commands.

echo -n | openssl s_client -connect server.name.com:636 \
| sed -ne '/-BEGIN CERTIFICATE-/,/-END CERTIFICATE-/p' \
server.name.com.pem

sudo cp server.name.com.pem /etc/openldap

Now edit /etc/openldap/ldap.conf. Change the file to look like the following.

#
# LDAP Defaults
#

# See ldap.conf(5) for details
# This file should be world readable but not world writable.

#BASE	dc=example,dc=com
#URI	ldap://ldap.example.com ldap://ldap-master.example.com:666

#SIZELIMIT	12
#TIMELIMIT	15
#DEREF		never

#TLS_REQCERT	demand
#TLS_REQCERT	never
TLS_REQCERT	allow
TLS_CACERT /etc/openldap/server.name.com.pem

Now reboot. After your reboot you should be able to use the SSL checkboxes for LDAP connections to other LDAP sources. 

I have been using BlueProximity on my main development workstation in the office for years. I love it. I always take my phone with me. Within 1 minute of me leaving the office with my Evo 4G phone, I know that my workstation screen will be locked.
With my upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 on my workstation I noticed that the "gnome-screensaver-command -p" command no longer worked to "poke" my screen saver from the Proximity command setting in BlueProximity. Evidently the -p option was removed from the latest versions.
So I decided to do some Googling and find a work around. While I was doing this I thought that it would be cool to do locking/unlocking/proximity for more than one workstation. I have two Ubuntu workstations in my office.
I figured that since I had my ssh keys setup so I can using ssh seamlessly without passwords between my workstations that I could easily send the same commands that I used on my main workstation to my secondary workstation at the same time. Here are the commands that I used to get this working.
 
Locking command:

gnome-screensaver-command -l && xset dpms force off && ssh casutton@c-010b-lx01-its.local DISPLAY=:0 gnome-screensaver-command -l
 
Unlocking command:

xset dpms force on && gnome-screensaver-command -d && ssh casutton@c-010b-lx01-its.local DISPLAY=:0 gnome-screensaver-command -d
 
Proximity command:

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HP, as far as I'm concerned, has some of the most insane driver and software installs ever. They are right up next to Adobe, as far as craziness, some of the time.
At work, we just attempted to install the LJ M1530 multi-fuction printer. Of course there were issues as always with new devices like this in a proper enterprise environment. There are at least 5 workstations that the device driver needed to be loaded on. Once I hear that I wondered why I wasn't scripting the install.
So I downloaded the M1530's driver. The first thing I did was use 7-zip to unzip the contents of hp_M1530_MFP_full_Solution_usb_n_w.exe. I found the usual HP mess of install files with no useful instructions for a silent install.
I dug up what looked like the main install executable under the Installer directory and ran it with the /? argument.

hpbcsiInstaller.exe /?
The following text is what I got back

The Fire is pretty awesome for $199. But it lacks several features that I think would put it right over the edge. I also have an older Nook Color. It has the one thing that I wish the Kindle did. An external MicroSD slot. 

The Kindle actually has MORE memory for media/apps than a Nook Color does by default however. The Nook only allows 1GB of its 8GB of memory to be used for user loaded content. The Fire has about 6GB for Amazon or user loaded content.

With the whole "cloud" thing, as long as you have a network connection, you really don't need much storage so its a nit picky thing.

The fact that it will be the best selling Android tablet guarantees that it will have great support in the modding community. I'm 100% positive that Cyanogenmod will create an Android OS install for it. As long as I can still do all the Amazon Prime streaming with a modded OS I'm game!

I've already "rooted" it and side loaded the Google Market and some Google apps. Its not perfect yet, but new tweaks and hacks are coming out everyday for it.

The bottom line is that if you are already an Amazon customer (especially if you are already a Prime user) the Kindle is spectacular.

If you have nothing invested in the Amazon eco system than it is cheap enough at $199 to make you want to be invested in it.