May 14, 2013

Grow LUKS encrypted LVM /home partition

 

I run Fedora in VMware Fusion and needed more space in /home than I had initially anticipated. Luckily I had some space left on my Mac and shut shutdown the VM, went into the Fusion settings then increased the VMs disk size by 10GB after that I needed to apply the space to my /home patition which was an encrypted LV.

First step was to reboot into Single User Mode, from there I created a new ext2 partition (doesn’t really matter that it’s ext2, we’ll deal with that) with parted using the new free space this was /dev/sda3 You could also just extend the existing physical partition, but I felt safer doing it like this, and hey, that’s what LVM is for.

Take a look at your /etc/fstab and you’ll see the /dev/mapper/luks-biglonguuid device that is your encrypted partition

# Unmount the partition in question
umount /home
# Check the FS on the fedora-named luks device
fsck.ext4 -C 0 -f /dev/mapper/luks-biglonguuid
# Close the luks device
cryptsetup luksClose luks-biglonguuid
# After growing my VMWare virtual disk, I created a new partition with parted (/dev/sda3)
# Make the new partition a PV, then extend your VG to the PV
pvcreate /dev/sda3
vgextend vg_jordanfedora /dev/sda3
# Extend the home LV to take the extra space you need
lvextend -L+10G /dev/vg_jordanfedora/lv_home
# Open the crypt mounted on a temp device, here called "mytempdevice"
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/vg_jordanfedora/lv_home mytempdevice
# Resize the crypt temp device
cryptsetup --verbose resize mytempdevice
# Mount it and make sure your files are there
mount /dev/mapper/mytempdevice /home
# It worked! Unmount it
umount /home
# Another fsck
e2fsck -f /dev/mapper/mytempdevice
# Grow the FS to match the size of the device
resize2fs /dev/mapper/mytempdevice
# Reboot the machine so fedora can do it's luks-biglonguuid decryption on boot
reboot

And there you have it!

Originally learned this from here and expanded on the explanations a bit http://blog.gauner.org/blog/2010/01/23/resize-a-luks-partition-on-lvm/

December 8, 2009

Enable Flash on Google Chrome Beta in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Today Google released Google Chrome Beta for Linux/mac.

This is the actual Google branded version of Chromium which has been available on Linux for quite some time now.  I installed Google Chrome only to find out that Flash did not Work on it.  Being no stranger to flash not working on linux, I poked around a bit until I found a solution.

UPDATE: It appears that Flash will work if you import your settings from Firefox when you install it, however if you’re a Chromium user and did not import any settings when you installed Chrome this should fix you right up.

The following applies to my experience with Ubuntu 9.10 64bit and Google Chrome Beta 64bit.

I’ll assume that you are already using Flash in Firefox or Google Chromium.

Fist we’re going to find your flash plugin: Open up a terminal window and type (always leaving out the quotations)

“sudo updatedb”

This will update the database that “locate” uses to find things with. Next we’ll use locate to find your flash plugin.

“locate libflashplayer.so”

That should show you the location of your Flash plugin, something like “/usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/libflashplayer.so” or “/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so”

What we need to do is make a directory for the plugin in the default Google Chrome install directory which is “/opt/google/chrome/”

so back to the terminal window and type

“cd /opt/google/chrome”

now once there type:

“sudo mkdir plugins”

Now we need to copy libflashplayer.so to the newly created plugins directory

“sudo cp /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/libflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/plugins/”

make sure to replace the bold /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/libflashplayer.so with the output of your previous search “locate libflashplayer.so”

Once that’s done Youtube and all other flash sites should work perfectly well on Google Chrome Beta

April 2, 2009

Jordan Teaches – RSS & Google Reader

While I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I’m doing with this page I came up with an idea for a recurring segment called “Jordan Teaches”.  I know a lot of stuff.  In this segment I share some of my knowledge with you.

For the inaugural post of Jordan Teaches I’ll teach you about RSS and Google Reader.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  I’m not going to go all Wikipedia on you, but essentially it distils the essence of a webpage or blog post and makes it readily available for syndication, or sharing.  Like when your favourite TV show goes into syndication and networks other than the one that owns it can pick it up and play it whenever they want to.  It’s the same for many webpages, but you don’t need to wait until the 100th episode, you can do it whenever.

The advantage to this is that you can read all of your favourite sites at the same place, and keep track of unread articles and be notified of new articles as soon as they are available.

RSS can syndicate posts or pages to many places, but the most common one is to a Newsreader or RSS reader program.  There are many of these available, but in the interest of operating system neutrality I won’t get into the various Windows, Mac or Linux options available, I’m going to talk about Google Reader.

Google reader is free and accessible from anywhere you can get the web, even your phone.

You can go check it out here: http://www.google.com/reader

It probably looks something like this

greader1

Now if you’ve already got a Gmail account or other google account the good news is that you’ve got a Google Reader account!  If not, you’ve got to sign up, gmail is great, but I’m not going to talk about that for now, just sign yourself up for google reader then sign in.  You’re ready to go!

The next step is finding the RSS feeds for your favourite sites.  A feed is pretty much the stream, or channel if you would that tunes your RSS reader to the site you want.

The de facto international symbol for RSS is this orange guy here:

128px-Feed-icon.svg

Look around at your favourite page for this guy, or a variation of and give it a click.

Now this is where it gets kind of tricky depending on what internet browser you’re using it will handle RSS feeds differently.

If you’re using Internet Explorer 7 I’ll let the fine people over at the Google Operating System blog explain what to do from here.

Add Feeds to Google Reader in Internet Explorer 7

I imagine it’s similar with the newly release Internet Explorer 8 also.

However if you’re using Firefox (which is currently my browser of choice) when you click on an RSS feed for the first time you’ll be presented with something like this:

rss3

Check the box that says “Always use Google…” and then click Subscribe Now.  You only have to do this once.  Once it’s done it will bring you to the next screen which is what you’ll see from now on whenever you click an RSS feed.

greader5

Click the Add to Google Reader button and you’re done!

Or you can click the “Add a Subscription button in Google Reader and paste the RSS feed address in there.

greader4

It seems like a lot of steps, but it’s actually quite simple.  Once you’ve got some of your favourite sites added to Google Reader the main Reader page looks like this

greader2

This is my google reader page, you can add Tags to posts that organize them in the sidebar by folder, you can search in the top to go through everything you’ve ever read to find that funny cat picture that you saw last week, but can’t remember where.  It’s great.

Google Reader has literally changed the way I use the web.  No more going from bookmark to bookmark, I just load up Google Reader and scroll through all of my favourite sites, all in the same place.  It removes the flashy and distracting colours from the sites you read (pro or con, depending on how you look at it)  It gets rid of most of the advertising that you see on sites.  It cuts off the inane comments that go along with many articles and it just makes the web a crisper, cleaner, easier to read place.

That’s it for this first issue of Jordan Teaches.  I was probably too verbose,  and maybe a little confusing, but I’m new at this, I’ll work on paring it down more in future episodes of Jordan Teaches.  I hope you learned something.

Cheers,

-Jordan