Can I Set Up User Name Mapping in Windows Vista?

Can I Set Up User Name Mapping in Windows Vista?

Unfortunately, no if you don't have a SFU 3.5 or W2K3 R2 machines on the network that is running User Name Mapping service. This has been a major disappointment with NFS deployments using Windows Vista.

However, there is a tiny little good news for you if you are looking for a way to enable Client for NFS in Windows Vista to be able to do something other than anonymous mounts. There is a registry tweak that you can modify to tweak Vista NFS client to use a pair of UNIX UID and GID while mounting and accessing NFS shares.

Here's how you can do it -

Start Registry Editor
Locate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ClientForNFS\CurrentVersion\Default
Create two DWORD values namely AnonymousUid and AnonymousGid
Set these values to the UID and GID you would like this NFS client to use
Restart your Client for NFS service using the Microsoft Services for NFS MMC snap-in
Go ahead and mount shares on this machine and now the Client for NFS driver will send those values as the UID and GID to the NFS server. You can also use the mount command without any parameters to verify if these values are being used. You should see something like this -

C:\>mount

Local Remote Properties
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
x: \\NFSSERVER\NFSSHARE UID=10012, GID=10011
rsize=8192, wsize=8192
mount=soft, timeout=1.6
retry=1, locking=yes
fileaccess=644, lang=ANSI
casesensitive=no
Try creating a file on the share and on the UNIX box, you can see that they bear the same UID and GID values as we have mentioned in the above DWORD values. If you use the ls command that comes with SUA, you will not see the correct ownership information because the client is still doing anonymous mounts and as you might have guessed already - we are just changing the UID and GID that the client is sending to the server. It is more like squashing from a client side instead of doing it from the server.

There's a security consideration as well - Every user on this machine will start sending these same NFS credentials so if you are going to have multiple users using this machine - think carefully about using this registry tweak. You also will not be able to use any secondary groups. I guess that can also be a consideration for many environments.

BTW, this works the same way on Windows 7 box ;)

Bandwidth Monitoring Tools for Ubuntu Users

Bandwidth in computer networking refers to the data rate supported by a network connection or interface. One most commonly expresses bandwidth in terms of bits per second (bps). The term comes from the field of electrical engineering, where bandwidth represents the total distance or range between the highest and lowest signals on the communication channel (band).
Bandwidth represents the capacity of the connection. The greater the capacity, the more likely that greater performance will follow, though overall performance also depends on other factors, such as latency.

Here is the list of bandwidth monitoring tools for your network bandwidth

bmon
bwbar
bwm
bwm-ng
iftop
iperf
ipfm
speedometer
cbm
ibmonitor
pktstat
mactrack
MRTG
Cacti

Now we will see each tool separately

bmon

bmon is a portable bandwidth monitor and rate estimator running on various operating systems. It supports various input methods for different architectures.

Various output modes exist including an interactive curses interface, lightweight HTML output but also formatable ASCII output

Current Stable Version :- 2.1.0

Install bmon in Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install bmon

This will complete the installation.

If you want to open the application you need to enter the following command

bmon

you should see the following output



If i select the eth0 i should see all the traffic details



If you want to know more available options check man page

bwbar

This program will output a PNG and a text file that can be used in scripts or be included in web pages to show current bandwidth usage. The amount of total bandwidth can be customized. The PNG output appears as a bar graph showing maximum possible usage with the current inbound or outbound usage shown as a differently colored bar.

Current Stable Version :- 1.2.3

Install bwbar in ubuntu

sudo apt-get install bwbar

This will complete the installation

There is a /etc/default/bwbar file to configure before this package will work and here is my config

# Directory to put files into
DIR=/var/www
# Who to run as
RUNAS=www-data
# What are the options (eth0, scale of 1.5mbps)
OPTIONS=”eth0 1.5″

Now you need to chnage the permissions using the following command

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/bwbar/

Start the bwbar using the following command

sudo /etc/init.d/bwbar start

You can also launch bwbar using the following command

bwbar eth0 100 -x 200 -y 7 -t 10 -p network.png -f network.txt -d /var/www/bwbar &

Now you need to go to http://serverip/bwbar you should see the bandwidth bar as follows



If you want to know about available option check man page

bwm

BandWidth Monitor This is a very tiny bandwidth monitor (not X11). Can monitor up to 16 interfaces in the in the same time, and shows totals too.

Current Stable Version :- 1.1.0

Install bwm ubuntu

sudo apt-get install bwm

This will complete the installation now

If you want to run the application use the following command

bwm

Output looks like below



If you want more details and available options check man page

bwm-ng

small and simple console-based bandwidth monitor.Bandwidth Monitor NG is a small and simple console-based live bandwidth monitor.

Current Stable Version :- 0.5

features

supports /proc/net/dev, netstat, getifaddr, sysctl, kstat and libstatgrab

unlimited number of interfaces supported

interfaces are added or removed dynamically from list

white-/blacklist of interfaces

output of KB/s, Kb/s, packets, errors, average, max and total sum

output in curses, plain console, CSV or HTML

configfile

Install bwm-ng in ubuntu

sudo apt-get install bwm-ng

This will complete the installation

If you want to run the application you need to use the following command

bwm-ng

Output looks like below



If you want more details and available options check man page

iftop

iftop does for network usage what top does for CPU usage. It listens to network traffic on a named interface and displays a table of current bandwidth usage by pairs of hosts.

Current Stable Version :- 0.17

Install iftop in ubuntu

sudo apt-get install iftop

This will complete the installation

If you want to run the application you need to use the following command

iftop

Output looks like below



If you want more details and available options check man page

ipfm

IP Flow Meter (IPFM) is a bandwidth analysis tool, that measures how much bandwidth specified hosts use on their Internet link.

Current Stable Version :- 0.11.5

Install ipfm in Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install ipfm

This will complete the installation

Now if you want to configure this for your network you need to copy example configuration file from /usr/share/doc/ipfm/examples if you want to check this file click here

once you configure this file you need to start the service using the following command

sudo /etc/init.d/ipfm start

If you want more details and available options check man page

Speedometer

Measure and display the rate of data across a network connection or data being stored in a file.

Current Stable Version :- 2.4

Install speedometer in ubuntu

Check which version of python is the default by running

python -V

Then issue the following commands as root to install speedometer (choose the correct Urwid package for your python version, ie. if python -V reports version 2.3.X then install python2.3-urwid)

apt-get install python2.4-urwid

Download the speedometer.py source file.

As user issue the following commands in the directory that you downloaded the source file

sudo cp speedometer.py /usr/local/bin/speedometer

sudo chown root: /usr/local/bin/speedometer

sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/speedometer

Now you can run the speedometer application using the following

/usr/local/bin/speedometer

Now you should see the following screen output



Speedometer Usage

Usage: speedometer [options] tap [[-c] tap]

Available options

speedometer -h

Usage: speedometer [options] tap [[-c] tap]…

Monitor network traffic or speed/progress of a file transfer. At least one tap must be entered. -c starts a new column, otherwise taps are piled vertically.

Taps:

[-f] filename [size] display download speed [with progress bar]

-f must be used if directly following another

file tap without an expected size specified

-rx network-interface display bytes received on network-interface

-tx network-interface display bytes transmitted on network-interface

Options:

-i interval-in-seconds eg. “5″ or “0.25″ default: “1″

-p use plain-text display (one tap only)

-b use old blocky display instead of smoothed display even when UTF-8 encoding is detected

-z report zero size on files that don’t exist instead of waiting for them to be created

Usage Examples

How long it will take for my 38MB transfer to finish?

speedometer favorite_episode.rm $((38*1024*1024))

How quickly is another transfer going?

speedometer dl/big.avi

How fast is this LAN?

$ cat /dev/zero | nc -l -p 12345

$ nc host-a 12345 > /dev/null

$ speedometer -rx eth0

How fast is the upstream on this ADSL line?

speedometer -tx ppp0

How fast can I write data to my filesystem? (with at least 1GB free)

dd bs=1000000 count=1000 if=/dev/zero of=big_nothing &
speedometer big_nothing

cbm

cbm — the Color Bandwidth Meter — displays the current traffic on all network devices.

Current Stable Version :- 0.1-1

Install cbm in ubuntu

First you need to download the .deb package from here

once you have the .deb package you need to install using the following comamnd

sudo dpkg -i cbm_0.1-1_i386.deb

this will complete the installation now if you want to use the appltcation use the following command

cbm

Output looks like below



pktstat

pktstat listens to the network and shows the bandwidth being consumed by packets of various kinds in realtime. It understands some protocols (including FTP,HTTP, and X11) and adds a descriptive name next to the entry (e.g., ‘RETR cd8.iso’, ‘GET http://slashdot.org/’ or ‘xclock -fg blue’).

Current Stable Version :- 1.8.3

Install pktstat in Ubuntu

First you need to download .rpm package from here once you have the .rpm package you need to convert this .rpm file to .deb file using alien

Install alien

sudo apt-get install alien

Now you need to use the follwoing command to convert .rpm to .deb

sudo alien -k pktstat-1.7.2q-0.i386.rpm

Now you should be having pktstat_1.7.2q-0_i386.deb package

Install pktstat in Ubuntu

sudo dpkg -i pktstat_1.7.2q-0_i386.deb

This will complete the installation now you can open the application using the following command

pktstat

output looks like below


If you want more available options for pktstat check man page

ibmonitor

ibmonitor is an interactive linux console application which shows bandwidth consumed and total data transferred on all interfaces.

Current Stable Version :- 1.4

Its main features are:

Shows received, transmitted and total bandwidth of each interface

Calculates and displays the combined value of all interfaces

Displays total data transferred per interface in KB/MB/GB

Values can be displayed in Kbits/sec(Kbps) and/or KBytes/sec(KBps)

Can show maximum bandwidth consumed on each interface since start of utility

Can show average bandwidth consumption on each interface since start of utility

The output with all features (max, avg and display in Kbps and KBps) easily fits on a 80×24 console or xterm

Can interactively change its output display format depending on key pressed by user.

Install ibmonitor in Ubuntu

First you need to download the latest version from here

wget http://ovh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ibmonitor/ibmonitor-1.4.tar.gz

Now you have ibmonitor-1.4.tar.gz

Extract this file using the following commands

tar xvfz ibmonitor-1.4.tar.gz

cd ibmonitor

If you want to run the application use the following command

Once you are in ibmonitor folder use

./ibmonitor

Output looks like the following screen



iperf

While tools to measure network performance, such as ttcp, exist, most are very old and have confusing options. Iperf was developed as a modern alternative for measuring TCP and UDP bandwidth performance.

Iperf is a tool to measure maximum TCP bandwidth, allowing the tuning of various parameters and UDP characteristics. Iperf reports bandwidth, delay jitter, datagram loss.

Current Stable Version :- 2.0.2

Install iperf in ubuntu

sudo apt-get install iperf

iperf Syntax

iperf [-s|-c host] [options]

Example

iperf -c server address -F file-name

iperf -c server address -I

The -F option is for file input.

The -I option is for input from stdin.

If you want more details and available options check man page

tcptrack

tcptrack is a sniffer which displays information about TCP connections it sees on a network interface. It passively watches for connections on the network interface, keeps track of their state and displays a list of connections in a manner similar to the unix ‘top’ command. It displays source and destination addresses and ports, connection state, idle time, and bandwidth usage.

Current Stable Version :- 1.1.5

Install tcptrack in Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install tcptrack

this will complete the installation

tcptrack Syntax

tcptrack [-dfhvp] [-r ] -i []

Examples

tcptrack requires only one parameter to run: the -i flag followed by an interface name that you want tcptrack to monitor. This is the most basic way to run tcptrack

tcptrack -i eth0

tcptrack can also take a pcap filter expression as an argument. The format of this filter expression is the same as that of tcpdump and other
libpcap-based sniffers. The following example will only show connections from host 10.45.165.2

tcptrack -i eth0 src or dst 10.45.165.2

The next example will only show web traffic (ie, traffic on port 80)

tcptrack -i eth0 port 80

The following output screen will show you more details



MRTG

The Multi Router Traffic Grapher or just simply MRTG is free software for monitoring the traffic load on network links. It allows the user to see traffic load on a network over time in graphical form.

Current Stable Version :- 2.15.0

Project Homepage

http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/

Cacti

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive,easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.

Current Stable Version :- 0.8.6i

Project Homepage

http://www.cacti.net

Regarding MRTG and Cacti i am going write detailed articles in future

Zend Performance

Let me first start off by saying that the Zend Framework has been very good to us.

It enabled us to build a kick-ass application in a relatively short amount of time. On top of that, we followed the conventions from Zend and PEAR and essentially have a very maintainable piece of software which I don't hate looking at every day (which is as one can imagine, a huge plus).

The other day our servers were overwhelmed with the rising traffic and I started profiling my application through Xdebug. Initially I tried to use Zend Studio and the Zend_Debugger but Zend doesn't like my (awesome) operating system (FreeBSD) and only provides Linux and Windows extensions. Xdebug, while being free and awesome in general, doesn't know this prejudice. :-)

On this project we currently run with 100,000 visitors per day on average, our peak is Sunday night where we get a ton more traffic than usually. We run the latest PHP (5.2.6 at this time), etc.. The software comes from FreeBSD ports, there are no magic secret patches. I'm picky about the modules I compile and load but the list is far from optimized.

To our defense, we just relaunched over summer and since we are a team of four total and only two of those four people write code. Since we started off slow with 60,000-80,000 visitors per day since summer, we never really had a chance or need to optimize and tried to avoid all premature optimization.

We currently use 50-some Zend-classes. I wish I could provide a better number, but as you may know, the Zend Framework is only bundled as a whole and figuring out which classes are all in the mix is tricky. So the 50 is an estimation based on grepping through our own class code mostly.

On the server we run Apache 1.3. Currently we have a total of four webservers (two older (dual core, 6 GB RAM, slow disks (7.5k rpm)), two newer models (eight cores and 6 GB RAM, faster disks (15k rpm)). The backend consists of two powerful workhouses with eight cores, more RAM (than the frontends) and a lot of disk (at 12k rpm each).

Prior to starting the quest for performance one of our older servers was able to handle ten (10) requests/second at peaks, now we are at 42 requests/second. (Give or take a few.) In regard to page loading time, we went with a few optimizations from 340 ms to 76 ms in no time (all figures according to Xdebug). So I feel like we are right on the right track to Getting rich with PHP. (Where's my Lexus at? :-))

We benchmarked using Apache Bench (at moderate ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://url) and Siege, which are both really awesome tools and provide you with an instant DoS attack on your servers. I might add that you are better off running those tools from "localhost" vs. remote as you might trigger your providers IDS/snort/DoS protection otherwise.

Here are a few things, that helped us. Suggestions are in no particular order and I should add that whatever is applicable for my suitation, doesn't have to work for you. Also, my number game could be off and if you have suggestions on how to improve, please comment or drop me a line.

1) APC
It cannot be stressed enough. Please run APC. Please take into account to adjust the default settings, also check apc.slam_defense, apc.write_lock and apc.stat.

We had APC before, but I felt like I needed to mention it on the list of things.

Also, apc_fetch, apc_store etc. are great ways to add little caches throughout your application.

And they almost require zero time to implement. I may suggest you use apc_fetch/apc_store directly vs. wrapping the Zend_Cache layer around it which provides (IMHO) little added value and benefit but just adds more class code around the obvious.

2) Adjust PHP's realpath.cache setting and .ttl
This helps, somewhat.

3) Get rid off require_once, use __autoload (and the Zend_Loader)

This might be a hassle when during development, because require_once evaluates each include, thus letting you know if it finds a parse error, and also where.

With include_once (which Zend_Loader essentially uses), it's a bit tricky at times. A good idea here would be a phing task (or some other script) which strips out or replaces require_once when you deploy your application to production.

Removing require_once in favour of __autoload shows one of the biggest performance improvements in my entire application - I shaved off roughly 220 milliseconds by removing about 15 (or so) calls to require_once in my bootstrap.php file. And that's with APC enabled, and a decent sized realpath.cache (and .ttl).

Beyond weird coding conventions (I shall bitch about those in another blog post), require_once is also the number one performance killer from the entire Zend_* code base. The before/after is amazing. Without any of those enhancements from the list just by stripping out require_once from our ZendFramework "install", we went from 9-10 requests/second to 27 requests/second.

Use the following shellscript to strip them:

grep -rl require_once . | grep -v svn |grep -v Loader | xargs perl -pi~ -e 's/require_once/#require_once/'

3) Zend_Loader
I know, I just recommended using the Zend_Loader but with no offense, the Zend_Loader sucks is not so great when it comes to general performance. Obviously I did not write it and really no offense meant, but it does some really weird stuff on the inside which I am not sure what the use-case is. But I am sure there is one. ;-)

In order to preserve the API, I extended Zend_Loader and started overwriting functions such as Zend_Loader::_securityCheck(), which runs a regular expression on the name of each file you feed to __autoload/Zend_Loader.

On top of that I switched to usig the Zend_Loader only for models and controllers. But not for Zend_ and Company_-classes. Since Zend (and we) essentially follow the great PEAR coding standard in regard to one class per file and a very explicit naming scheme, all you have to do in your __autoload is the following:

function __autoload($className) {
include_once $className = str_replace('_', '/', $className) . '.php';
}

Now, that would be the bare minimum and our loader looks slightly more complicated but I haven't stopped there and we are still in the process of "dumbing" it down even further, but so far it saved us between five and 15 ms per page.

4) Cache DB results, avoid queries!

Those tricky, tricky DB queries.

Even though our DB backends idle mostly even when we get beat with traffic, there's a few things to keep in mind.

One of them is - DB queries are really expensive. And by queries I am not talking about the "SELECT * FROM foo"-part, but rather about opening a connection to another server, sending the query, receiving it and so on. Let alone by caching one of those, we roughly gained another 20 ms on the frontpage. And it's not a very complex query either.

I remember looking puzzled when ahem... I was presented with the code that pulls a status message on each request to the homepage but I had forgotten about this already and just noticed it again when it popped up in xDebug with a notable amound of milliseconds.

5) Zend_Db_Table

Zend_Db_Table is very easy to use, in fact most of our models wrap around a couple tables and that's why we got a bunch of them. Now what I did not realize (but thanks to JamesG@#zftalk now I do), is that the meta data the class uses to provide all those nifty interfaces is generated on each request. That's a DESCRIBE TABLE in the background, which is pure overhead.

Zend_Db_Table_Abstract::setDefaultMetadataCache() to the rescue.

5) Apache

5a)
I sometimes hate Apache, but I also can't live without it.

Over the past years, I have tried all sorts of things in the webserver market - Lighttpd and nginx with php-cgi (fastcgi) seem to be no fun. A commercial solution such as Resin or Zeus has never been an option either.

I've always come back to Apache (1.3) for the simple fact that Apache and PHP are really so tightly integrated that nothing ever will go wrong.

Remember that guy Nik who claimed that Apache/PHP sometimes fail and deliver the sourcecode to the browser (because Facebook obviously failed to configure Apache)? Well, that doesn't happen - ever. The only problem with Apache is that Apache and client(browser)-communication is a bitch.

Nginx to the rescue! Fast install, easy to configure (don't let the Russian FAQ scare you, the nginx.conf-dist will teach you all you need!) - just chain your Apache to localhost:8080 and let Nginx proxy all requests to it and your Apaches move from "lockf" status, to "run" and "accept" always.

Whenever Apache receives a request of a slower client, it will have to wait until the slower client is done reading all of the response. While waiting, your 30 MB Apache sits there unable to do anything else. Which nginx in the mix, the Apache sends the response as fast as it can to nginx, thus having more time to take care of what it's supposed to do for you - PHP.

Judging from my poor benchmarks, nginx adds to the number of requests by factor six or seven (6 or 7). It's amazying and I never expected it to have such a great impact. It also doesn't eat away on resources, so beware of the Russians! :-)

Take all "optimizations" into account, Apache 1.3, proxied by Nginx can now handle over 3000 requests/second (ab -n 10000 -c 1000 http://url).

5b)
The obvious quirks, for example check out your default Apache install and unload all the modules and extensions you never use anyway.

For example, we don't have any of those HTTP authentication boxes ever. So why do we need *_auth_* modules. Then, we don't use a user_dir, why load mod_userdir, our Apache does not log - why load mod_config_log, or my most favorite: mod_status.

Make sure mod_status is really disabled because otherwise that's one very, very expensive operation you got right there, with each request.

A good idea is to check top, unload, and look again:

PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND
42601 root 1 96 0 7092K 2324K CPU1 1 0:00 1.00% top
36242 www 1 20 0 114M 33304K lockf 1 0:22 0.29% httpd
38251 www 1 20 0 114M 32184K lockf 0 0:08 0.29% httpd
42579 www 1 20 0 114M 28016K lockf 1 0:02 0.29% httpd
37975 www 1 20 0 115M 34688K lockf 1 0:18 0.24% httpd
36344 www 1 20 0 115M 34036K lockf 1 0:18 0.24% httpd

Take into account (thanks, Jan), that the size column, is not the real size. It's like the theoretical size including whatever the Apache could use if it had to, but you want to look at RES (resident) instead. Because that's what's in the memory right now.

Another smart move is to put all the rules from .htaccess into your server configuration because otherwise Apache searches for various (!) .htaccess files with each requests and tries to evaluate the rules you have in there.

Imagine this:

/htdocs/foo/bar/index.html

In this request Apache will look for .htaccess in the following directories:
/htdocs
/htdocs/foo
/htdocs/foo/bar

Turn it off (AllowOverride none) instead and move on because when you move all your directives into httpd.conf (or similar) at least they get evaluated once when the server process starts up.
From a deployment perspective it's nicer to have .htaccess because all you need to do is re-deploy one file vs. editing a server config and restarting a server, but this really pays off. With certain APC settings, you will need to restart the server anyway, also, "No pain, no gain!".

REPLACE in PostgreSQL

I've recently made the switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL for some of my more complicated database projects, such as the ad matching discussed in my last post. PostgreSQL has a much richer feature set (although MySQL 5 is catching up). One feature I couldn't find in PostgreSQL however was the REPLACE extension offered by MySQL where rows that occur in duplicated primary keys replace the existing rows instead of give errors. Fortunately, PostgreSQL's advanced rules system allows the creation of an equivalent feature.

For the sake of this example we'll use a very simple table called 'map' with a two fields: 'key' and 'value'. Not surprisingly, key is the primary key.

Let's further assume that every insert into this table should actually be a replace. Then all we need is this simple statement and we're done:

-- Merge rule
CREATE OR REPLACE RULE merge_btv_lookup_weather_locations AS
ON INSERT TO btv.lookup_weather_locations
WHERE (EXISTS ( SELECT 1
FROM btv.lookup_weather_locations
WHERE lookup_weather_locations.code = new.code)) DO INSTEAD UPDATE btv.lookup_weather_locations SET name = new.name, type = new.type, active = new.active
WHERE lookup_weather_locations.code = new.code;

That's it! So how does it work? First, we create a rule to be processed whenever a row is inserted into the map table. Then, we use the subquery EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM map WHERE key=NEW.key) to test for a row on the same primary key. If there isn't a row, the query proceeds as a normal INSERT. But if there is a row, the query is converted into an UPDATE that sets the value instead of trying to insert it. The 'NEW.var' means whatever values we were trying to INSERT.

This is why I'm starting to become a PostgreSQL fan.

How to convert dmg file to an iso image

I found this out a while ago when looking for info on reading .DMG files on Windows or Linux boxes. I found out it was not possible, and I wasn't too happy. You see, my iMac has no CD-R drive, just a CD-ROM. This tip creates ISO images from DMG images, so they can be burned elsewhere. To convert the file to an ISO image, type the following command at your terminal window:

hdiutil convert /path/to/filename.dmg -format UDTO -o /path/to/savefile.iso

Replace /path/to/filename.dmg with the path and name of the existing .DMG file, and replace /path/to/savefile.iso with the desired path and name for the converted image.

This then creates an ISO image burnable in Nero on Windows, or pretty much anything on Windows that will burn ISOs and same with Linux. I just converted a DMG image as a test, and it took a while -- it only converted at about 1MByte per secoond, but I only have a 333Mhz imac G3, so speed wise, it may be good.

Even if you use OpenOffice, you might still want all the Microsoft TrueType fonts so that documents created using Word or PowerPoint look as they were supposed to when you open them with OpenOffice. Also, with the Microsoft Fonts installed we browsing will be better since the pages will look as the designer originally intended them to. Most webpages are designed with Microsoft fonts in mind. The stylesheet specify these fonts. On Linux, when these specified fonts are not available on your computer, they are replaced with generic equivalents. With these fonts installed, you will see the page as it was designed. To install the fonts, all you need to do in Ubuntu is to install the msttcorefonts package. Instructions for installation are given below.

The Truetype Microsoft fonts provided by the package include:

• Andale Mono
• Arial Black
• Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Comic Sans MS (Bold)
• Courier New (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Georgia (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Impact
• Times New Roman (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Trebuchet (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Verdana (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Webdings

Installing Microsoft Truetype fonts on Ubuntu

You can install the MS core fonts by installing the msttcorefonts package. To do this, enable the “Universe” component of the repositories. This is done by default in Feisty. After you do that, use the following command from the command line:

$sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

This will give you the core fonts, but if there are other TrueType fonts that you want installed, it is as easy as copying the font files to the ~/.fonts/ directory.

After installing new fonts, you will have to log out and log in again to be able to see and use the new fonts. If you want to avoid this, you can regenerate the fonts cache by issuing the following command:
$sudo fc-cache -fv

Enable and Disable Ubuntu Root Password

Ubuntu is one of the few Linux distributions out there that will not enable the root account.If you want to do something with root permission on the console you have to type sudo before the command.

sudo” means superuser do. “sudo” will prompt for “Password:”. Please specify user password

As you have noticed during the Ubuntu installation there was no question about the root password, as you might have been used to see during other Linux distribution installation process.Because of this your root accout is inactive.

If you want to enable root account (which is not recommended) enter the following command.

$sudo passwd root

This will prompt for a new root password and once you confirm it, you can start using the root account to login.

If you want to disable root account in ubuntu you need to lock the root account by using the following command

$sudo passwd -l root

If you want to work on a root console you’d better use the following command

$sudo -i