At the office we like to also make sure our desktops are fairly safe to connect from as well, mostly  in case the machines ever get stolen, we know our data and ssh keys are safe.

So we set up encrypted /home dirs like this...

sudo su -
apt-get install libpam-encfs encfs
echo fuse >>/etc/modules
encusername=<yourusername> #put the username you want to setup to use fuse here (test user?)
adduser ${encusername} fuse
echo user_allow_other >>/etc/fuse.conf

 vim /etc/security/pam_encfs.conf and add the following

drop_permissions
encfs_default --idle=1
fuse_default allow_other,nonempty
- /home/.enc - -v allow_other

If you have ubuntu check it does not have allow_root earlier in the config.

vim /etc/pam.d/common-auth and make sure it contains only the following

auth sufficient pam_encfs.so
auth [success=2 default=ignore] pam_unix.so nullok_secure use_first_pass
auth [success=1 default=ignore] pam_winbind.so krb5_auth krb5_ccache_type=FILE cached_login try_first_pass
auth requisite pam_deny.so
auth required pam_permit.so

Then follow these commands

mkdir -p /home/.enc/${encusername}
chown -R ${encusername}:${encusername} /home/.enc/${encusername}
mv /home/${encusername} /home/${encusername}.bak
mkdir -p /home/${encusername}
chown -R ${encusername}:${encusername} /home/${encusername}
su ${encusername}
rm -rf /home/${encusername}/*
encfs /home/.enc/${encusername} /home/${encusername} # Same password as the user!!!,  won't work with gdm since it will ask for a password again.
rsync -av --delete /home/${encusername}.bak/ /home/${encusername}
logout
fusermount -u /home/${encusername}
logout

Test the user login in tty and the encfs mount can be seen during login, also gdm should work.

Encfs should umount automatically the partition that spent idle more than 1 minute, works on my laptop (Debian) but does not seem to work ok on Ubuntu, do not know why, here is a quick and dirty hack to solve it:
Put this into /etc/cron.d/encfshomeautoumount

*/5 * * * *    root    mount | grep '^encfs on' | awk '{print $3}' | while  read home; do if ! w\
| grep -q $( getent passwd | grep ':'$home':' | awk  -F':' '{print $1}' ); then fusermount -u $home;\
 fi; done >/dev/null 2>&1

Once you are sure you can remove the backup home folder:

rm -rf /home/${encusername}.bak

Despite John and I booking our flights several weeks apart, we still managed to get on the same flight, and even the same row, which was fine since I had a window seat and was able to take plenty of fantastic photos out the window.

The Waikato where we were located had been in the middle of some amazing weather and 25-30 degrees most days, we were dressed in shorts and shirts when we landed and were informed that they had 30 knot winds and rain and a temperature of 13 degrees.

John grabbed his bags and caught a taxi to the Ustay where we were both booked (I think everyone from LCA was booked in there, 12 stories of geeks!), and i grabbed my bike i had brought with me, assembled it, and cycled the 6km into town.

The weather wasn't as bad as expected at all, and it was great seeing all the sights and having a bike around Wellingtons down town.

I found the uStay ok, and stumbled over the 1st floor which was a common area/lounge to which there was always some form of geeks hacking, soldering, coding, etc at all hours of the day and night.

The talks were varied and very interesting from a range of subjects. The Keynotes were always the highlight being both informative and interesting to pretty much everyone, all from well spoken and knowledgeable people. I even managed to have a photo of me on the big screen during one of the lightening talks from a computer show back in 2002

There was far too much to see and do most of the time, and often we had to hope that the video stream will be great to watch later on to catch up on what we missed. John and I didn't see each other much at the actual conference however we did end up drinking together or eating together at more than one place. There were after hours functions pretty much every night, either formal or informal. I don't think anyone got to bed before midnight the entire week, and I have to compliment Wellington on its excellent Coffee, Beer, and Food.

They ran a Photography competition also during the LCA, however much as I love photography I didnt fancy lugging that around and trying to get photos, I only had my netbook which was unable to open most (i have an SLR) and i prefered to spend my time talking and socializing. However some of the Photographs were specitacular, this one in particularly i loved and came runner up

During the week I met a Busker called David Merritt who wrote his own CopyLeft books containing amazing Poetry & Prose, and one in particular i knew would go down well with the Linux.conf.au attendees so i asked him to turn up at the Open Day. When the Open Day came, there was no room for him to sell, so we shuffled around and did what we do best, and hosted him on our table. This turned out to be brilliant since everyone else had freebies and cool give aways and all we had were pamphlets until then.

Overall, we enjoyed the week, it was fantastic and a total sucess. Unsure about John but I'm pretty glad i took a second week holiday afterwards to recover.

I'll leave you with a couple of excepts from David Merritts book titled 'Geek Prayers' (if you want a copy of the book email him lrfpress at gmail.com - its $5 NZD)

"Lord,

May I never receive Zillions of weird and curious emails extorting me to increase my breast or penis size or transfer funds to bogus Nigerians"

"Lord,

May all my interweb page and backend site code be w3 compliant, not browser dependant and be free of all proprietary operating system kibble as well as be backwards compatible to the very first generation of interweb browsers"

We are now looking forward to  next year in Brisbane http://followtheflow.org/

My work box is Ubuntu, so here's the easiest process to get Thunderbird 3 installed

I used Ubuntuzilla to get the latest packages http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/ubuntuzilla/index.php?title=Main_Page

echo "deb http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/project/ubuntuzilla/mozilla/apt all main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com C1289A29
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install thunderbird-mozilla-build

Then because i wanted my old profile i started it with the profile manager

thunderbird --profileManager

I added a profile, then pointed it to ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/profiledir which was the old schema. The new place is ~/.thunderbird so in hindsight i probably just have copied over the profile to there before using it. No biggie though.
It crashed a few times with various errors as I updated plugins and other things, but after the 3rd time it just worked.
All i can says is 'wow' very cool! I have a global inbox for all my emails, and then an inbox for each account individually. It has tabs and some brilliant UI looks.

Give it a go yourself and see what you think!

The idea originated from when i was making Xmas Mince pies, i cut the circle then cut a V out so i wouldn't have leftover dough. Since i was doing a cookie swap at the time i made a quick mock up with the Pie Dough which my kids loved.

I gathered my cookie mixture together in the following few days, and did some research (clearly not enough, i almost only made 3 Ghosts when there are 4!), then sat down one night to make the cookies.

I took photos of the process for you to have a giggle. Apologies for the poor photo quality, It was night from 9pm-1am , i don't have a decent flash unit etc. I made 3 sets, one for each of the people in the cookie swap, and one as a spare in case things went wrong which i took to work.

After wiping the conference room table, i placed the cookies out in a pattern, everyone loved it and wanted to eat it,. John grabbed a Ghost immediately, and then there was talk about 'you cant eat the ghost until you get a powerup! and you need Pacman to eat his way along the line to get to those!.

So for the rest of the day everyone would eat a small cookie, and move Pacman along a pace whilst making the 'waga waga' noise. Slowly they all disappeared.

You can find the full photo set here http://www.flickr.com/photos/wishes/sets/72157622749111189/

The most important thing, for us, is delighting customers and showing them we care about their issues and we're here to help whenever trouble strikes.

How do we do that?

Simple, we're a team of professionals with varied backgrounds.  There is a good deal of middle ground between all of us of course (remember, we see lots of similar problems day-in day-out), but there's usually 1-3 of us that are really keen on any particular topic.

This explains why you may see a delay with a given issue that you've submitted.  If I think the problem warrants somebody else, I'll let that stay into our queue or I'll annotate that message to someone's attention so that they go look at it.  If it's urgent, I'll dig in and get after it myself.

I think that's what makes us a great team; we're all good at 'our own thing'.  As a result, we can tackle just about any problem you can throw at us and that's a great thing to have on your side when you're trying to keep your service up and running against the brutality of the open web.

I came across a good article over at linux-mag describing a good sysadmin team and it got me thinking about all of us here at RimuHosting.

http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7455/1.html

We don't have anybody that "used to raid drug boats for the United States Coast Guard", but give us a call if Apache is giving you grief.  We can handle that.

Once apon a time, Rimuhosting was based in a room in Peters house (like all good start-up companies). Eventually he gained the trust of many  customers and made the move to a small office at on the top floor of a building in town. This was great,  he hired more fantastic Sys-admins and slowly got bigger.

Eventually came the day when he decided to buy the entire top floor and extend into the other offices.  Since he had grand ideas to get a development team this worked out well.

Next to the kitchen there was a large room which he named the conference room.  He then purchased a large table made of Rimu which weighed in at about 150KG.  Once this table arrived all the workers stopped work, unbolted the legs, tied ropes to this table and hauled it up through the center of the stairwell half way, and then jiggled it up each step until finally it arrived.

It was no easy mission, and the table was fantastic. Recently somebody suggested a pool table would go well with the ping pong table we have. Thus we have the Pool table theory.  Peter bought a pool table, and being Peter he didn't get the normal cheap wooden one, but a proper one with a slate base that weighed in at 450KG.

The size  of it was smaller or similar to the conference table, so he thought we ought to be able to get it up the stairs.

It took a few guys to carry off the truck and into the downstairs area.  They carefully pulled it apart into smaller pieces, took parts they could carry up then prepared ropes and people to hoist it up the middle of the stairway.

The guys all sat about and looked at each other,  discussed what way was the best to get the remaining table top up the stairs. About 30 minutes later we all came to the conclusion that, though it was a fantastic idea, there was no real safe way to get this huge heavy table up the stairwell.

We brought back down all the parts, and had to send the pool table back from where it came.