Category Archives: Technology

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Ok, here’s a quick one.

I recently had the Ubuntu upgrade popup kick in on my desktop computer, prompting me to upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04. It was a rainy afternoon, so I went ahead.

Things seemed to go fine (even my dual screen Nvidia setup worked), but I could no longer log in from either the desktop or ssh. The local root account was fine, but none of the network users could log in.

So, this was an NIS / ypbind problem.

I logged in as root and ran ypwhich, which reported it could not connect to ypbind. However, networking was working, and I could ping the NIS server.

Running /etc/init.d/nis restart didn’t do anything, but when I ran ypbind manually, all of a sudden I was able to log in.

Ubuntu likes to change their startup scripts as often as politicians like to change their faces, so I wasn’t overly surprised. Most likely the startup order had changed, and maybe NIS was being brought up before networking was initialised.

My quick and dirty solution

Ok, so I’m getting old, and I don’t enjoy this as much as I once did. I’d rather not spend the entire day deep in the bowls of upstart or systemd or whatever the new thing Ubuntu is using today.

So, this isn’t the correct solution, but it works.

  1. Log in as root
  2. Edit the crontab: crontab -e
  3. Add this line: @reboot /usr/sbin/ypbind &

Save and reboot, and you should be able to log in.

Yes, I know this is dirty, but honestly life is too short!

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Because I’m currently in the UK, I went along to the Indieweb Camp Oxford event today!

I didn’t really go with a plan, except to sort of see what other people were up to and help out where I could, with a backup plan of doing a bit of Known dev if I could.

In the end I helped guide some folks with setting up their own Known installs, and answer some questions about the Indieweb in general (apparently I’m a veteran now!).

Was a really fun event, and it was really great to hang out with a bunch of like minded smart people!

Temporarily location protected checkins

I had a conversation with one of the attendees, a fellow traveller, and I hit on a hopefully useful extension to the Known Checkin plugin – protected checkins.

Protected checkins will, when enabled for a post, protect your exact checkin location for 24 hours. Logged in users will still be able to see your exact location, as will logged out users after 24 hours have elapsed.

The use case here is for vulnerable people, as well as travel bloggers, backpackers and nomads, who want to share their location but not be particularly precise with the location while they’re there.

So, with this feature, you can check in to a location, but not share your precise location until much later, after you’ve presumably moved on.

Anyway, I thought it was a cute idea, hope you’ll find it useful!

» Visit the project on Github...