Tag: Ubuntu

Use your Debian System with as an iBeacon for Home Automation

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

I have been using the Home-Assistant application at home to experiment with Home Automation.

One thing I’ve found is that the Raspberry Pi is perfect for a few of the monitoring things that I wanted it to do (see also https://github.com/JonTheNiceGuy/home-assistant-configs for more details of what I’m doing there!).

I’m using the OwnTracks application to talk to an MQTT server, but I could also do with it knowing where I am in the house, so I looked around for some details on iBeacons.

iBeacon is an Apple standard, but it’s very easy to configure on Linux systems. I took some pointers from this article and wrote up a script to turn on the iBeacon on my Raspbian Raspberry Pi 3.

Configuring the Script

When you first run it as root, it will pre-populate a config file in /etc/iBeacon.conf. Edit it and run the script again.

Running the script

This script needs to be run as root, so to test it, or to reconfigure the beacon, run sudo /root/iBeacon.sh (or wherever you put it!)

Making it persistent

To be honest, at this point, I’d probably just stick this into my root Crontab file by adding this line:

@reboot /root/iBeacon.sh | logger

Again, replace /root/iBeacon.sh with wherever you put it!

Please visit this link to see the script and make suggestions on improvements.

Podcast Summary – Ubuntu Podcase S09E37 and S09E38

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

I was very fortunate to have been invited to guest present on the Ubuntu Podcast, for the episodes S09E37 and S09E38.

I recorded the show on my normal laptop, with a specially built Ubuntu Mate 16.10 image, which just included the show’s recording tools (Mumble, Voice Recorded, Gobby)

Due to some issues with my local recording, the audio used in the podcast was from the Mumble recording, rather than the local recording I made.

I’m generally happy with the recording, although I could have done with reading the content in more depth before the show, but, as it happened on a work night, I didn’t really make the time to research properly.

It was an absolute pleasure to record the show, and I’ve offered to guest present again in the future, if they’ll have me!

Setting up a Google Play Music uploader for Linux Servers

JonTheNiceGuy 8 Comments

THIS POST HAS BEEN SUPERCEEDED.

I like having an online music server. At home, I use a Logitech Media Server (formerly Squeezebox Server) [1] and run my several O2 Jogglers around the house with the “Squeezeplay OS” [2] images to play music from that server, but when it comes to an Android tablet (or Android phone), there’s not that joined-up thinking from Logitech (although you can just about cobble it together using a few 3rd party apps [3]), but what I do like is the Google Play Music service.

Google Play Music [4] was the first product from the Google Play team after they rebranded to “Google Play”, and I pretty quickly got interested in it. I installed the Google Play Uploader [5] on my home server, and uploaded all my music (apparently, I’m up to 12,000 tracks, but I think there are some duplicates there!) but what to do about the rest of the family? Well, until just recently, it didn’t matter. Jules has no interest in playing music on her phone or tablet, and Daniel, well, he’s 3-and-a-bit.

Since pretty early on, he’s been all over our tech – initially just using whatever apps we had installed on Jules’ and my phones, then Jules’ tablet (I was, and still am, pretty cautious about him using my tablet as it’s an Asus TF300T [6] which cost quite a lot of money, and I keep toying with the idea of installing some other OS – like Firefox OS [7] or Ubuntu Touch [8] on there and can’t if it’s wrecked), and now he’s pretty comfortable with browsing YouTube or the Play Store, although he knows not to click on adverts and can’t install anything that costs anything.

In the last couple of months, since he’s been really learning how to spell, he’s been asking how to spell the names of his favourite films (“Oliver!”, “Frozen” and “The Polar Express” primarily) to get the film clips up in YouTube, or to play snippets from the soundtracks of the films… which got me thinking. I can’t really do much about the films (not yet at least!), but perhaps I could set up Google Play Music with the soundtracks he listens to… but I already have one account sync’ed with Google Play Music from my media server…. how do I get his stuff set up on there?

Essentially, Google Play Music Uploader is a GUI application that can’t be started in the CLI (which kinda makes sense from a simplicity perspective), but as I’m already running one instance of the application on my media server, I can’t start up a second one, so what do I do?

Well, as it turns out, there’s actually a python library for interacting with Google Play Music’s upload and download applications called “gmusicapi” [9], and this couples with a really nice wrapper gives me a CLI utility I can run in a CRON job on my media server.

The wrapper is called gmusicapi-scripts [10], which contains 3 utilities – gmdownload.py, gmsync.py and the key to this – gmupload.py.

You need to install a few libraries. On my Ubuntu 14.04 system, I needed to run:

sudo apt-get install python-pip avconv-tools
sudo pip install gmusicapi
sudo pip install docopt

Once you’ve got this, you can get the tools themselves like this:

git clone https://github.com/thebigmunch/gmusicapi-scripts.git

This will give you a folder called gmusicapi-scripts in which is gmupload.py – the first time you run it, it’ll ask you to visit a web page in order to register the client. Click “OK” to approve the library having access to Google Play Music. This is a pretty spartan page, and ends up with a grey text box containing a string. Copy the contents of that box back into your terminal, and hey-presto, you get it working…

Well, sort of. For me, because I’d not set Daniel up with Google Play Music yet, I needed to set up his account first. I didn’t realise this (I thought, just going to the web page the script points you to will get you access, but it doesn’t because they need to vet which country you’re accessing from…) and the script didn’t tell me that (it just kept saying “Not Subscribed” [11])

Anyway, once it’s done you run

~/gmusicapi-scripts/gmupload.py /path/to/file.mp3

( 1/1) Successfully uploaded /path/to/file.mp3

If you’ve got multiple users, you can rename ~/.local/share/gmusicapi/oauth.cred to ~/.local/share/gmusicapi/SomeOtherName.cred and then run

~/gmusicapi-scripts/gmupload.py -c SomeOtherName /path/to/file.mp3

Subsequent passes will prompt you to authenticate the next account as you go, and then you can rename them as appropriate.

[1] Logitech Media Server (formerly Squeezebox Server): http://www.mysqueezebox.com/download
[2] “Squeezeplay OS”: http://birdslikewires.co.uk/articles/squeezeplay-os
[3] a few 3rd party apps: I got it working on my TF300T by combining https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.bluegaspode.squeezeplayer and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.cedata.android.squeezecommander
[4] Google Play Music: https://play.google.com/music
[5] Google Play Uploader: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/manager
[6] TF300T: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Transformer_Pad_TF300T
[7] Firefox OS: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os/
[8] Ubuntu Touch: http://www.ubuntu.com/tablet
[9] “gmusicapi”: https://github.com/simon-weber/Unofficial-Google-Music-API
[10] gmusicapi-scripts: https://github.com/thebigmunch/gmusicapi-scripts
[11] “Not Subscribed”: I raised a bug, but the lead developer said it seemed obvious to him that you have to set it up first… not disputing that for the first pass, but a nice message would have been good :) https://github.com/thebigmunch/gmusicapi-scripts/issues/22

Broadcom BCM43228 and recent Linux support

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

I have an Acer V5-171 laptop, with a BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n wireless network adaptor. In Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10, I had absolutely no issues with my wireless connectivity. I upgraded to Ubuntu 13.04, and the wifi device dropped out.

I fixed the wifi by performing the following command (found via this forum post):

sudo apt-get install --reinstall bcmwl-kernel-source

I’d had a few issues with my Ubuntu install – mostly due to tinkering, so I thought I’d give a few other distributions a shot. Unfortunately, the state of the support of this driver was even worse on the others I installed.

Sabayon 13.04 (note, this is from memory!): You need to edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and uncomment the blacklisting of the b43 module. You need to comment the blacklisting of the 5 or so modules above it (mostly to enable the “wl” module). While this brought the NIC up, it didn’t survive an upgrade of packages, and by this point I’d spent about 2 days on it, so I was getting ratty, and wanted to try something else.

Fedora 18: Also didn’t work – I checked this distro because of my issues with Sabayon, but I figured that as it wasn’t working, perhaps there was something fundamental going on – probably either installing a package, or blacklisting a module would have solved this – I won’t know now!

OpenSUSE 12.3: I finally settled on installing OpenSUSE after I’d realised my issues were just with the module and not the distribution. I’d considered running OpenSUSE for some time and thought I’d give it a shot. I found a post (which I’ve subsequently lost) which showed that the package wasn’t installed by default to support this adaptor, so I found this page which listed both the relevant kernel module (in my case the x86_64 12.3 package) and the matching software package. As I was doing the install semi-offline (I can’t tether my phone to the laptop right now, and had no wired access) I transferred the relevant RPMs over, and installed them using rpm (the RedHat/Fedora/OpenSUSE/etc package manager). Wireless came up, but I’m missing certain APs – probably a configuration item that I’ve not yet fixed. It’s not disastrous, but is annoying :)

Want multiple vhosts without creating new apache config files each time? Use vhost_alias

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

This is a pretty quick technical post explaining how to get vhost_alias working with apache2 on Ubuntu 12.10. Read More

Building a WPA2 Protected Wireless Access Extender for Jogglers using Ubuntu 12.04

JonTheNiceGuy 4 Comments

Shesh! What a lot of keywords in the title!

For those who don’t know what some of those key words were, I’ll break down the title

  • Ubuntu is a Linux distribution, and 12.04 is the version number of the latest Long Term Stable version.
  • Joggler is the name of a device sold by O2 a couple of years ago. It is a re-branded OpenPeak tablet.
  • A Wireless Access Extender is a device like a WiFi enabled router, but it uses the same DHCP pool and should use the same SSID name and WPA2 passphrase.
  • WPA2 is the latest incarnation of the WiFi security protocol. It is currently (at this time, as far as I know) uncracked, unlike WPA1 or WEP.

So, now that we know what I’m talking about, let’s look at what components we will be using today.

  • An O2 Joggler. EBay lists them from between £30 and £100. They originally sold for around £100, but got popular when O2 dropped the price to £50. They are no longer available for sale from O2, hence EBay.
  • A wired network connection. I’m using a pair of Ethernet over Power (or “HomePlug”) devices to let me position this device in a useful place in my house. I’ve had a lot of success with the 200M devices sold by 7DayShop.com, but if I were buying new today, I’d probably stretch up to the 500M devices, as they will be Half Duplex (like a narrow street permitting traffic only one way at a time), and will loose some data due to interference and “collisions” – where two devices on the Ethernet over Power “network” are talking at the same time. Ultimately, you won’t get the equivalent to 100M Full Duplex with the 200M devices, but should do with the 500M devices.
  • A USB stick. This needs to be 4Gb or greater, but not all devices are suitable. I bought some 4Gb sticks from 7DayShop.com and found they only actually held around 3.5Gb… making them unsuitable. I bought three 8Gb sticks from 7DayShop.com, but only used one for this task!
  • A Ubuntu 12.04 install. Actually, I used the Xubuntu 12.04 image, because I didn’t need everything that Ubuntu 12.04 gave me. This is a special non-official build of Xubuntu, customised for Joggler hardware and it’s touchscreen, and is what I’ll be moving all my Jogglers in the house to, eventually, however, the principals in making all of this stuff work will apply just as much to Ubuntu as it would Xubuntu – special build or not!
  • Once installed, you’ll use a combination of VNC and SSH to manage your device, these will be through the X11VNC project and OpenSSH-Server. You should have an SSH client (for Linux/Mac, ssh should be fine, for Windows, use PuTTY) and a VNC client (for Ubuntu, I use Remmina, for Windows, I use TightVNC).

So, you’ve got all your goodies, and you’re ready to go. Let’s do this!

  1. Transfer the Xubuntu image to the USB stick. This is a simple task, and is clearly documented on the site where I got the Xubuntu image from, and involves you copying the image directly to the USB stick, not to one of it’s partitions. It sounds complicated, it really isn’t.
  2. Stick the Xubuntu stick into the side of the Joggler. Get used to that shape, as it’s going to be in the side of that from now on. This is because the Linux distribution needs more than the 1Gb that the Joggler holds internally.
  3. Plug in the HomePlug device – make it as close to the wall as you can make it! I’ve had experience of it being three 4way plug strips away from the wall and it worked fine, but I’ve also had the same HomePlug only one 4way away, and it’s completely failed to work, and had to juggle all my sockets to get it plugged directly into the wall. I think it may be down to the number of “noisy” plugs in the same 4way, but I can’t be sure. Just experiment!
  4. Plug your Ethernet cable between the HomePlug and the Joggler.
  5. Power on the Joggler. It will start up with an O2 logo (or possibly an “OpenPeak” logo – depends on when the device was manufactured)  – sometimes either of these may corrupt or show with a big white block as it’s booting. Don’t worry too much about this, we’ll stay away from the boot screen as much as possible! :)
  6. Once you get to a blue screen with icons on it – this is Xubuntu (well, actually XFCE4, but the semantics are moot really). Click on the blue spot in the top left corner of the screen – it may be a little fiddly – and select Ubuntu Software Centre.
  7. Open the “Florence” keyboard – found by pressing the small grid icon near the clock in the top right corner of the screen. If you struggle with this keyboard (I did), you may find it easier to use the “OnBoard” keyboard, found through the applications menu (again, via the blue button in the top corner).
  8. Select the Search box in the Software Centre and search for OpenSSH-Server. Click on the only entry which comes back (you need to search for the exact term) and then click install. While that’s installing, click on the two arrows icon in the top right corner, and select Connection Information. Make a note of the IP address you have received. Once it’s finished installing you can move away to something a little more comfortable to work on your Joggler!
  9. SSH to your Joggler’s IP address – the username for the device is “joggler” and the password is also “joggler”. All of the following you’ll need to be root for. I always use the following line to become root: 
    sudo su -
  10. The wireless driver that is installed by default on the Jogglers don’t support “Master” mode – the mode you need to be a wifi access point or extender, so you’ll need to change the wireless driver. Thanks to this post, we know that you edit the file /etc/modprobe.d/joggler.conf and move the comment symbol (#) from before the line blacklist rt2870sta to the line blacklist rt2800usb. It should look like this after you’re done: 
    # blacklist rt2800usb
blacklist rt2870sta
  11. We need to bridge the wlan0 and eth0 interfaces.
    1. Install bridge-utils using apt-get install.
    2. Now we’ll start to configure the bridge. Edit /etc/network/interfaces to create your bridge interfaces. 
      auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet manual

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
    pre-up service hostapd start
    post-up brctl addif br0 wlan0

auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
    bridge_ports eth0 wlan0
    pre-up iptables-restore -c < /etc/iptables.rules
    post-down iptables-save -c > /etc/iptables.rules

      If you want to use a static IP address instead of a DHCP one, then change the last block (auto br0; iface br0 inet dhcp) to the following (this assumes your network is a 192.168.0/24 with .1 as your router to the outside world):

      auto br0
iface br0 inet static
    bridge_ports eth0 wlan0
    address 192.168.0.2
    broadcast 192.168.0.255
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    gateway 192.168.0.1
    3. Setup /etc/sysctl.conf to permit forwarding of packets. Find, and remove the comment symbol (#) from the line which looks like this: 
      # net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1
    4. Create your initial /etc/iptables.rules (this is based on details from this page) and then “restore” them using iptables. 
      *filter
:INPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
:FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [1:81]
-A FORWARD -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
-A FORWARD -m state --state INVALID -j DROP
-A FORWARD -i wlan0 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT
-A FORWARD -i eth0 -o wlan0 -j ACCEPT
COMMIT
    5. Check the iptables have restored properly by running iptables -L -v which should return the following data: 
      # iptables -L -v
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
 pkts bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination         

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
 pkts bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination
    0     0 ACCEPT     all  --  any    any     anywhere             anywhere             state RELATED,ESTABLISHED
    0     0 DROP       all  --  any    any     anywhere             anywhere             state INVALID
    0     0 ACCEPT     all  --  wlan0  eth0    anywhere             anywhere
    0     0 ACCEPT     all  --  eth0   wlan0   anywhere             anywhere            

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
 pkts bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination
  12. Now you’ve got a bridged interface, and your wifi adaptor is ready to go, let’s get the DHCP relay in and working right.
    1. apt-get install dhcp3-relay
    2. It’ll ask you where to forward the DHCP requests to – that is your current gateway – if you have your network as 192.168.0.0/24 with the gateway as .1, then it should be 192.168.0.1.
    3. Next, it’ll ask which interfaces to listen on – this is br0.
    4. The last screen asks for some options to configure – this is “-m forward” (without the quote marks).
  13. Last thing to do, we need to configure something to listen on the wifi interface to provide the Access Point facility to your device. This is “hostapd”.
    1. apt-get install hostapd
    2. zcat /usr/share/doc/hostapd/examples/hostapd.conf.gz > /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf
    3. Edit /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf replacing the following config items: 
      FROM: # driver = hostapd
TO:   driver = nl80211
FROM: #country_code = US
TO:   country_code = GB
FROM: hw_mode = a
TO:   hw_mode = g
FROM: channel = 60
TO:   channel = 12
FROM: #ieee80211n = 1
TO:   ieee80211n = 1
FROM: #wpa = 1
TO:   wpa = 2
FROM: #wpa_passphrase=secret passphrase
TO:   wpa_passphrase=MySecretPassword
FROM: #wpa_pairwise = TKIP CCMP
TO:   wpa_pairwise = TKIP CCMP
    4. Edit /etc/default/hostapd amending the DAEMON_CONF line to show /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

Reboot, and your access point should come to life! Huzzah!! Initially it’ll have the SSID of “test” (it’s in /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf as the config line “ssid = test”) but you should probably change it to the same SSID as your main router. If you do that, ensure your WPA passphrase is the same as your main router too, otherwise your network will get very confused!

So, now you’ve got an Access extender, running Ubuntu… what else could you do with it? Well, I run one of two things on all of mine – sqeezeplay or vlc monitoring a webcam. All very useful stuff, and stuff I was doing with it before it was an access extender!

Getting started with Unit Testing for PHP

JonTheNiceGuy 2 Comments

Unit testing seems like a bit of a dark art when you’re first introduced to it. “Create this new file. Tell it what is supposed to be the result when you run a test, and it’ll tell you if you’re right nor not.”

Let’s start with a pseudocode example:

test->assertTrue(1+1 = 2); // Test returns true, huzzah!
test->assertFalse(1+1 = 3); // Test returns false. Those integers must not have been large enough

I want to use PHPUnit, and for me the easiest way to get this and the rest of the tools I’ll be referring to in this collection of posts is to install “The PHP Quality Assurance Toolchain“. On my Ubuntu install, this was done as follows:

sudo pear upgrade PEAR
sudo pear config-set auto_discover 1
sudo pear install --all-deps pear.phpqatools.org/phpqatools

Now we’ve got the tools in place, let’s set up the directory structure.

/
+ -- Classes
|    + -- Config.php
+ -- Tests
     + -- ConfigTest.php

In here, you see we’ve created two files, one contains the class we want to use, and the other contains the tests we will be running.

So, let’s slap on the veneer of coating that these two files need to be valid to test.

/Classes/Config.php

<?php
class Config
{
}

/Tests/Config.php

<?php

include dirname(__FILE__) . '/../Classes/Config.php';

class ConfigTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
}

So, just to summarise, here we have two, essentially empty classes.

Let’s put some code into the test file.

<?php

include dirname(__FILE__) . '/../Classes/Config.php';

class ConfigTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
  public function testCreateObject()
  {
    $config = new Config();
    $this->assertTrue(is_object($config));
  }
}

We can now run this test from the command line as follows:

phpunit Tests/ConfigTest.php

phpunit Tests/01_ConfigTest.php
PHPUnit 3.6.10 by Sebastian Bergmann.

.

Time: 1 second, Memory: 3.00Mb

OK (1 test, 1 assertion)

That was nice and straightforward!

Let’s add some more code!

In ConfigTest, let’s tell it to load some configuration, using a config file.

<?php

include dirname(__FILE__) . '/../Classes/Config.php';

class ConfigTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
  public function testCreateObject()
  {
    $config = new Config();
    $this->assertTrue(is_object($config));
  }

  public function testLoadConfig()
  {
    $config = new Config();
    $config->load();
  }
}

And now when we run it?

PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined method Config::load() in /var/www/PhpBetterPractices/Tests/ConfigTest.php on line 16

Ah, perhaps we need to write some code into /Classes/Config.php

<?php
class Config
{
  public function load()
  {
    include dirname(__FILE__) . '/../Config/default_config.php';
  }
}

But, running this, again, we get an error message!

PHPUnit 3.6.10 by Sebastian Bergmann.

.E

Time: 0 seconds, Memory: 3.00Mb

There was 1 error:

1) ConfigTest::testLoadConfig
include(/var/www/PhpBetterPractices/Config/default_config.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory

/var/www/PhpBetterPractices/Classes/Config.php:7
/var/www/PhpBetterPractices/Classes/Config.php:7
/var/www/PhpBetterPractices/Tests/ConfigTest.php:16

FAILURES!
Tests: 2, Assertions: 1, Errors: 1.

So, we actually need to check that the file exists first, perhaps we should throw an error if it doesn’t? We could also pass the name of the config file to pass to the script, which would let us test more and different configuration options, should we need them.

class Config
{
    public function load($file = null)
    {
        if ($file == null) {
            $file = 'default.config.php';
        }

        $filename = dirname(__FILE__) . '/../Config/' . $file;

        if (file_exists($filename)) {
            include $filename;
        } else {
            throw new InvalidArgumentException("File not found");
        }
    }
}

So, here’s the new UnitTest code:

class ConfigTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
    public function testCreateObject()
    {
        $config = new Config();
        $this->assertTrue(is_object($config));
    }

    public function testLoadConfig()
    {
        $config = new Config();
        $config->load();
    }

    /**
     * @expectedException InvalidArgumentException
     */
    public function testFailLoadingConfig()
    {
        $config = new Config();
        @$config->load('A file which does not exist');
    }
}

This assumes the file /Config/default.config.php exists, albeit as an empty file.

So, let’s run those tests and see what happens?

PHPUnit 3.6.10 by Sebastian Bergmann.

...

Time: 0 seconds, Memory: 3.25Mb

OK (3 tests, 2 assertions)

Huzzah! That’s looking good. Notice that to handle a test of something which should throw an exception, you can either wrapper the function in a try/catch loop and, in the try side of the loop, have $this->assertTrue(false) to prevent false positives and in the catch side, do your $this->assertBlah() on the exception. Alternatively, (and much more simplely), use a documentation notation of @expectedException NameOfException and then prefix the function you are testing with the @ symbol. This is how I did it with the test “testFailLoadingConfig()”.

This obviously doesn’t handle setting and getting configuration values, so let’s add those.

Here’s the additions to the Config.php file:

    public function set($key = null, $value = null)
    {
        if ($key == null) {
            throw new BadFunctionCallException("Key not set");
        }
        if ($value == null) {
            unset ($this->arrValues[$key]);
            return true;
        } else {
            $this->arrValues[$key] = $value;
            return true;
        }
    }

    public function get($key = null)
    {
        if ($key == null) {
            throw new BadFunctionCallException("Key not set");
        }
        if (isset($this->arrValues[$key])) {
            return $this->arrValues[$key];
        } else {
            return null;
        }
    }

And the default.config.php file:

<?php
$this->set('demo', true);

And lastly, the changes to the ConfigTest.php file:

    public function testLoadConfig()
    {
        $config = new Config();
        $this->assertTrue(is_object($config));
        $config->load('default.config.php');
        $this->assertTrue($config->get('demo'));
    }

    /**
     * @expectedException BadFunctionCallException
     */
    public function testFailSettingValue()
    {
        $config = new Config();
        @$config->set();
    }

    /**
     * @expectedException BadFunctionCallException
     */
    public function testFailGettingValue()
    {
        $config = new Config();
        @$config->get();
    }

We’ve not actually finished testing this yet. Not sure how I can tell?

phpunit --coverage-text Tests/ConfigTest.php
PHPUnit 3.6.10 by Sebastian Bergmann.

....

Time: 0 seconds, Memory: 3.75Mb

OK (4 tests, 5 assertions)

Generating textual code coverage report, this may take a moment.

Code Coverage Report
  2012-05-08 18:54:16

 Summary:
  Classes: 0.00% (0/1)
  Methods: 0.00% (0/3)
  Lines:   76.19% (16/21)

@Config::Config
  Methods: 100.00% ( 3/ 3)   Lines:  76.19% ( 16/ 21)

Notice that there are 5 lines outstanding – probably around the unsetting values and using default values. If you use an IDE (like NetBeans) you can actually get the editor to show you, using coloured lines, exactly which lines you’ve not yet tested! Nice.

So, the last thing to talk about is Containers and Dependency Injection. We’ve already started with the Dependency Injection here – that $config->load(‘filename’); function handles loading config files, or you could just bypass that with $config->set(‘key’, ‘value); but once you get past a file or two, you might just end up with a lot of redundant re-loading of config files, or worse, lots of database connections open.

So, this is where Containers come in (something I horrifically failed to understand before).

Here’s a container:

class ConfigContainer
{
  protected static $config = null;

  public static function Load()
  {
    if (self::$config == null) {
      self::$config = new Config();
      self::$config->load();
    }
    return self::$Config;
  }
}

It’s purpose (in this case) is to load the config class, including any dependencies that you may need for that class, and then return that class to you. You could conceivably create a Database container, or a Request container or a User container with very little extra work, and with a few short calls, have a single function for each of your regular and routine sources of processing data, but without preventing you from being able to easily and repeatably test that data – by not going through the container.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop you just having these created in a registry class, or store them in a global from the get-go, but, I am calling these “Better Practices” after all, and these are considered to be not-so-good-practices.

Just as a note, code from this section can be seen at GitHub, if you want to use them at all.

Update 2012-05-11: Added detail to the try/catch exception catching as per frimkron’s comment. Thanks!

Logitech Media Server vs Ubuntu 12.04

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

A while back I upgraded my home server to Ubuntu 12.04 (while it was still in beta) and immediately the first thing I noticed was that the Logitech Media Server (previously known as Squeezebox Server) had stopped working.

Checking through the logs, I saw a lot of messages about perl dependencies being missing or not working [1]. As I was a bit busy at the time (the decision to upgrade had been due to something else entirely), I put it to one side (much to my wife’s annoyance!) to pick up later.

As I’ve been wallowing at home the past couple of days with a stomach bug, and not really been fit to do much other than moan, lie there and feel sorry about myself, I thought about what I could do to get my squeezebox server back up and running.

A few Google searches later, and I turn up this page: http://forums.slimdevices.com/archive/index.php/t-89057.html which suggests that this message below is due to Ampache… which now that I look at the log entry, it kinda makes sense. Queue digging into the depths of the server.

Under Ubuntu, all the serious configuration for the server is stored in /var/lib/squeezeboxserver, which includes the plugins.

So, firstly, I deleted the downloaded Zip file from /var/lib/squeezeboxserver/cache/DownloadedPlugins/Ampache.zip

rm /var/lib/squeezeboxserver/cache/DownloadedPlugins/Ampache.zip

Next, I removed the unpacked plugin from /var/lib/squeezeboxserver/cache/InstalledPlugins/Ampache

rm -Rf /var/lib/squeezeboxserver/cache/InstalledPlugins/Ampache

I made a mistake here on my box, and restarted the server. Woohoo it came back up, but the first thing it did was to re-download the plugin again! D’oh. So, now I need to find what’s telling it to re-install the plugin. Queue a quick grep. Ahhh, there’s a file called extensions.prefs, which says:

prefs/plugin/extensions.prefs:  Ampache: 1

And another file called state.prefs which says:

prefs/plugin/state.prefs:Ampache: needs-install

Note, these are both the output from grep – so the filename includes the path from the point /var/lib/squeezeboxserver. A quick nano away (or whatever editor you prefer) and I’d removed the line from the extensions.prefs which showed Ampache: 1, but the state.prefs was marginally more tricky. In here it lists them in three states, enabled, disabled and needs-install. So, I changed it to show disabled and then restarted the service. Tada. I’ve got a working Logitech Media Server again! Huzzah!

[1] Log file looks like this:

Slim::bootstrap::tryModuleLoad (285) Warning: Module [Plugins::GrabPlaylist::Plugin] failed to load:
Can't locate Math/VecStat.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/sbin/Plugins/Gallery /var/lib/squeezeboxserver/cache/InstalledPlugins/Plugins/Gallery /var/lib/squeezeboxserver/cache/Installed
Plugins/Plugins/CustomScan/lib /var/lib/squeezeboxserver/cache/InstalledPlugins/Plugins/Ampache/lib CODE(0xb911c40) /var/lib/squeezeboxserver/cache/InstalledPlugins /usr/share/squeezebo
xserver/CPAN/arch/5.14/i386-linux-thread-multi-64int /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/CPAN/arch/5.14/i386-linux-thread-multi-64int/auto /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/CPAN/arch/5.14.2/i686-linu
x-gnu-thread-multi-64int /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/CPAN/arch/5.14.2/i686-linux-gnu-thread-multi-64int/auto /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/CPAN/arch/5.14/i686-linux-gnu-thread-multi-64int
 /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/CPAN/arch/5.14/i686-linux-gnu-thread-multi-64int/auto /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/CPAN/arch/i686-linux-gnu-thread-multi-64int /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/li
b /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/CPAN /usr/share/squeezeboxserver /usr/sbin /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/perl/5.14.2 /usr/local/share/perl/5.14.2 /usr/lib/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/
5.14 /usr/share/perl/5.14 /usr/local/lib/site_perl . CODE(0xb911e20)) at Slim/Player/Player.pm line 18.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at Slim/Player/Player.pm line 18.
Compilation failed in require at /var/lib/squeezeboxserver/cache/InstalledPlugins/Plugins/GrabPlaylist/Plugin.pm line 22.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /var/lib/squeezeboxserver/cache/InstalledPlugins/Plugins/GrabPlaylist/Plugin.pm line 22.
Compilation failed in require at (eval 924) line 2.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at (eval 924) line 2.

Nice, right?

Installing MOTP-AS under Ubuntu 11.10

JonTheNiceGuy 3 Comments

Please note, I am having issues with localhost authentication. See below

MOTP-AS is a simple installable two-factor authentication system using the mOTP algorythm for generating one-time passwords. MOTP-AS integrates with FreeRadius to provide the same authentication to log in to managed servers in a consistent manner.

I’ve recently installed this on my Ubuntu 11.10 laptop and on my Ubuntu 12.04 Beta server, and the installation instructions worked on both, so I thought I’d share them with you.

Installing appropriate packages

sudo apt-get install libpam-radius-auth freeradius mysql-server phpmyadmin

Alternatively, use tasksel to install the LAMP server task, then

sudo apt-get install libpam-radius-auth freeradius

Download the latest version of motp-as from http://motp-as.network-cube.de/index.php/download/current-version

Unpack it.

tar xfz ~/Downloads/motp-as*

Setting up the database

Go into the Setup/MySQL directory of the MOTP-AS directory. Edit motp_schema.sql at the line “CREATE USER”. Change the password from motp to something more secure.

mysql -u root -p < motp_schema.sql

Now update Setup/config.php with the new password you just created.

Setting up the web site

Copy the HTML directory to /var/www/motp (or somewhere else in your web root). You may need to do this either as root, or as a user with permissions to write to /var/www

cp -Rf ~/MOTP-AS_*/HTML /var/www/motp

Note this must be done after you’ve made your changes to Setup/config.php

Setting up FreeRadius

Stop the FreeRadius service

sudo /etc/init.d/freeradius stop

Users

Backup the users file

sudo mv /etc/freeradius/users /etc/freeradius/users.dist

Edit the users file you’re about to copy in

nano ~/MOTP-AS_*/Setup/Freeradius/users

Find the part where it says “/var/www/htdocs/radius-auth.php” and change that to “/var/www/motp/radius-auth.php”

Copy in the new users file

sudo cp ~/MOTP-AS_*/Setup/Freeradius/users /etc/freeradius/users

Dynamic Clients

Backup the dynamic-clients file

sudo mv /etc/freeradius/sites-available/dynamic-clients /etc/freeradius/sites-available/dynamic-clients.dist

Edit the new dynamic-clients file

nano ~/MOTP-AS_*/Setup/Freeradius/dynamic-clients

Find the three lines saying “/var/www/htdocs” and replace that string with “/var/www/motp” (I use Ctrl+W, Ctrl+R in nano to do a replace-all.)

Copy in the new dynamic-clients file

sudo cp ~/MOTP-AS_*/Setup/Freeradius/dynamic-clients /etc/freeradius/sites-available/dynamic-clients

Then make that function available

sudo ln -s /etc/freeradius/sites-available/dynamic-clients /etc/freeradius/sites-enabled/dynamic-clients

Accounting

Amend the default script to enable accounting

sudo cp /etc/freeradius/sites-available/default /etc/freeradius/sites-available/default.dist

Then edit it to use the MOTP accounting functions

sudo nano /etc/freeradius/sites-available/default

Search for the line “accounting {” then comment that whole block out with the hash/pound sign “#“. Fortunately in the distribution supplied default file, this only means commenting out a few lines, which are “detail“, “unix“, “radutmp“, “exec“, “attr_filter.accounting_response“, and then the closing “}” for that block.

If you’re using nano, press the insert key (or Ctrl+R if you can’t find that easily) and enter /home/MyUserName/MOTP-AS_v0.7.2/Setup/Freeradius/accounting (amend the path as appropriate). Replace the section “/var/www/htdocs” with “/var/www/motp“.

Save and exit

Finishing off FreeRadius

sudo /etc/init.d/freeradius start

Install your client

Personally, I have an Android device, and I chose to install the Mobile-OTP app from the Android Marketplace. I also, through work, have a Nokia 6303i Classic, on which I installed the MOTP application from the MOTP site.

I’ve heard good things about iOTP for iPhone, although I personally don’t have one.

Configuring MOTP

Go to http://localhost/motp (or https://yourdomain.com/motp)

Login with the username admin and password of motp.

Securing the admin account

Click on the red text in “First time configuration”

Click on “Change password of User ‘admin’”

Enter a new password. Do not set the time or uses section of this page. Click “Set“. Ignore the warning.

Click on “Home”

Setting up your first user

Click on “Quick Add” (under “Wizards”)

Enter a username. It should be the username for your Ubuntu 11.10 device.

On the client, create a profile for the device. Most of them create a profile by asking for a seed, rather than a secret, so those will likely be more than 16 characters long – maybe even 20 (Mobile-OTP for Android) or 25 (MOTP Java app).

Once you’ve got your secret (on Mobile-OTP, by pushing-and-holding on the profile name and selecting “Show Secret“, on MOTP Java app, once you’ve put 0000 as the PIN for the first time to initialize it, you get a string “Init-Secret:“), put that into the “Secret” field, and then ask the user to set their pin here – I suggest 1234 initially, as the user can change it to something they want after.

Click OK, then click “Logout” and test authentication. If it all goes OK, they should be presented with “Welcome to the Mobile OTP Authentication Server“.

Under “Settings” they can change their own PIN.

Testing radius authentication works OK

Run the radius testing program, like this, as a user:

radtest username passcode localhost 0 testing123

(This assumes the default localhost password hasn’t changed)

If you get anything like “rad_recv: Access-Reject packet from host“, then you’ve failed to configure something properly, or you’ve entered the PIN or code wrong.

Restart FreeRadius in debugging mode by doing the following:

/etc/init.d/freeradius stop
/usr/sbin/freeradius -X

This will produce a large quantity of logs on-screen, so I’d suggest running the test itself from a separate window. Run the radtest command (listed above) again. Look for your error messages. In my case, I forgot to update the line in users, so I saw this error message: Could not open input file: /var/www/htdocs/radius-auth.php

To find where this fault was, I did (as root, in /etc/freeradius)

find -R 'htdocs' /etc/freeradius

And got back: users: Exec-Program-Wait = “/usr/bin/php /var/www/htdocs/radius-auth.php %{User-Name} %{User-Password} %{Client-Shortname}”

That told me the fault was in the users file.

Fix the issue, check it again, and when you get this message “rad_recv: Access-Accept packet from host” press Ctrl+C to cancel the test mode of FreeRadius, and then run:

sudo /etc/init.d/freeradius start

Configuring pam_radius_auth.conf

Edit /etc/pam_radius_auth.conf

sudo nano /etc/pam_radius_auth.conf

Find the line which says “127.0.0.1” and replace the shared secret with something you want your server to use. You will also need to amend /etc/freeradius/clients.conf and replace the “secret” in the localhost client there (by default, it’s “testing123” in freeradius).

If you want to use your OTP for all authentication credentials, edit /etc/pam.d/common-auth, or if you just want to use it with specific access protocols, edit the relevant file in /etc/pam.d for the authentication systems you want to use OTP for.

You need to add the following line – either on the line before “@include common-auth” (for non common-auth files) or after the primary comment block for common-auth.

auth sufficient pam_radius_auth.so

Open a separate terminal session to your box (especially! if you’re remote) and ensure you can still login with your regular credentials.

Then try a connection with your radius credentials. It should just work! If not, stop the freeradius server and re-run it using /usr/sbin/freeradius -X and see whether you’re getting a different error message.

** UPDATE **

I have noticed that I’m getting locked out when using my non-radius credentials. This is probably due to the placement of the line in the /etc/pam.d/common-auth – it should probably come after the pam_unix.so line, but I’ve not tested that yet. I’m also going to try to suggest that there be an optional time-out period on locked accounts to the developers of MOTP-AS.

The second issue I’m struggling with is that I’m getting errors when using the LightDM. I’m getting the following error message in /var/log/auth.log:

pam_succeed_if(lightdm:auth): requirement "user ingroup nopasswdlogin" not met by user "spriggsj"

I don’t know if this is because I’m using ecryptfs as well, or because there’s something wonky going on with the common-auth structure I’m using.

Use GMail’s SMTP gateway using the command line from !Ubuntu without lots of config #tips

JonTheNiceGuy 12 Comments

I’m writing a few little scripts at the moment, and one of them needed to be able to send an e-mail. I’d not got around to sorting out what my SMTP gateway was from my ISP – but I do tend to use GMail’s SMTP gateway for non-essential stuff.

I thought I could easily setup sendmail, but no, that’s SCARY stuff, and then I thought of Postfix, but that needs an awful lot of configuration for an TLS based SMTP connection, so I did a bit of digging.

Thanks to this post over at the Ubuntu Forums, I worked out how to get a local port 10025 to run, but PHP kept complaining, so I next looked for a “sendmail replacement”, in comes nullmailer.

So, thankfully this is all rather easy.

  • sudo apt-get install openssl xinetd nullmailer
  • sudo tee /usr/bin/gmail-smtp <<EOF >/dev/null#!/bin/sh# Thanks to http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=918335 for this install guide/usr/bin/openssl s_client -connect smtp.gmail.com:465 -quiet 2>/dev/nullEOFsudo chmod +x /usr/bin/gmail-smtp
  • sudo tee /etc/xinetd.d/gmail-smtp <<EOF >/dev/null# default: on# description: Gmail SMTP wrapper for clients without SSL support# Thanks to http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=918335 for this install guideservice gmail-smtp{    disable         = no    bind            = localhost    port            = 10025    socket_type     = stream    protocol        = tcp    wait            = no    user            = root    server          = /usr/bin/gmail-smtp    type            = unlisted}EOFsudo /etc/init.d/xinetd reload
  • sudo tee /etc/nullmailer/remotes <<EOF >/dev/null127.0.0.1 smtp --port=10025 --user=your@user.tld --pass=Y0urC0mp3xGM@ilP@ssw0rdEOFsudo /etc/init.d/nullmailer reload

Setting all this lot up was pretty easy with these guides. There’s no reason why it wouldn’t work on any other version of Linux (provided you can install all these packages).

Good luck with your project!