Symform on Linux

So the hard drive on one of my Symform devices died.  It was a laptop running Windows Vista, which is one of those undying-one-time-hack situations.  No point to rebuild it so I swapped in a hard drive, which already had Ubuntu 10.04 on it (don't remember when I did that).  After some minor reconfig I got it work properly and installed the Symform client.  The Web interface was pretty convenient - much better than the desktop app on Windows.  However even with port forwarding configured I still don't see a heartbeat from https://control.symform.com.  Here's where the UI starts to fall short: I really don't have a way to further troubleshoot it.  I had to drop into command and start going through the community forum.  Not really complaining about this when working on Linux, but if you have a GUI, why not put some quick indicators and info for troubleshooting?

Anyhow I eventually noticed the contribution service isn't staying on (/opt/symform/SymformNode.sh status).  A check through the exception stack in the log (/var/log/symformcontrib.log) made it clear that the process couldn't really access the contribution folder.  I had no problem selecting it from the UI, but the folder is on an USB drive that was used by the old Windows machine.  As auto-mounted the NTFS volume had no permission for the symform UID, which runs the needed process.  I remounted the volume with umask=0 and it started to work.

Migrating Ubuntu ... no sweat

Here's how I moved a Jaunty installation from one computer to another. The old one is Core 2 Quad Q6600 on LANParty DK X38-T2R. The new one has Core 2 Quad Q9550 running on Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P. Different memory and drive configuration. The only thing shared was a pair of HD4670. I just moved the drive containing the root partition to the new computer, booted Live CD, and did the following under grub:
root (hd2,1)
setup (hd2)

Done. Reboot, select the drive to boot from, and I was back in my old Jaunty desktop. Could it BE any easier? It actually could, if I hadn't install grub on another boot drive in the old computer. I wouldn't have even needed the grub reinstall. True plug-n-play.

Could anyone imagine the pain if I were to try moving a Win 7 installation?

By the way, the only thing that caused a bit trouble was the RAID volume (Intel Matrix Storage based) on the new computer. After the grub reinstall, one of the RAID drive got dropped so the volume became degraded. GRUB shouln't touch the drive or anything related to the volume, so what the heck? Luckily the Win7 installation on the volume did survive so I was able to rebuild it, but not without complications. I'll have another post on my frustration on this Intel fake RAID junk.

How to change port for NX

Sometimes you want your SSH daemon to run on a non-default (22) port, and this would affect your NX server as well, as it's based its service on SSH. So besides making the change in SSH, here's the places you need to modify for NX:

• /etc/nxserver/node.conf
  change SSHDPort to your custom sshd port
  This file is /usr/NX/etc/node.cfg for NX Free Edition (non OSS version)
  
• (this seems to only apply to non-OSS version)/usr/NX/etc/server.cfg
  change SSHDPort and SSHDAuthPort to your custom sshd port