Install Samba Server on Ubuntu

If you want to share files between your Ubuntu and Windows computers, your best option is to use Samba file sharing.
To install, first open a terminal window and enter the following command:

sudo apt-get install samba smbfs

We’ve got samba installed, but now we’ll need to configure it to make it accessible. Run the following command to open the configuration file, substituting your editor of choice:

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf

Find this section in the file:

####### Authentication #######
# “security = user” is always a good idea. This will require a Unix account
# in this server for every user accessing the server. See
# /usr/share/doc/samba-doc/htmldocs/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/ServerType.html
# in the samba-doc package for details.
;  security = user

Uncomment the security line, and add another line to make it look like this:

security = user
username map = /etc/samba/smbusers

This will set Samba to use the smbusers file for looking up the user list.
Create a Samba User
There are two steps to creating a user. First we’ll run the smbpasswd utility to create a samba password for the user.

sudo smbpasswd -a <username>

Next, we’ll add that username to the smbusers file.

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smbusers

Add in the following line, substituting the username with the one you want to give access to. The format is <ubuntuusername> = “<samba username>”.  You can use a different samba user name to map to an ubuntu account, but that’s not really necessary right now.

<username> = “<username>”

Now you can create samba shares and give access to the users that you listed here.

Create a Samba User on Ubuntu

If you are using Samba Server on your network, you will want to create users that have access to use it. There’s a very simple command structure on how to do so.
I’m assuming that you’ve already installed Samba Server at this point.
There are two steps to creating a user. First we’ll run the smbpasswd utility to create a samba password for the user.

sudo smbpasswd -a <username>

Next, we’ll add that username to the smbusers file.

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smbusers

Add in the following line, substituting the username with the one you want to give access to. The format is <ubuntuusername> = “<samba username>”. You can use a different samba user name to map to an ubuntu account, but that’s not really necessary right now.

<username> = “<username>”

Now you can create samba shares and give access to the users that you listed here.

Change your Network Card MAC Address on Ubuntu

There are a lot of reasons you might want to manually set your MAC address for your network card. I won’t ask you what your reason is.
To change this setting, we’ll need to edit the /etc/network/interfaces file. You can choose to use a different editor if you’d like.

sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces

You should see the line for your network interface, which is usually eth0. If you have dhcp enabled, it will look like this:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

Just add another line below it to make it look something like this:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
       hwaddress ether 01:02:03:04:05:06

Obviously you would want to choose something else for the MAC address, but it needs to be in the same format.

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

You will need to restart networking or reboot to take effect.

Change the GRUB Menu Timeout on Ubuntu

When your Ubuntu system boots, you will see the GRUB menu if you hit the Esc key, or if you’ve enabled the menu to show by default. The only issue with this is that the default timeout is only 3 seconds. You may want to increase this amount… or you may even want to decrease it. Either one is simple.
Open up the /boot/grub/menu.lst file in your favorite text editor. I’m using gedit:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Now find the section that looks like this:

## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined).
timeout 3

The timeout value is in seconds. Save the file, and when you reboot you will have that many seconds to choose the menu item you want.

Change the DHCP IP Address Range for VMware NAT

VMware Workstation includes a network utility that allows you to manage the virtual networks. Typically virtual machines will use NAT (Network Address Translation) to automatically assign a virtual IP address that hides behind your host address, but the default range of 192.168.200.0/24 may not work for everybody.
You can change this address range to anything you like easily. Note that you should not have virtual machines running during this.
First open the Manage Virtual Networks start menu item:

Click the Host Virtual Network Mapping tab, and then click the arrow button next to the VMnet8 dropdown box. VMnet8 is the default NAT adapter for VMware.

Choose the Subnet option, and you will see a dialog where you can change the network range:

Once you have changed the network here, you can click the OK or Apply buttons, and after a few seconds it will update.

Change SSH Welcome Banner on Ubuntu

Every time I connect to my Ubuntu development server through my ssh client, I receive the same message and I’m getting tired of seeing it, so I decided to change the message to something else.
Here’s the message that I get every time:

Linux superfast 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Thu Jun 7 19:00:28 UTC 2007 x86_64
The programs included with the Ubuntu system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
applicable law.
Last login: Mon Aug 13 01:05:46 2007 from ipaddress removed
geek@superfast:~$

Changing this message requires editing two different files. The first three sections can be modified by editing the following file:

/etc/motd

This file contains the linux build number as well as the Ubuntu warranty message. I don’t find this particularly useful, so I removed all of it and replaced it with my own message.
To disable the last login message (which I don’t recommend doing), you will need to edit the following file in sudo mode:

/etc/ssh/sshd_config

Find this line in the file and change the yes to no as shown:

PrintLastLog no

Now when you login, you’ll get a blank prompt, although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it because it’s useful to see the last login to the system for security reasons. This is my prompt now:

This is a superfast system. Please max out the cpu accordingly.
Last login: Mon Aug 13 01:24:14 2007 from ipaddress removed
geek@superfast:~$

Linux is really great.

Change or set the MySQL root password

For every database, you should set the root or sa passwords to something other than the default, unless you want to get hacked. For mysql, the system administrator user is called root. You will use the mysqladmin utility from a command line to set the new password. Notice that there are two commands to be run.
Syntax:

mysqladmin -u root password “newpassword”
mysqladmin -u root -h host_name password “newpassword”

Example:

mysqladmin -u root password ws8dr8as3
mysqladmin -u root -h localhost password ws8dr8as3

You will also want to restart the database server after running this command

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart