Hostname Resolution with (K)Ubuntu

An entire home network can be a bit of a challenge to manage, which is part of the reason why I migrated years ago to the Linux world. The number of computers in my house kept increasing and Windoze takes way too much effort to just make useful, so I cheerfully went back to my *nix roots. It took a bit of effort to convert the family to the FOSS concept, but everyone (particularly me) has been quite happy with the conversion.
Though part of having a number of computers on the same network is the ability to manage all of them. For convenience, I prefer to have the machine's hostname accessible from the command line. Among other things, it makes my life easier when I have to do some work on a particular computer. Fortunately Ubuntu comes loaded with samba as part of the default installation.
There is basically only two steps to this. Open the samba configuration file for editing. You can use the command below, or use your own favorite method. That choice is up to you.

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Once you have the file open, search for the workgroup line in the configuration file. Which for the version I'm running is on line 38 (I'm running version 3.5.8). The value on the right hand-side of the equal sign should be changed to the same workgroup that you're using for the rest of your home network. Once you're done, save the modified configuration file.
We are fortunate that Ubuntu comes with a working samba client installed, and doubly fortunate because it comes with winbind installed. So the next thing that we are going to do is modify another file.

sudo nano /etc/nsswitch.conf

Here we're looking to add something. Look for the hosts: line and insert wins after the word files, make sure that you leave a space between the words. Save the modified configuration file. Now you can either just restart the machine, or you can restart the services. To restart the services do the following.

sudo service smbd restart
sudo service networking stop; sudo service networking start

The service networking doesn't recognize the restart instruction, so you have to do it with a stop/start sequence. Once all that is done, you should be able to verify operation by doing a ping to the hostname and get a response.

Blogilo and the Blog

For a while I've been wanting to setup Blogilo to handle my different blog accounts on the different sites. Perhaps a certain sense of laziness comes into play, but I never saw the need to visit all of these different sites endlessly. I like to think that I've better things to do with my time than to spend it trolling one blog site after another. Though, I suppose that could be just me.

Regardless, I invested the time to actually make Blogilo work for me. Setting it up for LiveJournal was easy. The entire auto-configure thing worked like a charm for me. I was able to add, my blog, and the different communities that I belong to on LJ. Then I went to add this blog to it and the troubles began.

In a nut-shell, it would error out with something to the effect that there was an XML error. The fix for it was to not use the automated features for creating a blog. They apparently run the process right off the road and into the weeds. So, to work it was just enter the blog URL, username, password, and then move on to the advanced tab to select the Blogspot.com API and the Blog ID. It took me a little while to figure how to get the blog ID, but if you are looking at your Blogspot journal, you'll find it at the end of the URLs at the top of the page. Then the thing works like a charm.

The next item was to get it working for DreamWidth as well. A quick Google search turned up this page, which proved all sorts of useful. Towards the bottom of the page the even have an entry specific to the use of Blogilo. Following the success of creating an account for DreamWidth, I moved on to get my InsaneJournal account setup. I just used the same format for the link as I did for the DreamWidth account and it took off without any problems.

After completing this exercise, I am now left to ponder, do I really need all of these different blogs? I suppose I could come back to that another day, but that is not this day.

Now to just figure out how to deal with tags for the posts.