Recently someone asked me about an issue he was facing with his Ubuntu Hardy Heron installation. Many of the applications, that he regularly used, were misbehaving. e.g., he couldn’t play flash videos in firefox, downloads were failing, installation of new applications were failing, etc. Everything was giving errors of not enough disk space even though he had quite a few GBs left on his drive. A few of the error messages pointed out that there wasn’t enough space in /tmp. And indeed, he was unable to store anything more than 1 MB inside this particular directory. After a quick look I found out the issue. Ubuntu had created another partition with /tmp being its mount point and its maz size was set to 1 MB.

First a bit of background. A UPnP media server can serve your media files (video / audio / pictures) over the network to any compatible player. Some of the most known examples of these media servers are MediaTomb, TVersity, ushare, etc. In linux, few players can play media off these servers natively, but many require a plugin / library called “coherence”. e.g. the default media players (Totem and RhythmBox) can detect and play media from media servers once you install coherence (“sudo apt-get install python-coherence”). This works, BUT you will see that many times Totem will stop detecting the server suddenly. It happens to me quite a bit (The server I use is Mediatomb). First I thought that the problem is with Media Tomb, but my PS3 continued to play videos from it over wi-fi without any issues, so that was ruled out. I tried many things but in the end, the solution turned out to be pretty simple. The problem seems to be that the coherence library hangs some times. Simple thing is to just restart it. So, all you need to do is run the following command:

Many times you might not be sure about which shell you are currently using. Especially if you are not on your system and logging into someone else’s, or maybe ssh’ing into a remote server. Worry not, because here are few simple commands that you can use to find out which shell you are using currently.

Command (Note: This one is a bit unreliable as it might not work with non-bash shells or on redirection. Pls check the comments for details. Thanks to Shantanu Kumar and renoX for pointing this out.):

Most of you must be knowing by now that I bought the amazing Asus WL-500W router a few days back. This router builds on the great lineage it has in its predecessors, the WL-500g, WL-500g Deluxe, WL-500gP, WL-500gP v2 etc, and shines ahead with being much more than a router, rather a complete headless linux PC. Anyways, to the point. In most routers/modems, if you forget the password to your web-administration gui (which generally resides as 192.168.1.1), the only option left is to reset the router, thereby losing all your settings etc. But not so with this little beast. If you remember your ssh password (which BTW is available if you have installed a custom firmware on our router), then you can just login through it to your router and execute the following commands to save your skin:

Many readers of this blog have written to me for the slow updates. I apologize for the same. I’ve been swamped by loads of work for quite some time now and haven’t been able to write anything here or update any of my projects, though I have loads of new hacks and tricks that I would write once I’m free and lots in store for most of the projects as well in form of bug fixes and new features. So, hang in there :)