Networking at home

Earlier I have measured the speed of some pendrives, now here is the next bunch. They are all 2.0 drives, in some cases the speeds are close to the limit of this interface.

There is an easy way to set the network interface speed in Ubuntu 14.04: In the iface section of the /etc/network/interfaces  you can add the link-speed and link-duplex parameters, to pass them to ethtool. The example below sets the link speed to 100 Mbit/sec: iface eth1 inet static         address 192.168.1.120         netmask 255.255.255.0         network 192.168.1.0         link-speed 100         link-duplex full

In a Samba installation I was trying to set up a Share, where any user without authetication is assigned to a certain Unix user, to have the propper rights ro read the content presented there. After reading the Samba manual, the solution which came to my mind was to do the following setup: guest only=yes guest account=user But this was not working and not globally readable files (which had permission for the user user) were not readables. After reading a bit mode the manual, I found, that guest only is not enough it shoucl always be acompanied with guest ok .  I have tried this also, but still no lock. After a lot of debunning and looking very stupidly, it come to my mind, that let's try to use the force user directive. I have constructed the following setup: guest only = yes guest ok = yes force group = users force user = user and yes, this was working perfectly, the user's permissions were used in the filesystem.

umask is a user related setting in Linux, which specifies, that when creating a new file or directory which permissions will be set. For the shells users can set the umask with the umask command (what a surprice :-) or they can set the defult value using the same command in the shell init scripts. But there are other programs (like Samba), which are using the umask and they are not taking into account the changes what users are making after they have logged in into the system. To change the umask for them as the pam_umask manual says, you need to set the values in the GECOS fields. But what is GECOS? You can find it in Wikipedia , that it is in the /etc/passwd file, but it may be more difficult to find an example for it. To put it short, the GECOS fields are the 5th element in the passwd file and the fields are separated by comas. In the following example we set the umask for the user test: test:x:1003:100:Test user ,umask=0002 :/home/test:/bin/bash

I have created a Share on a Samba server, to be used commonly by several users, with the goal, that all users belonging to a Unix group (in this case "users") can read and write these files, but nobody else should have access to these files. Speaking in unix permissions I wanted to add the 0770 mask to these files. After reading the Samba documentation I concluded that I need to set the "force create mode"/"force directory mode" parameters for this share and this should do the trick. After setting it up it was working well for my account (the first, account created during installation), but it was not working for a second account, which I have created manually, and where I have added it manually to the users group as its primary group. For this account it always omitted the group write attribute for the directories, where the resulting permission was always 0750. After some investigation it turned out that Samba was honoring the "umask" re...