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It does seem weird in general that Ubuntu is so popular at Google, when Ubuntu is basically just Debian with training wheels, and Google engineers tend to be smart enough to not need training wheels.
For the AWS Citadel instance I created, I picked a Debian image. I pretty much have it configured, except for allowing a BBS ssh login without a password.
There's some setting hiding somewhere that won't let it take a blank password.
I forget where all I looked now; I'll have to take that up again.
I had it networked with my test system on my home PC (just based on IP address) and it sort of worked. I could send mail messages back and forth, but the room sharing wasn't quite there yet; I think there was at least one more place to configure things.
AWS is... interesting.
Sat Oct 05 2013 12:16:01 PM EDT from Sig @ UncensoredThat was one of the places I hit, but I think there's a PAM module setting somewhere overriding it. The default config on the image allows ssh only for the admin account using a key; opening it up beyond that without screwing with things dramatically has been an interesting exercise. I have as far as creating a bbs user and setting its shell to the citadel client (with rnano as the external editor; don't judge me). I could live without a password-less login, certainly, but it's just one extra step.
I had to do a search on the net, but I found a post on a support forum that detailed replacing the entry in /etc/shadow for the encrypted password with another encrypted empty password.
Couple that with the sshd_config setting to allow empty passwords, you should be good.
https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/
So, you get a cheap Allwinner A20 board with all important sockets on one side.
Its the same chip as on the next generation qubie board, plus some more sockets
(two UEXT sockets, olimex specific; nice sets of extension boards available for these: https://www.olimex.com/Products/Modules/ )
The single board systems are getting cheaper. I used a Raspberry Pi this weekend for a voip server at the Twin Cities Marathon. It worked quite well for the 5 extensions we had set up.
I had to do a search on the net, but I found a post on a support
forum that detailed replacing the entry in /etc/shadow for the
encrypted password with another encrypted empty password.
Couple that with the sshd_config setting to allow empty passwords,
you should be good.
I did see a reference to that elsewhere; I may give that a swing.
There is some concern out there over the fact that even though more than a million Raspberry Pi boards have been sold, they're not having the effect that the project was intended to create -- flexible hobbyist computers for aspiring young techies to learn on. That may or may not be a problem.
well, the OLPC also didn't fly, but it inspired and created the netbook hype. catching up on that made microsoft totaly miss the tablet hype and greatlely set more fire on stillborn vista; even windows 7 got a real bad start due to them trying to make it somehow run on netbooks...
the pi proved that there actually is a market for cheap arm systems; and it gave XMBC an affordable home helping to smarten up dumbtv and raising the bar in terms of features & usability for smart tvs.
like the arduino proved that people want easy to use micro controllers, the price of the pi set the price tags for such poor micro controllers and now spawns the crossovers - powerfull arm systems able to controll embedded devices
Just for teh lulz (or more realistically, to feed a dream of someday needing more coverage) I turned my home server into a wireless access point by tossing a wifi card into it and running hostapd.
Not exactly a walk in the park, but it wasn't that hard either. I needed extra firmware for the card (firmware package was in the debian nonfree repo) and I had to manually configure a beaconing frequency to get it to announce itself at all.
So far I'm getting reception around the house that's roughly equivalent to the wireless router in the same room as the server.
My next experiment is to run both the router's AP and the server's AP with the same SSID, bridged to the same network, on different channels. The eventual goal is to deploy it in a way that the server's AP is the one I expect to be using most of the time, with the router's AP serving as a backup.
I was expecting hostapd to be less than stable, but I suppose that with it being a key component that makes things like OpenWRT work, it's had its share of QA applied.