You can easily create an Autorun file on a USB pen drive to mount and dismount the encrypted file systems. This is very useful for carry portable TrueCrypt USB drives.

The only downside is that using TrueCrypt on the move means that you need administrator rights to access the disk.

Once you plug in the USB stick, you should see the typical Windows menu pop up. You can also right-click on the drive icon to mount, dismount and run the truecrypt application.

AUTORUN.INF

[autorun]
label=MyData
icon=truecrypt.exe

action=Mount TrueCrypt Volume
open=truecrypt /v MyData.tc /li /q /a /m rm /e

shell=mounttc
shell\mounttc=&Mount
shell\mounttc\command=truecrypt /v MyData.tc /li /q /a /m rm /e

shell=dismounttc
shell\dismounttc=Dismount
shell\dismounttc\command=truecrypt /di /q

shell=runtc
shell\runtc=Run TrueCrypt
shell\runtc\command=truecrypt

Finally, I have the recognition I so dearly deserve…

One of the thing that differs VirtualBox from Microsoft’s Virtual PC is that VB puts guest on a subnet of the computer that you are working on. This means that it cannot be directly accessed from other computers on your network.

To enable access, you need to configure your computer to allow ports to be forwarded to the guest. Thankfully, this is quite straightforward with the VBoxManage tool, and Allister Sanchez covers it well here: Additions and SSH Access to a VirtualBox Guest.
I’m assuming that your Vitual Machine is called MyVBoxSystem. Replace this with the name of your VM.

To enable SSH:

On the host computer, run the following commands:

VBoxManage setextradata MyVBoxSystem "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/HostPort" 22
VBoxManage setextradata MyVBoxSystem "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/GuestPort" 22
VBoxManage setextradata MyVBoxSystem "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/Protocol" TCP

This is essentially telling VirtualBox to map any access on port 22 (the host port) to 22 on the guest. On a Windows system, this is fine as you are unlikely to be running an ssh server. If you are though, just change the HostPort parameter to a port that you know is free.

To enable HTTP:

VBoxManage setextradata MyVBoxSystem "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/http/HostPort" 80
VBoxManage setextradata MyVBoxSystem "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/http/GuestPort" 80
VBoxManage setextradata MyVBoxSystem "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/http/Protocol" TCP

Once again, we’re passing TCP ports forward. If you already have a web server installed such as Apache or IIS, then you will probably need to change the HostPort to something like 8080.

Make sure that your VM isn’t running when you run these commands. To check that the settings are saved, you can run the following command:

VBoxManage getextradata MyVBoxSystem enumerate

Alternatively, open up the VM .xml file which is found in .VirtualBox/Machines/MyVBoxSystem/MyVBoxSystem.xml. The settings are found in the ExtraData node:

<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache/HostPort" value="8080"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache/GuestPort" value="80"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache/Protocol" value="TCP"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/HostPort" value="222"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/GuestPort" value="22"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/Protocol" value="TCP"/>

I had a little trouble running Ubuntu server on VirtualBox today.

Thankfully the answer was easily found at Installing Ubuntu 8.04 server on VirtualBox « {S.A.Z.W.Q.A}.

All you need to do to get Ubuntu server firing up is to open the settings screen for your virtual machine, and then tick the Enable PAE/NX box.

Click OK and fire it up! No problem.

I’ve grown quite fond of vim over the past couple of weeks. After learning and re-learning the shortcut keys, I think that I’m finally on my way to knowing what the hell I am doing!

Anyway, after working on it – I’ve found gVim to be great.

To install, just run:

sudo apt-get install vim-full

This includes syntax highlighting and other neat stuff. If you want to gegt the syntax highlighting on the server, just run:

sudo apt-get install vim

Yes, that’s right – no extra bits.

One of the cool things I’ve been doing lately is using secure shell to mount remote file systems. The great thing about this method is that you’re not dependant of explicitly creating shares as you are in Samba, and you don’t have to rely on repeated scp commands.

As long as you have the sshfs package installed, you should be able to mount the file system. Here’s an example to create a mount point on your desktop:

mkdir ~/Desktop/sshmnt
sshfs user@target-pc:/home ~/Desktop/sshmnt/

That’s it! Once finished you can unmount the folder with the fusermount command:

fusermount -u ~/Desktop/sshmnt

If you have trouble with unmounting a connection (because the target may be switched off), you can force the connection to be unmounted:

fusermount -z -u ~/Desktop/sshmnt