HowTo: Configure Ubuntu to be able to use and respond to NetBIOS hostname queries like Windows does
Users in the Windows world are very used to referencing PC’s via their NetBIOS names instead of their IP address. If your PC has a dynamic IP address (DHCP-assigned) of 192.168.0.12 and its hostname (computer name) is “gordon”, Windows users can happily jump into a command line or an Explorer window and ping the name “gordon” which will magically resolve to 192.168.0.12.
If your host is not configured with a Hosts file entry on your local PC or a DNS entry to associate a name with an IP address, Ubuntu can only use the IP address of that PC to communicate with it which means you have to remember what that IP address is with your feeble grey-matter in your head. Likewise, Ubuntu will not respond to a Windows PC pinging its NetBIOS name because Ubuntu does not use NetBIOS at all by default and so it will ignore such requests.
So how do we get Ubuntu to resolve NetBIOS names like Windows? And how can we allow Windows to ping Ubuntu like another Windows PC? Read on…
HowTo: Deal with BD+ copy protection when ripping Blu-ray titles using Ubuntu
A fair while back now, I wrote an article detailing how to decode Blu-ray titles using Ubuntu and an LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray optical drive.
This article detailed how to decrypt just about every movie under the sun except for a newer type of protection called “BD+” which I never got around to supplementing my original article with.
What is “BD+” protection? Well in short, it’s the deliberate corruption of random parts of the video track of the movie (well, OK – that is a highly simplified definition as BD+ protection can do a lot more than that, but the end result is the same – to prevent unauthorised playback which includes ripping). The idea BD+ is that when you rip the title, you can still watch the movie, but with some or all of the screen corrupt at various stages in the movie which well and truely ruins the movie-watching experience, especially since you paid good money for it and should not be forced to buy a dedicated consumer Blu-ray player when you’ve got a perfectly good PC that can do the same task.
But hang on, if the movie is deliberately corrupt, then how come it plays fine in a stand-alone consumer Blu-ray player or PlayStation3 console?
Well, let me tell you about that and how to get around it yourself.
New server!
I finally got around to upgrading the server that serves this very page you’re reading to Ubuntu Jaunty today, up from Ubuntu Hardy. Yes I know, maybe I should have waited for Karmic, or even Lucid, but the biggest reason why I did this was that I’ve migrated this server from the little Pentium 4 Shuttle XPC that was in use before onto a Virtualbox 3.0.6 headless VM hosted on an Ubuntu Jaunty box running on top of an Intel E5200 CPU.
You’re probably wondering why I’d use an E5200 when it doesn’t have hardware virtualisation features built in? Well, the server consumes very little juice compared to the Pentium 4 (26% less in fact), it’s more powerful, it’s cheap, cheerful, produces less ambient heat, is a heck of a lot quieter and there’s loads of CPU time left over to do other things outside of the VM on the host side.
CPU wise, when the server gets really busy I’ve seen spikes as high as 50%, but it never exceeds that, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s fine. If I ever need this box to do anything more significant, I’ll upgrade the CPU to something that does have VT-x later on.
If you see anything unusual/missing/dead from today onwards, please let me know in a comment!