RoundCube on Nas4Free

ownCloud has some default "apps" (something that would have been called "plugins" some years ago) installed, but working with emails is much more enjoyable using RoundCube.

I installed RoundCube using the SQLite option as database. This was the only one supported according to the installation check. However, at the end of the installation, something went wrong with the creation of the database file.

In the end, to get RoundCube functional, two "details" have to be taken care of:

• both db.inc.php and main.inc.php files need to belong the the web-server user (www). A chown www *.inc.php is enough.
• the path to the sqlite.db file should NOT include the 4 slashes after the colon like written in the example of the db.inc.php file. 2 slashes instead would spare me the errors dues to missing database.

Note that I just use the web-server provided with Nas4Free, without any modifications.

Performance Test

My music is located on my NAS (Nas4Free), and my music player (mpd) is on another computer. Sometimes, the music stopped briefly. This needed to be fixed before getting too much on my nerves.

Monitoring the tasks on the player side, nothing suspicious showed up. The connection between both computer needed some investigation. iperf would help a lot for the investigation.

• On my NAS, I wrote: iperf -s
• And on the music playing computer side: iperf -c nasname (nasname should be the host name of the NAS, or its IP address)

Watching the results displaying, this gives quickly an idea of the bandwidth between both computers. It can be really useful to find out a slow wifi connection for example (148 KBits/sec versus 94.5 MBits/sec when using the LAN cable in my case)

me@mpd:~$ iperf -c nas
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.0.12, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 21.6 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 192.168.0.45 port 41540 connected with 192.168.0.12 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-21.3 sec   384 KBytes   148 Kbits/sec

Windows 7 insomnia after Ubuntu installation

Recently, I installed Ubuntu 13.04 on my Windows 7 machine. It all went smooth, and was even surprised how everything seemed to work well in Ubuntu without any tweaking. The collateral damage was on the Windows side: it could not go to stand-by any more, even if it was no problem before I installed Ubuntu.

A short search showed an interesting thread from the Ubuntu forum. The various solutions requiring activating a partition were not helpful to me, since the installation was on two separate disks, both active partitions. However, the powercfg command did the trick:

powercfg -h off as administrator restaured instantly my stand-by :)