Fixing Media keys in Ubuntu 14.04

I installed Ubuntu 14.04 about 6 months back and in the process of getting it setup I was having lots of trouble with the media keys not working. I would go in to the keyboard settings. click on the pause/play binding and map it to the appropriate media key on my keyboard and then try out my new key binding. Unfortunately this didn't work. I would press the key and get no response.

After lots of Googling I found one post that mentioned using the dconf-editor and edit the key bindings manually. I decided it couldn't hurt so I opened the dconf-editor and found the media keys under org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys. Looking at the key bindings everything looked like it should work just fine, However, in comparing the keybindings that did work such as the volume buttons with the ones that didn't work like the play/pause button I noticed the value pattern for those keys were different. The diference was that the ones that worked started with XF86. I decided to try adding the XF86 prefix to the custom buttons that I had mapped. After I added that and logged out and back in the media buttons that I had mapped myself started working.

Linux DNS

So in using Linux at work I was never able to get the the DNS for our internal servers to work. I always thought it was a DNS issue until I found this post. So to quickly summarize what is going on is the .local suffixes on all the server DNS entries were never getting resolved by the AVAHI Daemon. Here is what you need to do to fix it.

1. edit the following file with your text editor of choice:
   

   /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf

2. Change the following line:
   

   #domain-name=local

   to
   

   domain-name=.alocal

3. Save the file and exit
4. Restart AVAHI:
   

   sudo service avahi-daemon restart

Once AVAHI has been restarted those server addresses that end with .local should resolve on your internal network.

SSH Client Slow

So I was having problems at work connecting to certain servers over ssh. The problem is that when I would connect it would take about 30 seconds or more just for the server to supply the password prompt. I had initially thought this was the our System Administrators forcing the users to read the legal warning, that is until I asked them. They had no Idea what I was talking about. After lots of searching and some debugging I found a post that sounded similar to the problem I was having. Here is a link to the post http://askubuntu.com/questions/104334/ssh-client-takes-a-long-time-to-respond. and in case the link is broken here is the solution.

The most common cause for this is
GSSAPIAuthentication yes
in /etc/ssh/ssh_config. if you are not using this as an authentication method, setting
GSSAPIAuthentication no
will speed up your ssh client.
You can also change this for just your user by setting up a personal configuration in ~/.ssh/config but if you are the only user on the system, or all users will benefit, then setting it in /etc/ssh/ssh_config is fine.
See man ssh_config for more information on setting up your ssh client.

So once I had set GSSAPIAuthentication no, my client was speedy again! 

Flash Cookies

I enjoy listening to music while I do my homework and lately Pandora has been one of my favorite music players. Pandora is a free music player that will play music that is similar to an artist or song that you specify.

The thing I find interesting about Pandora is that whenever I closed my browser, delete all my cookies and browsing history, and reopened the browser, Pandora remembers who I am and automatically logs me back in. Even after set my browser to start every session in a "private browsing session" (click here for more info) so that everything would be deleted when I close the browser Pandora still remembers.

I was really perplexed by how Pandora was doing this. About this point I realized that Pandora operates over flash so after a quick Google search I found out that flash stores what they call a "Local Shared Object" which is a basic form of cookie. After a quick search on Wikipedia I found a page on local shared objects and it also had where they were stored on most operating systems. Once I found out where they were located I went and deleted them all and sure enough Pandora at this point once again asked me for my credentials.

So a long story made short, if you want to delete all your history, cookies, and anything else that can be stored on your local machine by an internet site you will have to go outside of your browser to clean it all up.