Transferring large files peer to peer without using torrents or third party cloud solutions

 This post take care of an issue which we sometimes encounter which is how to transfer a large file which is more than the size allowed for third party cloud storage solutions which require hefty annual charges. 

Torrents is the best method, but, sometimes torrents are blocked in the internet service provider end and not so intuitive for the first time user.

The method I would be describing would be using age old FTP for this purpose. I would be breaking it up in some steps.

Step 1 : Install IIS in your windows 10 professional system . 

• Open "Turn Windows features on or off":

  • Open the Start menu. 
  • Type "features" and select "Turn Windows features on or off". 
• Select IIS:

  • Tick the "Internet Information Services" checkbox. 
  • You may need to expand the "Internet Information Services" node to select specific features like "Web Management Tools" or "World Wide Web Services". 
• Confirm and Install:

  • Click "OK" to apply the changes and start the installation process. 
  • Wait for the installation to complete. 
• Verify Installation:
• 
  
• • After installation, you can verify by searching for "IIS" in the Start menu and launching "Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager". 

  Step2: Note down the private and public IP of this server. you can use ipconfig to note the private IP address and google for the public IP of the system. Note these IP address. The public IP address can change if router is rebooted
• 
  
• Step3 : setup a FTP server in the IIS

click here to open a how-to

Step-4: Download Filezila software

Step-5: configure NAT in the internet router

consult your router documentation. the NAT configured in this example redirects the requests arriving

at ports from 49152 to 65134 to port 23 in a private IP ( the IP where the FTP server is hosted 

like 192.168.1.6)

This is done because FTP uses a passive algorithm which throws requests at different high ports

 which have to be redirected to a single port 23.

Step-6: open filezila software 

this is how it would look in disconnected state

fill the public IP and port 23 and click on quick connect, this is how the screen should look now

the directory structure of the shared ftp folder should be visible . This is a test to see if filezila can access the folder on your laptop through your public IP . Disconnect after the test is successful

 

Step 7: give all read/write permissions to the shared ftp folder for "Everyone" by right clicking the folder 

Step 8 : give the public IP and the port to the friend/person and ask him to download and install  the filezila software  who wants to upload/download the file from the this FTP folder. he can simply drag and drop content from his local folder to this ftp folder as shown in pic above

STEP 9; (Most important) : Revoke all permissions to folder delete all port redirects & stop the FTP server from IIS once your transfer is completed in interest of security. 

Hope this short guide was useful!

installing linux to laptop having uefi bios

 the linux distributions based on older distributions are mostly based on MBR partitioning scheme. These distributions are not detected by UEFI BIOS. 

To install linux in laptops having UEFI BIOS, the following steps can be followed:-

Preparing The boot pen drive

1. download Rufus. Rufus is  a small utility about 1.5 MB in size which can make flash drives/pen drive bootable.  Rufus can make both MBR type which is used by older conventional BIOS and GPT type which is used by newer  UEFI bios when reading the partition tables of the inserted pen drive. both MBR & GPT is available as dropdown in Rufus, However, whether UEFI is supported depends on the ISO of the OS which is downloaded. In case the ISO does not support UEFI, the GPT option won't be available in drop down. 

2. The UEFI bios first reads the EFI partition on the GPT partitioned pen drive to boot the OS. The EFI partition is FAT 32 partition usually about 500 MB for Linux systems where the bootloader is stored. The bootloader in case of MBR based system is GRUB. 

3. The UEFI BIOS does have support for legacy MBR based pen drives . but that is only for loading live OS from pen drive . For installing the OS in the internal hard drive, only EFI based boot is usually possible in such systems. 

4. pressing F2 to go into bios, the EFI file of the inserted pen drive is visible as EFI entry . If there are no EFI bootloaders present in the pen drive, this field will be blank denoting that the pen drive can't boot the system. 

5. The advantage of GPT partitioning is support of drives more than 2 TB, which is the upper limit for MBR type of partitioning. 

INSTALLING LINUX ON HARD DRIVE 

After trying the distro as live USB drive, if you decided to install , there should be a install app in the desktop itself, launching the app and follow these steps for completion and install of OS in hard drive. The following points may be noted for partitioning of drive using utility like GPARTED:-

1. mark 500 MB as FAT32 and label the partition as /efi/ boot. This is where the bootloader for EFI will be installed ( which would be visible to BIOS as stated earlier)

2. mark a space equal to that of RAM in the laptop ( 8 GB or 16 GB) as Swap space.

3. remaining space can be marked as / (root) partition

Now, you can install and follow the other steps for completion.

  

Asus FX 60V laptop with probably faulty battery not charging on mains and after removal boots twice before turn on , turns off after a pre-determined time ..weird problems

Laptop Model: Asus FX 60V

(1) The issue started with battery not charging with mains on. plugging and unplugging mains cord from laptop used to sometime resume charging. Finally, even plugging and unplugging did not start the charging

(2) Initially thought that the problem might be with the charging arrangement inside the laptop as the charger was giving proper 19 v output.

(3) opened the laptop and removed the battery. switched on the laptop, laptop used to get on for a second and then turn off and then restart again, google revealed that it was normal behaviour of asus laptop if battery not present. It was also found that the batt led was steady amber(condition when battery fully charged) even without battery present

(4) continued with this behaviour for few weeks, until I found that if power was also not switched off, after shutdown and then subsequent power-up, this "switch on once, then shutdown, then switch on" behaviour did not occur

(5) A new problem started after a few weeks, the laptop would shutdown automatically while working after a few minutes. opened and tested bios battery this time, found that bios battery was 0.7 volts.ordered new bios battery and fixed it somehow using tape. the original battery was rivetted to a wire using metal plates and 2 pin header at other end connecting to motherboard. even after changing the bios battery, this auto shutdown issue persisted. 

(6) this time re-inserted the main laptop battery, and found not charging. switched off the laptop,  here i made a mistake, should have removed the battery, but forgot. next morning , I found the battery voltage totally drained close to 0 v. so either some battery circuit inside has gone faulty discharging the battery or battery itself has grown dendrites and became faulty, either way I wouldn't know. That is the end of my laptop battery and not planning to replace it because of expenses.

(6) searched and got to this video..https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKNmYp3h2N8&lc=Ugzp8-mCVC9_pfVhUXN4AaABAg.9a48O7-4ZXd9a48ic7v7mE

 where many in comments were saying that this issue (auto shut down) happens due to faulty keyboard. so This time decided to open everything, heatsink, fans, flat ribbon cable to keyboard, LEDs, touchpad etc. initially suspected that some clogging might be there in heaksink and thereby due to thermal issue, auto shutdown was happening. however, the heatsink was not much clogged, cleaned it nevertheless. cleaned the motherboard backside as seen in pic, little bit of dust was there. 

(7) reconnected everything back and switched on, now the repeated switch on/switch off problem was not there and laptop straight away booted and did not shutdown after a pre-determined time, the battery led also blinks amber as it is supposed to do (trying to charge a non-existing battery) and is running ok ever since.

(8) Possible reasons for solving problem:-

(a) dust removed from the backside of the motherboard.

(b) keyboard connector removed and turned on resetting the chipset circuitary. later when keyboard connected as explained in step (6) and turned on, everything was fine. 

(C) battery was anyway failing, that is why charging circuit was not charging. may be due to dendrites, it might be overdrawing current thus charging circuit was shutting the charge circuit. 

 Misc:

Some zoomed in view of MOSFETS (NCE 4688) which I had tested, and apparently had no issues

Switching between Kerberos & Unix Authentication mechanism

 I had installed kerberos by mistake on my local VM for skol linux and ever since it would allow to create  users but won't allow to change password. Actually I had no need of Kerberos and had selected the option by mistake while installing the VM. 

Now, even after removing all kerberos packages and rebooting, it still did not exit my system. So I wanted local unix authentication. 

Problems faced: allowing creation of new user, but not allowing to set password

The solution is to use pam-auth-update and the resulting menu will allow you to unselect kerberos and keep the unix authentication. 

unselect kerberos authentication, block password change unix users and suggest Gosa instead and you are good for setting password of local users using unix authentication

What to do if you forget your password and even root password?

 If you forget your password and even the root password, you can stare into a blank login screen not knowing what to do. Here is one break for that situation.

While you are at Grub , instead of clicking enter on your linux distribution or kernel, click E, this will take you to edit mode for starting of that kernel. Try to find one line with "quiet" in the end. At the end of this line append init=/bin/bash and press F10 to boot further into single mode. 

The single user mode directly takes you to the root user. type passwd root at the prompt to set the new password for root. 

If you get error like "Authentication token manipulation error" or if root@none:/ is shown at the prompt, then, type the following command

mount -o remount, rw/

this will remount the filesystem and will allow to change the root password. 

wifi Tethering to VM on virtualbox

 The usual and most common method to pass internet to the VM from host network is to keep the adapter of VM in bridged mode and the internet connection of the host is shared to the VM whether VM is linux or windows

However, though this works without problem if the host internet connection is through wired medium(Ethernet). When host gets the connection through wifi, this method of bridge does not work. 

Soultion:

The solution is rather simple, in the guest VM settings in virtualbox manager, go to network and in Advanced settings, copy the mac address of the host wifi adapter(which you can get by going to network connections, and rt clicking the wifi adapter and then clicking status and noting down the MAC address) and paste it in the MAC address box replacing whatever was existing in the box.

This can be done only when the VM is offline. once done, check using ip address or ipconfig command in guest VM  and you would find that that the eth1 adapter in VM has already been allotted an ip address in same series as wifi adapter of host OS. ping google dns 8.8.8.8 and it should ping. open browser and check if it is opening google, if not, then just add DNS entry in VM which would be same  as gateway of WiFi dongle/router.

Getting internet via usb tethering(JIOfi) on Debian skol Linux VM created on virtual box & installing guest additions on it.

 The VM was created after downloading a iso file of Debian Blue ray iso and installing it to the VM.

Guest additions were required to run the VM in full screen, here is where problems started.

step1 : getting the usb tethered internet working

The Oracle virtual box does not support sharing of wifi connection (there is a trick, another blog post for that!) of host to guest, even if it supports, it is choppy at best, sometimes working, sometimes not working. 

I didn't have a wired connection of ethernet variety, so the only option left was to plug in USB of jiofi modem to laptop running windows 11 host. thereafter using the virtualbox (rt control key + home) menu, selected the USB modem (listed as Android) and made it visible to Debian VM. immediately, it got unistalled from windows and got connected to Debian. Drivers were added automatically.

The device was showing in command ip address( IPconfig is depreacted it seems) as usb0 and given an ip address. The jiofi uses 255.255.0.0 subnet mask. However, routing was messed up as the default routes all go to eth0, so this has to be disabled from the host first. (use vm manager, click on debian vm configuration and in Networks, select "Not Attached" in Adapter1).

The above step resolved all gateway issues etc and was able to ping the google dns 8.8.8.8. Browsing was still not going through, and therefore, had to add the jiofi DNS entry (which is same as gateway) manually in USB0 configuration.

Now, internet was working fine.

Step2: Install kernel headers

Follow this post

https://www.tecmint.com/install-kernel-headers-in-ubuntu-and-debian/

Step3: installing the guest additions

Follow this post 

https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-install-virtualbox-guest-additions-on-debian-10/

Skol Linux is very useful for school students with many apps for school subjects like physics, chemistry,maths,geography and also for topics like astronomy and music.