Ubuntu

Ubuntu's cloud-init is a mechanism which can be used to provision a new instance upon initial boot. I imagine cloud-init can be used in many environments, but I'll focus on its use in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

You can invoke cloud-init in at least a couple ways :

- shell, with a lead line of #!/bin/sh
- cloud-init, with a lead line of #cloud-config

Here's how to mount SMB (Windows) shares on an Ubuntu system. Most of this assumes you're the root user. You may have to prepend 'sudo' to many commands depending on your situation.

First, you may have to install the following :

- # apt-get install smbfs smbclient

You can do a simple interactive connect with this :

- # smbclient \\\\YOUR_SERVER\\myusername-U myusername -W YOUR_WORKGROUP

This will at least show the SMB share is reachable.

Next, to enable auto-mounting on system start, you'll want to add one of the following to your /etc/fstab file :

I wanted to turn an old laptop from a Windows XP system to one that dual-booted Ubuntu. To get this to work, I first had to resize my Windows partition.

I started out with Windows default disk defragmenter (Accessories => System Tools => Disk Defragmenter). I ran it a few times, but it always left files at the "high end" of the partition so I couldn't downsize the partition.

I then tried Defraggler (http://defraggler.com). This maybe is a bit better at defragmenting, but still left files at the high-end of the partition.