It's Alsa Confusing

I decided to install the ubuntu-desktop metapackage on top of my existing Ubuntu Server system. Since the tower is already hooked up to a KVM, I sometimes find it useful to sit down in front of it and use it as a desktop instead of connecting via ssh.

Unfortunately, sound did not work out of the box, despite the fact that ubuntu-desktop has dependencies on ALSA and PulseAudio. I was pleased to find that the solution was relatively easy. I only had to fire up alsamixer, unmute PCM, and raise the volume. My next task is to get Music Player Daemon (MPD) working.

Permission to Land

Last week, I installed CentOS on my old tower. The installation was a breeze. However, afterward, I was annoyed to find that sshd prompted me for a password, even though I had appended my public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the server. As it often is, the solution was simple.

I spotted the problem in /var/log/secure:

Jul 1 22:08:44 madhatter sshd[25996]: Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for file /home/josh/.ssh/authorized_keys

I had the wrong permissions on my .ssh directory and my authorized_keys file.

chmod 755 ~/.ssh

and

chmod 644 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

did the trick.