Cubieboard

I wanted to keep my existing configuration and programs on my Cubieboard2 with Linaro Lubuntu, but at the same I wanted to upgrade the packages since the Lubuntu 12.10 is quite outdated. This post describes my steps to upgrade my Cubieboard2 to the newer version, which can be done in 3 steps:

1. Update repository list to old-releases derivatives
2. Upgrade Ubuntu 12.10 (Linaro 13.04) to Ubuntu 13.10 (Linaro 14.01)
3. Ubuntu 13.10 (Linaro 14.01) to Ubuntu 14.04  LTS version (long time support)

Kippo is an SSH honeypot written in Python. Kippo is used to log brute force attacks and the entire shell interaction performed by an attacker so I have installed it on my cubieboard2 Lubuntu version. According to wiki a honeypot is a trap set to detect, deflect, or, in some manner, counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems.

So lets start to install and test my first honeypot.

I have installed Lubuntu on my new Cubieboard 2. I have also attached HDD to SATA so I have more space to store my media. This posts describes the steps needed to install and configure media server to share my media to other devices (media players). I spent some time to select the right one and chose minidlna tool (also known as ReadyMedia, lightweight DLNA/UPnP-AV server targeted at embedded systems).

According to Ubuntu documentation the MiniDNLA daemon serves media files (music, pictures, and video) to clients on a network. Example clients include applications such as totem and xbmc, and devices such as portable media players, smartphones, and televisions.
MiniDLNA is a simple, lightweight alternative to MediaTomb, but has fewer features. It does not have a web interface for administration and must be configured by editing a text file.

The main advantage of cubieboard is it’s SATA connector. I have old HDD from notebook, so I wanted to use it as a media server.

This post has 3 parts related to HDD connected to Cubieboard2 with lubuntu:

• Mounting HDD
• Backup NAND
• Spin down HDD

There are many ways to see all disks and partitions but my favorite command is lsblk:

sudo lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL
NAME        FSTYPE   SIZE MOUNTPOINT LABEL
sda                149.1G
nand                 3.7G
|-nanda     vfat      64M            Volumn
`-nandb     ext4     3.6G /
mmcblk0              241M
`-mmcblk0p1 vfat     241M            SSD

or also fdisk:

I’ve bought  BMP085 barometric pressure sensor and my goal was to get pressure and temperature data via I2C interface to my Cubieboard running linux (cubieboard2-lubuntu-installation).

I executed the following steps to install apache with PHP on my cubieboard2 with lubuntu.

Lets start with installation that will take about 25MB:

sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install php5
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

When I installed Lubuntu on my new Cubieboard2, the print screen was not working. When I hit the “Print Screen” button I got this message:

I’ve fixed it by installing the scrot application:

sudo apt-get install scrot

If you hit “Print Screen” or “Alt+Print Screen” you will see a new file *_scrot.png in you home directory.

When I install new Lubuntu NAND image to my new Cubieboard2 I had only 2GB of space out of 4GB available.

I followed this forum to expand the filesystem to 4GB.

sudo nand-part

In my case I used this nand-part command:

sudo nand-part -f a20 /dev/nand 32768 'bootloader 131072' 'rootfs 7569408'

the number in bootloader is the same as previous partition size.
The number in rootfs is the sum of previous partition size of partition 2 and partition 3 that we wanted to merge.

I use VNC to access the graphical interface from my PC to a Cubieboard running Lubuntu. I chose TightVNC and spent some time configuring it. A helpful guide on ubuntuforums.org (currently offline — see status) got me started, but I needed to make changes, so I documented what actually worked.

I have just bought cubieboard and installed lubuntu and I want to have synchronized time with NTP server. NTP is a TCP/IP protocol for synchronising time over a network – Network Time Protocol.

This post describes:

• Setting the timezone
• Configuring NTP for clock synchronization