You have just installed Arch on the Tonido2plug, now to do the initial setup.

ssh into the system (you may have to get clever to find the network address, try ssh root@192.168.2.1)

Set root password

You should be logged in as root, so set the password now.

passwd

Mount the home directory

During the install, you partitioned your 500Gb drive to create a 20Gb root partition, and over 400Gb of home. The system hasn’t been told about where to mount the second partition.

Edit fstab to mount /home.

echo "/dev/sda2       /home   ext3    defaults,noatime      0      2" > /etc/fstab
mount -a

The home directory is now mounted, and will mount at boot time. Check this with df -h

Update the system and install some useful packages

pacman -Syu
pacman -S sudo rsync

Set the hostname

Using hostnamectl requires all kinds of faffing, getting systemd running, etc etc. This work around was easier.

pacman -S polkit
shutdown -r now

ssh back into the system and set the hostname to “tonido”:

hostnamectl set-hostname tonido

Set the clock

ntpd -sd
hwclock --systohc

Make sure systemd runs rc.local during boot

The new systemd appears not to include an rc.local service. This is probably fixed in later releases of Arch, but meanwhile, we can do it ourselves.

Create a new systemd entry for rc-local:

vi /etc/systemd/system/rc-local.service

This is the systemd config file:

#  This file is part of systemd.
#
#  systemd is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
#  under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#  the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
#  (at your option) any later version.

[Unit]
Description=/etc/rc.local Compatibility
ConditionPathExists=/etc/rc.local

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/etc/rc.local
TimeoutSec=0
StandardOutput=tty
RemainAfterExit=yes
SysVStartPriority=99

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Start rc.local:

chmod a+X /etc/systemd/system/rc-local.service
systemctl --system daemon-reload
systemctl enable rc-local.service
systemctl start rc-local.service

If the start fails, use the systemctl status command to find out why:

systemctl status rc-local.service

The output may tell you why it failed.

rc-local.service - /etc/rc.local Compatibility
          Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/rc-local.service; enabled)
          Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Wed, 2012-12-12 11:38:52 GMT; 8s ago
          Process: 336 ExecStart=/etc/rc.local (code=exited, status=127)
          CGroup: name=systemd:/system/rc-local.service

Dec 12 11:38:52 tonido systemd[1]: Starting /etc/rc.local Compatibility...
Dec 12 11:38:52 tonido systemd[1]: Failed to start /etc/rc.local Compatibility.
Dec 12 11:38:52 tonido systemd[1]: Unit rc-local.service entered failed state

In this case is the script itself failed (exited with status-127) because me no type good.

Calm the drive down a bit

Install hdparm tool, and add a command to rc.local to be quiet and spin down after it not been accessed for a while.

pacman -S hdparm
cat "/sbin/hdparm -q -B1 -q -S12 -q -M128 /dev/sda" /etc/rc.local

Unfortunately, there’s lots of services poking at the drive, so it often spins up again.

Shush syslog by cacheing log writes

One culprit, always spinning up the drive for no good reason is system logger. Tell it to hold its horses by setting it to buffer in memory and flush when it gets to 10 lines or 10 hours:

vi /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf

options {
 stats_freq (0);
 flush_lines (10);
 flush_timeout (3600000);
 mark_freq(0); 
 time_reopen (10);
 log_fifo_size (10000);
 chain_hostnames (off);
 use_dns (no);
 use_fqdn (no);
 create_dirs (no);
 keep_hostname (yes);
 perm(0640);
 group("log");
};

… You can leave the rest of syslog-ng.conf as it is.

Set up the en_GB locale and timezone

Make sure these options are set in files:

vi /etc/locale.conf

LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"

vi /etc/locale.gen

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US ISO-8859-1
de_DE ISO-8859-1
de_DE@euro ISO-8859-15

Update and check the locale with the commands

timedatectl set-timezone Europe/London
timedatectl status

Congratulations, you are now in the UK, have a cup of tea.

Add a normal non-privileged user, add them to an admin group.

I am Neil, you may not be.

adduser neil  
groupadd admin
usermod -a -G admin neil

Set up ssh keys between desktop and tonido

Use ssh-keygen to create the ssh environment on the tonidoplug, and on the desktop. I recommend not doing this for root.

ssh-keygen

Press enter to get a password free setup.

You now have a .ssh directory on each host. You need to copy the public key from your desktop into .ssh/authorized_keys on tonido.

desktop$ scp id_rsa.pub tonido:.ssh/id_rsa_neil_desktop.pub
desktop$ ssh neil@tonido cat *.pub >> authorized_keys
desktop$ ssh neil@tonido chmod g-w /home/neil

The last command there makes sure home directory authority is correct on the tonido system.

You should now be able to ssh from your desktop to the tonido box without giving a password.

Set up sudoers

Set up sudoers to allow group sudo to issue commands with the users (not root) password.

vi /etc/sudoers

Add a line that allows anyone in group sudo to be root:

%sudo   ALL=(ALL) ALL

Create group sudo and add trusted user ‘neil’ to sudo group:

addgroup sudo
usermod -a -G sudo neil

Allow admin group some special commands:

Create a sudoers include file to allow users in admin group to issue specific commands without any passwords.

I set up a sudoers file to allow admin group to issue some restricted commands without any passwords:

[root@tonido]# more /etc/sudoers.d/admin 
Cmnd_Alias PACMAN  = /usr/bin/pacman -Sy
Cmnd_Alias TRANSM  = /usr/bin/systemctl stop transmissiond.service,/usr/bin/systemctl start transmission.service
%admin ALL=(ALL)NOPASSWD:PACMAN,TRANSM

Be very specific on the commands allowed, Do not use generics as these can be abused.

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Published

18 March 2013

Customization of Arch Linux on a Tonido2plug