An audience of two

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Tags: suncec2007

No rest for the wicked
6PM is here and the Welcome reception has started in the Pavillion. I'm finally enjoying a well earned glass of Estancia cabernet when my phone goes off. It's one of the conference organisers.
Him: You know how you created accounts for the attendees?
Me: Yes. I created accounts for everyone in Sun because I didn't know who would be coming.
Him: What about Sun partners? They don't have Sun IDs
Me: (Expletive deleted)

One quick script later and I'm standing in front of the SunRay, waiting while useradd creates 323 new accounts. Then I have to propagate those accounts to the other 11 SunRay servers.

At least I got an extra drink ticket. Now all I need is someone to fetch it for me. Mike?

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The storm before the calm, or Everything I Forgot From Last Year
It's the same every year; mass panic as we try to resolve all the issues. I have a few minutes to document the solutions to the problems we hit; More than likely the only person who will benefit from this is me twelve months from now, but here goes.

Configuring an Ultra 20 so that the NVIDIA card shows the same screen on both outputs

We need one for the presenter's monitor, the other for the projector. Under Gnome, select Launch->Applications->Utilities->NVidia X Server Settings.
Select X Server Display Configuration. If the second screen doesn't show up, click Detect Displays.
Select the second screen - it should say Disabled - and click Configure.
In the popup select Twinview, then OK.
Under Position select Clones. It should now work, but will not survive a reboot.
At the bottom of the screen select Save to X Configuration File - enter a file that you can write to, such as /tmp/foo - if you try to write to /etc it may fail silently.
As root, copy the file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf - voila.

Note that if you boot the Ultra 20 with the projector connected, that causes the NVIDIA card to get confused. It thinks that the projector only supports 640x480 - or worse still, 320x240! Annoyingly, the configuration utility is too big to run on a 640x480 screen which makes life fun.

Another side effect is that the xorg.conf may get updated with the lower resolution. If this happens, edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Look towards the end for a bit that looks like this:

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "metamodes" "CRT: 1024x768 +0+0, DFP: 1024x768 +0+0"
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection
Verify the parameters on the line that says "metamodes".

Configuring a network printer in Firefox

First make sure that the printer is connected to the right network. You don't want it plugged into the hub that all the SunRays are running off. Then configure the printer with an IP address on the main LAN. Double check the subnet mask and gateway because you probably fat-fingered it. Again.

If you can ping the printer, you're good to go. Add an entry to /etc/hosts and call it printer. Sure, you can use the IP address, but someone will fat-finger that too. You should be able to print using the command lp -d printer:printer

Launch Firefox and select File->Print. Under Properties get rid of that MOZ_PRINTER_NAME stuff and just put lp -d printer:printer - then print something. If you don't print something it won't save the change.

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Tags: printer punchin suncec2007 twinview