Sunday, April 24, 2016

Upgraded my netbook to 16.04

A couple of nights ago the updater said there was an upgrade to Linux.  Ubuntu is now 16.04 and I checked to see if Lubuntu itself was upgraded yet.  Not at this time, but, I figured it wouldn't hurt to see if the core would upgrade and the remainder still worked.  To summarize, yes, it upgraded.  Make sure you backup all of your documents, settings and any customizations to the system to an external drive before you start.


The process was smooth and it kept you informed on what it was doing which is nice.

 

When it completed it rebooted (new kernel) and I check again to see if there were more updates.



Sunday, April 10, 2016

Saw unexpected network activity

I try to keep an eye on my machine for memory, CPU and network activity on the netbook.  Normally when there is nothing running it is pretty quiet.  Today I installed a number of packages to help me manage the system and my photos among other packages.  I noticed that there was a lot of network activity even when nothing was running and that had me concerned.  I have a limit per month for usage and then I pay.  Even though the usage wasn't a lot (less than a kilo every 10 seconds) it does add up.  I decided to search to see what was doing the activity.  I downloaded iptraf and started there to see what was doing the connections.  I quickly could see port 123 and 1900 were the offenders.  Port 123 is for NTP so I was not too concerned there.  Port 1900 did cause me concern as every 10 seconds it would talk to someone outside my home network.  Next up I ran the lsof command (using SUDO) for 123 and 1900.  My suspicions that 123 was NTP was correct.  Port 1900 was minidlna.  I think it was for some of my multimedia software so I didn't want to kill it.  I did the next best thing, I found the config file and pointed it to eth0 and not wlan0, effectively killing it as I don't have networking set up for that.  Once I made the changes and did a quick reboot (yes, there is probably an easier way, but, it was the easiest for me at that time).  Once I logged back in the network went back to normal.