Tethering your iPhone in Ubuntu

This is a delightfully easy one. First, add this repository and update your apt:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pmcenery/ppa

sudo apt-get update

Now install the following three packages (you may have to go dig for them):

libimobiledevice-utils
ipheth-dkms
ipheth-utils

Restart your machine.

Turn on tethering inside your iPhone's General > Network menu.

Cable your iPhone to a USB port.

It should automatically connect. You'll see it in Network Manager.

Poof. Magic.

Enabling SSH Agent Forwarding in OS X

If you use EC2, you use SSH keys.

If you're sane, you keep the private keys on your workstation and forward them through the chain of public keys throughout your hosts.

I recently started working through OS X again and found some pretty obnoxious behavior: out of the box, the ssh keys don't forward. After some digging, I found the following discussion of the subject:

http://data.agaric.com/node/3061#comment-1604

Long story short, it appears that the location of the user's home directory isn't communicated when the keys are forwarded so the agent looks in the wrong place.

The fix? Run these two on your OS X machine:

ssh-add

ssh-add -l

et voila

Try again.

Removing packages from Debian/Ubuntu

Just a quick note so I don't waste time revisiting this topic again.

A coworker of mine forced a package install without repositories so all the dependencies obviously failed. Trying to remove it, I did a

dpkg --remove

But running an apt-get said it was still installed. Running

dpkg --list

Gave me a status of "rc" - which left a lot of files laying around. (Configs, etc.)

Finally, I just did a

dpkg --purge

And it cleared out all the junk.

From there, I was able to do a normal apt-get against the repositories.