stoolpigeon's Journal: A couple notes about Fedora 18

Got to work this morning and I started up my machines. I went to start synergy but it didn't start. I thought I had fixed this. It wouldn't start because it didn't recognize the machine name. I thought I had changed it from localhost.localdomain in a permanent fashion but I was wrong. I determined to track this down once and for all. I finally did. Here is the solution. (sort of)

hostnamectl set-hostname jr-acerdesk.this.net

I say sort of because that didn't totally work. hostnamectl sets up a static hostname and a pretty hostname. When I ran the command without specifiying which I got jr-acerdesk.this.net as the pretty name and jr-acerdeskthisnet as the static name. So the output of hostname is jr-acerdiskthisnet and that was not going to fly with synergy. So I had to do it again but this time specify that I wanted the static name to match the pretty name.

hostnamectl set-hostname jr-acerdesk.this.net --static

If you are curious - changing /etc/hosts had no effect on this. Poking around I think maybe changing /etc/hostname would have fixed it but I'm not sure. Unless I missed something, and I don't think I did - there was no opportunity during the install to choose a host name.

Next issue was my firewall. It was blocking the synergy client trying to connect on port 24800. There is a gui for managing the firewall daemon so I went with that. The problem is I couldn't get the changes I made via the gui to persist. It took some digging but here is what did it.

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=work --add-port=24800/tcp

I had to specifiy the zone because I have the ethernet connection on this machine set to a zone that is different from the default zone. If it was default that could be left out. I think there is an xml file somewhere I could have dug into but that's not really my idea of a good time. Hopefully the gui tool for managing firewalld will improve soon.

The kio_mtp work is available in the F18 repos. I am having a very difficult time getting it to work consistently with my Galaxy S3 though. I'm not sure why. The Nexus 7 devices I've tried work flawlessly. Something is up with the phone. I'm not sure what. I'm trying to contact the developer and see if I can help provide information that might point a solution.