Networking, and hence sshd, does not start until after login on Ubuntu

I updated my Ubuntu system and restarted it, as prompted, and left the office.

When I got home I could not ssh into my work machine.

This was because I had not logged into the machine and so networking and hence sshd had not started.

To get networking started before login add the following to /etc/network/interfaces

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

Setup Postfix to use Gmail as a smarthost

If you wanted Jenkins to send emails via gmail for instance.

 sudo apt-get install mailutils 

 echo timp.well.ox.ac.uk > /etc/mailname
 emacs /etc/postfix/main.cf

smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_sasl_tls_security_options = noanonymous
html_directory = /usr/share/doc/postfix/html

 emacs /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd # create password file

smtp.gmail.com GMAIL_USER_NAME@gmail.com:GMAIL_USER_PASSWORD

 postmap hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
 /etc/init.d/postfix reload

Send me the DHCP allocated IP address on boot

Occasionally I reboot, occasionally I get allocated a new IP address.

Create /etc/init.d/sendIpToTimP :

#!/bin/sh                                                                                                                                      
ifconfig eth0 \ 
 |grep "inet addr" \
 |cut -f2 -d":" \
 |cut -f1 -d" " \ 
 | mail timp@paneris.org -s "Work IP address" 

 update-rc.d sendIpToTimP defaults