Foo – Page 3 – RFC 3092

Amazon AWS SSL Certificate Import Foo

Posted on February 10, 2014 by peter

Using Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) with SSL is supposedly an easy thing to set up. And for the most part it is. You can use the command line tools or the web interface and all is good.

But it seems Amazon messed up a little bit the error messaging. When uploading our SSL certificate I got the nice error message Invalid Public Certificate. After double and triple checking the public certificate and not finding anything I asked the beloved oracle called Google.

One of the first things that came up that the intermediate certificate might be in the wrong order, or the root certificate is missing in the chain. Not helping in my case. I had only one certificate in the chain and the root is added automatically according to Amazon’s documentation.

While digging through the AWS documentation I found the little hint, that the private key has to be in RSA format. In other words your file should look like this:
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- (tons of text) -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
and not like this:
-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY----- (tons of text) -----END PRIVATE KEY-----

OpenSSL can do the conversion in one easy step:
openssl rsa -in my_private.key -outform PEM -out my_private.key.pem

After using that version of the private Amazon was accepting the public key as well, despite the error telling me that the public key is invalid. Can now somebody please explain the difference between public and private to Amazon?

Wicd On Ubuntu Fails To Start Foo

Posted on February 10, 2014 by peter

Running Ubuntu, like most mainstream Linux distribution, means nowadays automatically that your computer gets exposed to the NetworkManager and its sideeffects. Maybe this tool might work for some desktop users, but it definitely never worked for me. It is cumbersome to configure, doesn’t like if an interface is managed manually or you want to change it back to automatic. It has major problems with similar IP ranges for different locations…

Anyways, I digress. I tried a lot of versions of the NetworkManager and it actually got worse and worse. Switching back to manually editing /etc/network/interfaces is not really spouse compatible either. The decision was made, lets install an alternative: wicd.

I think there is enough on the internet on how to transition from NetworkManager to wicd, like this official one here from Ubuntu’s own help pages.

After all is set and done you should have wicd running and you should be able to use the widget of your favorite desktop environment to configure it. But not so in my case. All I saw was that wicd failed to start. And a lot of digging unvealed finally a bug and it is even filed (Launchpad Bug Report).

In short, it is a problem with how the symlinks for resolv.conf are set up. So here is the quick workaround to get wicd to work:

rm /etc/resolv.conf ln -s /run/resolvconf/resolv.conf rm /var/lib/wicd/resolv.conf.orig ln -s /run/resolvconf/resolv.conf /var/lib/wicd/resolv.conf.orig

After that sequence you should be able to start wicd. Happy networking.

Google Chrome With APT On Ubuntu Foo

Posted on February 6, 2014 - February 6, 2014 by peter

Installing Google Chrome on a Debian based distribution is actually pretty nice and easy… if you know how.

So lets get started. In the directory /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ create a file called google-chrome.list. Make sure that he extension is .list. The content of the file should be this:

deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main

After running apt-get update you will see an error message like this (the public key ID might change!):

W: GPG error: http://dl.google.com stable Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY A040830F7FAC5991

This is just telling you that you have to add Google’s key to your keychain. And here are the commands to do exactly that:

gpg --recv-keys A040830F7FAC5991 gpg --export -a A040830F7FAC5991 | sudo apt-key add -

Here is a sample output of that procedure:

root@majestix:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# gpg --recv-keys A040830F7FAC5991 gpg: requesting key 7FAC5991 from hkp server keys.gnupg.net gpg: /root/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created gpg: key 7FAC5991: public key "Google, Inc. Linux Package Signing Key " imported gpg: no ultimately trusted keys found gpg: Total number processed: 1 gpg: imported: 1 root@majestix:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# gpg --export -a A040830F7FAC5991 | sudo apt-key add - OK root@majestix:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# apt-get update ...

After that you can look for and install Google Chrome out of the apt repository:

root@majestix:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# apt-cache search google-chrome google-chrome-beta - The web browser from Google google-chrome-stable - The web browser from Google google-chrome-unstable - The web browser from Google

More Ubuntu Annoyances, Like Focus-Follows-Mouse… Foo

Posted on February 5, 2014 by peter

I don’t know how anybody can work with focus on click. It is just a waste of time and energy. So it is really annoying to me that focus on click is always the default. And Unity has the same lack of configuration option as Gnome. You can’t switch the mouse focus mode with the standard settings.

To help that problem they finally have a UI that you can install with this command:

apt-get install unity-tweak-tool

When you now search for the unity-tweak-tool it will start and gives you a lot of missing options and settings to improve your workflow on your desktop. Stuff like configuring the launcher, panels, desktop switcher, mouse behavior, shortcuts, theme settings, etc.

This tool is a life savior for me and makes Unity actually a little bit more usable.

But there might be some stuff that is not in the tweak tool yet. In that case you can install the gconf editor:

apt-get install gconf-editor

You start it with the command gconf-editor. If you like poking around in the MS Windows registry, then this is your friend. It looks very similar and is a powerful tool to apply settings for which Canonical thought you don’t need a UI for.

Now, there is of course another tool that is helping you setting up Compiz, the composite manager. Most settings should be in the gconf editor, but you never know. So lets install that one as well and play around:

apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

You invoke it with the command ccsm and have access to all the internal settings of Compiz.

And the CompizConfig settings manager,… wow, that is a mouthfull… That manager is the one that finally was able to resolve my issue with resizing windows. I like the quite common setting of using ALT+RightMouseButton to resize a window. and the Compiz settings manager is offering the setting.

In Window Management->Resize Window you can change exactly that behavior from the Ubuntu default middle mouse button to the right button. When you set it to the right mouse button (button 3) you might get a warning about a conflict with the Window Menu feature. I don’t need that one so I simply disabled it. And if I needed, then I can use the same tool to assign another key-mouse-button combination.

Now, why do you need next to the standard settings dialogs additional three tools to get just the basic setup going is something that most likely only some UI designers at Canonical know. But at least I have some tools to get to a usable workspace.

Adobe Acrobat Reader in Ubuntu 13.10 Foo

Posted on February 5, 2014 by peter

I guess more or less every Linux user has noticed that the official Adobe Acrobat Reader version is out of date and that Adobe has no intention to update it. So you are stuck with version 9.5.5, which is mostly okay especially when you need some features that are only available in the official reader.

And as a logical consequence, Ubuntu is not providing a package anymore in its newer releases. Especially when there are so many alternatives to the simple Reader functionality. But fear not, you can still install the Adobe’s Reader and there is even a .deb package on Adobe’s download site.

Because the package does not come through the standard repository you have to resolve the dependencies on your own… well, I mean tell apt to resolve the dependencies.

First install the package using the following command (change the file name as needed):

dpkg -i AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb

If you see error messages about the wrong architecture, then you work on a 64 bit system and dpkg needs a little hint.

dpkg -i --force-architecture AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb

Afterwards you should see error messages about missing dependencies. And now we fix them:

apt-get -f install

This should pull all missing libraries, install them and then wrap up the installation of the Acrobat Reader.

It seems that these steps are not enough on some 64 bit Kubuntu systems. You might have to install two additional libraries:

apt-get install libxml2:i386 lib32stdc++6

And now happy PDF reading… wait… can it be that easy? At least not on my Kubuntu 13.10. Reading on the screen is fine but printing is messed up. Every print out from the Reader scales down the output to about two-third of the original size. To make things worse, it does a really crappy job at scaling. The output is basically unreadable.

Picasa Web Album Download Foo

Posted on January 25, 2014 - January 25, 2014 by peter

I must admit, I don’t use Picasa. I actually don’t like all these image organization and album programs. But somebody shared a Picasa Web Album with me that had some really nice pictures of my niece’s wedding.

These were nice pictures and I wanted them on my machine. So, lets get on it and download them. This is not so easy, if you are not using Picasa. And that is not so easy on Linux. And the album had way too many pictures to download them manually.

The Firefox extension, or add-on DownThemAll! and it’s companion DownThemAll! AntiContainer are your friends when it comes to Web Album downloads from Picasa.

Once you installed everything DownThemAll! offers you a plethora of download options. For Picasa’s Web Album you choose the RSS feed link from the sidebar. Right click on it and select “Save Link with DownThemAll!” or go to the “Tools” menu and select in the “DownThemAll!” menu the entry “DownThemAll!…”.

The latter gives you a little bit more control over what is downloaded. For instance, you can select just image files or JPEG images. Either way, select a destination folder and click the “Start!” button. Sit back and watch it download.

The only downside is the image quality. I have not found any way to get a higher resolution image. The Flash or Shockwave based viewer shows beautiful HiRes pictures. But what I downloaded is much worse. Not really bad. But everything but good.

So, if anybody out there has an idea how to download the original resolution image in a shared Picasa Web Album, then let me know. I am all ears.

But until then, happy downloading.

npm “error parsing json” Foo

Posted on January 25, 2014 - January 25, 2014 by peter

I finally got a chance to update my test installation of Ghost. But as usual Mr. Murphy thought it would be a good day to say hello.

When running the installation using npm I got a ton of errors. Here an excerpt:

...
npm http 500 https://registry.npmjs.org/commander/1.3.2
npm ERR! registry error parsing json
npm http 500 https://registry.npmjs.org/methods/0.1.0
npm ERR! registry error parsing json
npm http 500 https://registry.npmjs.org/range-parser/0.0.4
npm ERR! registry error parsing json
npm http 500 https://registry.npmjs.org/buffer-crc32/0.2.1
npm ERR! registry error parsing json
...

As usual, I checked first if the problem was on my end. Of course it wasn’t. This was just an issue with npm and switching to a different server (in npm speak a registry) solved the problem. In my case the European server worked. Here the call to install Ghost using the European registry:

npm --registry http://registry.npmjs.eu install --production

Happy haunting.

CloudPress OC 6 Compatible

Posted on January 22, 2014 - January 22, 2014 by peter

After I finally updated Owncloud to version 6.0.0a, I could test the compatibility of my CloudPress “patch” with that release. And I can announce that CloudPress is Owncloud 6 compatible.

Netgear PS121v2 Print Server Linux Foo

Posted on January 15, 2014 - January 15, 2014 by peter

It is always fun to re-activate some old hardware. We had this HP laser printer sitting there with a Netgear PS121 (v2!) and it was just begging me to use it. So I thought, that is a quick and easy set up. Well it would’ve been if it didn’t have some nice surprises for me.

We had some other machines using that printer and it was an easy thing to get the configuration details from Windows. They all printed to a raw queue on port 9100. That sounds great. So I quickly set up the printer in a similar way using the PCL3 driver for the good old HP. The printer received data and started printing the test page. And it did a good job in starting it, but it printed only half the page. Afterwards the printer seemed dead. When I took a look at the print server I could see that it was switched off. Which is odd, because the print server does not have a power switch.

Anywhoo, I tried it again after restarting the print server. And I got the same result: Half a page printed and a switched off print server. A little bit digging on the internet revealed that I am not alone with that problem and that nobody knows how to fix it.

So I went with plan B and checked what ports are open so that I can try other options. Here is what nmap gave me:

Host is up (0.0078s latency).
Not shown: 993 closed ports
PORT     STATE SERVICE
21/tcp   open  ftp
23/tcp   open  telnet
80/tcp   open  http
139/tcp  open  netbios-ssn
515/tcp  open  printer
631/tcp  open  ipp
9100/tcp open  jetdirect

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.17 seconds

That looked promising and seeing ports 631 and 515 made me happy. But I knew out of experience that IPP will be most likely a pain in the behind to set up. So I went with LPD, but I needed the queue. So lets get into the web interface and read the queue information.

If I would’ve remembered the password for the print server web interface this would’ve been an easy task. Brute force password guessing gave me, after a lot of swearing, finally access to the server’s interface.

In the Server Status page you can find the queue name in the field Default Name in the form of PS******. Now comes the part that is important to know. You have to add a _P1, the port number, at the end in order to get the full queue name. This is of course not mentioned anywhere in the user manual and without it, it won’t print.

So your URI for the print server will look something like this:

lpd://host.domain.or.ip/PS******_P1

Happy printing and don’t forget this applies only to v2 of the print server. The older v1 is supposedly a different piece of hardware with most likely different problems.

Ubuntu Sleep Foo Resolved… Finally…

Posted on January 13, 2014 - January 13, 2014 by peter

The deed is done!

Finally!

If you don’t know what I am talking about, please read here, here and here.

I finally had the time to get down and dirty (literally!) and change the power supply. Well, the old one died on me and I had to replace it. Now the old 650W rests in peace while a brand new 850W does the job. And guess what, I was right. Replacing the power supply solved the “random” sleep problems of my server.

Finally I can watch TV, leave the office and do other stuff without having to fear that my server is in stand by.

And now to the next step. Get the OS moved to the new SSD. Not only a non-sleeping server, but also a fast one.

Although… my wife most likely to first clean the carpet…