Foo – Page 4 – RFC 3092

Harddisk Foo

Posted on October 15, 2013 by peter

I had my fair share of harddisk failures in the past and last night I got hit again. If anybody had problems accessing my site, then please accept my apologies. One of the hard drives in my server failed, which in itself is covered by the software RAID. But for an unknown reason the MySQL server had some issues coming back to life. The InnoDB structures were destroyed and I had to recover all databases from backup.

All is back up and running now, except of course for the failed drive. And I am working on moving everything to a different machine as soon as possible.

I’ll keep you posted.

Windows Keyboard Typing Consecutive Numbers Foo

Posted on October 15, 2013 - October 15, 2013 by peter

This Windows Foo showed it’s ugly head today for the first time and I was simply flabbergasted. Whatever I typed, only the first letter appeared correctly and from there on the system was showing consecutive numbers. Something like this for good ol’ hello world:

H2345678901

It happened first in a Java application so, I suspected a problem with Java and a virus scanner, etc. But nothing could be found. After some testing, I saw that it happened even in native Windows applications like the Powershell or AutoCAD.

Some further testing revealed that the tilde (~) and the back tick (`) seem to work fine and that pressing SHIFT plus any key gives the appropriate symbol for pressing SHIFT and the number that would appear. To make it even more fun the same happened using a remote session.

The whole behavior made me cringe and I thought already I have a key logger or some other kind of malware installed. But the virus scanner showed no problem and in general the system seemed to be fine.

After some more digging and asking repeatedly the great wise oracle with the googly eyes, I found the culprit: GuardedID. According to some other posts a tool from Comcast called Constant Guard causes the same trouble. After de-installing GuardedID, all was fine again. I did my good deed for this Monday.

And now my question to the GuardedID makers: WTF?! This tool supposedly should prevent keylogging. The least I can expect is good programming and not a TheDailyWTF moment. And even worse. After looking at your web site I nearly had to puke. Are you really marketing yourself as a serious product with “as seen on TV” and some actor’s quote?! How about investing your money into a good product rather in cheap marketing campaigns!

R.I.P. Medibuntu

Posted on October 10, 2013 by peter

While trying to update my desktop box, which is still running Quantal, I saw these nice error messages:

W: Failed to fetch http://packages.medibuntu.org/dists/quantal/free/binary-amd64/Packages  404  Not Found

W: Failed to fetch http://packages.medibuntu.org/dists/quantal/non-free/binary-amd64/Packages  404  Not Found

W: Failed to fetch http://packages.medibuntu.org/dists/quantal/free/binary-i386/Packages  404  Not Found

W: Failed to fetch http://packages.medibuntu.org/dists/quantal/non-free/binary-i386/Packages  404  Not Found

E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

If course I first suspected my flaky TWC internet connection to be the issue here. But after trying to access the URL’s in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ I saw… nothing.

Long story, short, medibuntu reached it’s end of life and after all, it is not needed anymore. All but good ol’ libdvdcss is part of the standard Ubuntu repository now. Here is the official blog post from Medibuntu’s maintainer Gauvain Pocentek: The end of Medibuntu.

Please refer to Jonathan Ridell’s blog post Medibuntu to Disappear, libdvdcss now direct from VideoLan on how to get libdvdcss to work on Ubuntu from now on.

Missing modules for paramiko and gio in duplicity foo

Posted on September 26, 2013 by peter

Since I upgraded some of my servers to the latest LTS of Ubuntu, I saw nice warning messages in my duplicity backup reports. I know, these are just warnings and no errors, but I don’t like to see any warning in a backup report of mine. Here is a sample:

Import of duplicity.backends.giobackend Failed: No module named gio
Import of duplicity.backends.sshbackend Failed: No module named paramiko

The paramiko problem was resolved easily by installing the python-paramiko package. The gio warning was not so easy to find. But after some digging I found the culprit in python-gobject-2. The following command line fixes the above warnings on a Debian based distribution:

apt-get install python-paramiko python-gobject-2

Apache Doesn’t Show Protected Folders… Foo

Posted on September 17, 2013 - November 12, 2013 by peter

After setting up a nice download area with password protection I ran into an interesting issue. And I don’t know why I haven’t encountered that problem before. It’s not that I never set up Apache configurations or have never heard of mod_auth and mod_autoindex.

But now to the problem itself. I had a set up for a download area and added a sub-folder that needed password protection. Here is the configuration:

<Directory /srv/www/myroot/>
         Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
         AllowOverride None
         Order allow,deny
         Allow from all
</Directory>
<Directory /srv/www/myroot/downloads/protected/>
         Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
         AllowOverride None
         Order allow,deny
         Allow from all
         AuthType Basic
         AuthName "Download area for Foo Bar"
         AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/private/htpasswd
         Require user me myself
</Directory>

Looks good, doesn’t it? Well, not 100% good. The folder protected didn’t show up in the directory index. After some additional coffee, a couple of face palms and a quick browse through Google and the Apache documentation I found the culprit. The setting ShowForbidden in the options for mod_autoindex. If it is not set everything that is forbidden or needs authentication will not show up in the directory index. Here is the tweaked version of the configuration (change in bold):

<Directory /srv/www/myroot/>
         Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
         IndexOptions +ShowForbidden
         AllowOverride None
         Order allow,deny
         Allow from all
</Directory>
<Directory /srv/www/myroot/downloads/protected/>
         Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
         AllowOverride None
         Order allow,deny
         Allow from all
         AuthType Basic
         AuthName "Download area for Foo Bar"
         AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/private/htpasswd
         Require user me myself
</Directory>

Eclipse Huge Tab Bar Foo

Posted on September 13, 2013 - September 13, 2013 by peter

On my odyssey to find the right desktop environment for me I am back in Gnome land. In its latest incarnation Gnome 3 it looks nice and seems to be actually usable. I still don’t like that they removed more or less all useful configuration options. But finally there are some tools that make up for that (i.e. Gnome Tweak Tool).

But I am digressing. One of the many issues that I had afterwards was Eclipse. I don’t like using Eclipse (or in this case MyEclipse) in the first place but after the switch to Gnome it was worse than ever. And it was not so much Eclipse in itself it was more the fonts and the way the widgets were drawn. The fonts I fixed with a general font settings overhaul for the desktop. But certain parts of the UI just were huge and didn’t scale nicely. The toolbar on top fit always in one row but now I have two rows. And although the fonts were smaller the tabs and toolbars were drawn like they had to accommodate a much huger font. It is just an utter waste of space.

The solution was actually quite easy. Just open or create the GTK 2.0 configuration file (.gtkrc-2.0) in your home directory and add the following lines:

style "compact-toolbar"
{
  GtkToolbar::internal-padding = 0
  xthickness = 1
  ythickness = 1
}

style "compact-button"
{
  xthickness = 0
  ythickness = 0
}

class "GtkToolbar"                       style "compact-toolbar"
widget_class "*<GtkToolbar>*<GtkButton>" style "compact-button"

Afterwards restart Eclipse and all is good.

CloudPress Foo

Posted on September 12, 2013 - September 12, 2013 by peter

In the wake of all the NSA scandals I finally took the time and created a full blown cloud solution for my family. I used a lot of components that are readily available (Owncloud, Roundcube, WordPress, etc.) and could create a very well rounded solution for us. In order to integrate everything I used the Roundcube plugin for Owncloud and CloudPress to integrate with WordPress.

But of course I ran into trouble. The Roundcube plugin worked out of the box and I have no problem letting people set up their own accounts. But the CloudPress plugin to sync the user accounts made some trouble.

After some digging the problem was obvious. The file that you can download contains conflict tags from a CVS update. This is kinda odd but easy to fix. After I removed the tags and the broken/old code the sync worked fine but still some images of the plugin didn’t show up.

Some more digging and that was resolved as well. Now I have a nice solution for my family to write blog posts and collaborate. To make life easier for other people I decided to release the fixes that I applied. So please give a warm welcome to my own patches for CloudPress. And now click here to go to my project page.

Ubuntu Sleep Foo… Resolved… Kinda…

Posted on June 21, 2013 - January 13, 2014 by peter

After a lot of searching, testing, trying stupid stuff, ripping hair out, frustration, and what not, I finally found a hint what is going on here.

To recap you can read here and here or just continue reading.

So, if you didn’t follow the links, then here a quick recap. My machine, after installing a ton of new hardware (new motherboard, processor, cooler, memory, graphics adapter) and re-installing Ubuntu started acting weirdly. It was in standby, when I returned to the office (it is a server!) or some service was not responding (because it was in standby).

After looking at the usual suspects like kernel, drivers, certain pieces of hardware, I first suspected the UPS to cause this. But I never could find a reason for that trigger in the UPS and even without the UPS the problem prevailed.

Afterwards followed a phase where I suspected the desktop environment because XFCE reacted differently than KDE and so on. But digging into this also didn’t resolve anything. But I learned a lot about UPower in the process.

Finally I had the opportunity to see it happen in real time and it was an eye opener. I have a TV and a Blu-Ray player in my home office to be able to watch… okay, listen to a DVD or a Netflix movie. But it never occurred to me that my “random” sleep events always happened when the TV and/or the Blu-Ray player was used.

Conclusion… well, it is not a software problem at all. It is a hardware problem. and now we are dealing with a different kind of problem. Either I have a problem with the electric in my office or, much simpler, my power supply is not strong enough. Remember, that I replaced everything but the power supply?

I guess my next step is to get a new power supply. Which would also help me to get my Windows machine back up and running because I can rotate power supplies… yeah

Black Screen After Ubuntu 12.10 Installation Foo

Posted on November 11, 2012 - November 11, 2012 by peter

We are a step further. I changed the partitioning so that the new and bigger core.img of GRUB fits on the disk. I manually selected the boot device because the drive enumeration changed with the new kernel. All is good. The system is installed and boots….

But all I got is a blank screen and a bunch of hard disk led’s that are working overtime. So I thought it might be a problem with the syncing of the newly created RAID. Time to take a nap…

After the nap and some other things, I returned and still all is black. But the keyboard reacts to Num Lock changes and it seems alive. Just no video. So the framebuffer hit me again. Why is that used by default anyways? Lets switch it off.

That sounds easy and it is. Just restart and in the GRUB menu screen hit e for edit the entry of Ubuntu. You get a nice EMACS style editor where you can remove the line that says:

gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode

After the change press F10 to boot the modified entry.

In my case I could see that one of my RAID’s was in degraded mode and the system was waiting for input. I really don’t understand why we are not in text mode here or why the framebuffer is not able to show this information. Anywhoo, I am now fixing my RAID and hope this information might help others.

Ubuntu Random Sleep Foo

Posted on March 29, 2012 - September 12, 2013 by peter

I am really getting frustrated. I ruled out more or less everything. I have no UI connection to the battery in the UPS anymore but still the system goes either randomly to sleep (KDE, Unity, Gnome) or logs out and messes up the X server (XFCE).

The interesting thing is that I can distinguish between the log out screen of Unity/Gnome and XFCE. When running XFCE I all of a sudden see the logout screen of Unity/Gnome and not of XFCE. So something in the system of Gnome/KDE causes a log out or a sleep.

I am ready to go back to a simple window manager but still not sure if that really will help my problem.

Lets see what the next release of Ubuntu brings. At least it is not that long anymore…