# sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-stable
# sudo apt-get update
# sudo apt-get install thunderbird
]]> http://blog.verwilst.be/2011/07/01/thunderbird-5-0-in-ubuntu-11-04-natty/feed/ 0 http://blog.verwilst.be/2010/05/05/netbeans-freeze-when-committing-to-subversion-workaroundfix/ http://blog.verwilst.be/2010/05/05/netbeans-freeze-when-committing-to-subversion-workaroundfix/#comments Wed, 05 May 2010 09:02:31 +0000 Bart Verwilst http://blog.verwilst.be/?p=232 On Ubuntu 9.10/10.04, Netbeans freezes when you commit your code changes to Subversion from Netbeans. This happens because of a bug in the Gnome keyring support in Subversion 1.6. We can fix it by added the following line to netbeans_default_options in /etc/netbeans.conf:

-J-DsvnClientAdapterFactory=commandline

Committing should work fine from then on.

Anyways, to make Netbeans at least reasonably OK in the easy-on-the-eyes dept., I enabled AA. as explained here:

In /etc/netbeans.conf, add the following line: “-J-Dswing.aatext=true -J-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on” to the netbeans_default_options variable.

Restart Netbeans and your fonts will be AA’ed

Now let’s hope Netbeans is stable..

Update: They seem to have a “Use GTK+ theme” and “Use system title bar and borders” under Options, but that only partially fixes things, turning the blue to purple. Nonetheless, when disregarding the desktop environment, Chrome looks pretty slick, and can hopefully become a worthy competitor for other browsers, which can only be a good thing!

root@ubuntu:/# ls /tmp/
dbconfig-generate-include.sed.fc6130  dbconfig-generate-include.sed.hu7261  dbconfig-generate-include.sed.k26205

Ok, on to the action:

root@ubuntu:/# rm *
rm: cannot remove `bin’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `boot’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `dev’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `emul’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `etc’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `home’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `initrd’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `lib’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `lost+found’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `media’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `mnt’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `opt’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `proc’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `root’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `sbin’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `srv’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `sys’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `tmp’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `usr’: Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `var’: Is a directory

You can summarize the next few seconds as “………. OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG”, while turning pale.

root@ubuntu:/# ls
bash: /bin/ls: No such file or directory

It’s a goner. Luckily i didn’t do rm -rf, because that would have FUBAR’ed the server fully. What happened is that /lib64 and /lib32 ( which are symlinks to /lib and /emul/ia32-linux/lib respectively ) got removed, effectively rendering you unable to execute any command ( because everything depends on /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 ). But no worries, there is one thing that is statically linked on your system ( meaning, not requiring any libs from /lib64, thus still working ) and that’s the /lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 file. By using this file, you can force your ln command to look into /lib for its libs instead of ( the now missing ) /lib64.

root@ubuntu:~# /lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 –library-path /lib /bin/ln -sf /lib /lib64

Which re-creates the /lib64 symlink, reviving all commands! Then you can create the /lib32 symlink again with the normal ln command. Crisis averted

Hopefully this will help others in the same situation

Remember kids, working as root is evil! ( although it couldn’t help me in this situation since i needed to be root to clean the /tmp. )

Long enough to spot some good and some bad things about it

First, the good:

• Very attractive device ( Hardware )
• It has the same smooth and silky look and feel that we’re used to from Apple ( Software )
• Standard apps are very easy to use ( as in non-awkward ( think Windows Mobile ) )
• Multi-touch, rotating pics, … ( yeah others support it too, but they were first afaik )
• Chat/IM-like interface for SMS ( takes SMS to a whole other level, but you tend to SMS a lot more as a result )
• Frontside glass seems to be very scratch-resistant
• The virtual keyboard is pretty handy to type on, even with my big hands

Now, the bad/ugly:

• You _have_ to use iTunes to be able to use the device ( activation ) and sync/backup it.
• You cannot choose what you want to install ( unless Apple said it was OK )
• Battery life.. with bluetooth and wireless disabled, I can’t even make 48 hours without recharging!
• No MMS.. I don’t use it, but FFS, every cheapo phone supports this for years..
• No bluetooth file transfers.. Same comment as above.
• No Caldav for calendaring. This one annoys me the most. Incredible.
• 15 EUR for an ‘official’ stupid recharge USB-to-Apple-stuffs cable.. ( $2 on dealextreme.com btw )
• They don’t allow competitors ( Opera, Firefox, …  anyone? )
• When calling, I cannot keep the phone to my ear for longer than 5 mins because my head starts feeling very warm. I have to swap sides regularly ( sounds very healthy )
• No access to the source
• API’s are mostly closed. Calendar API being the biggest annoyancy for me, and the reason why Funambol can only sync contacts through their iPhone app. Calendaring is still impossible because of Apple.
• Camera _really_ cannot handle any movement ( blurry pics as soon as you move )
• Fanboys that downplay every issue listed here with no technical arguments whatsoever.

I am sure I have forgotten a lot of items ( both pro and con ).

The general feeling I have is that this has everything to be a killer phone. Too bad Apple wastes a lot of opportunities by the vast amount of lock-in they oppose on the device. Let the community free to build/extend it and it would be orders of magnitude better/more attractive. But I guess this is typical Apple behaviour. If Microsoft would have the same behaviour as Apple, it would cost them millions and millions in Anti-trust lawsuites. I hope the EU wakes up one day and starts judging the anti-competative police Apple handles currently.

All in all i really like the device and hope Apple would pull its head from its *** and clean up shop!

Sure, it can be that I’m mistaken and release quality is going down the drain. Or it can be that more and more users start using Ubuntu. And it’s mostly the users that are already having problems that come to the forums to look for answers and vote on those polls. Most users don’t start searching through forums when everything works out of the box..

Statistics always show what the creator wants you to see

Too bad it costs 454 EUR in Belgium though ( What a rip-off! ) and it runs Windows XP! ( ‘WTF’ as my dear pal Raf put it )

I’m using your highly priced ( but for the most part awesome ) iPhone. When people cash out that much money for a phone, the least you can do is open up your API to allow other 3rd party applications to interface with it. Because of your closed iPhone calendar API for example, I’m unable to sync my OSS Zimbra with my iPhone. Lucky you, Apple, for not being as closely watched on lock-in practices as Microsoft is. Don’t worry, keep up this kind of unethical practices and I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

Greetings.

to !address@test.com

while this does:

to “!address@test.com”

By default, when using English as your Zimbra webclient language, all time notations ( in your calendar or mails for example ) are in AM/PM notation. This can be quit annoying since us Europeans don’t use this system.

The simple fix is to go to Preferences -> General -> Login Options -> Language, and select English ( United Kingdom ).

A simple reload later, and you’re still using your English webclient, but now with time in 24 hour format!

No packages are available yet for Ubuntu/Debian, but they will surely follow soon!

Seems like 2009 will be the year of the 64bit Linux desktop

Over the years, I have coded in various languages, but on small personal projects, without any expert guidance or anything. The lack of guidance might be the reason of my almost complete withdrawal from coding the last couple of years.

I started with VB. Writing an instant messenger for example ( with own protocol, just for the fun of it ).

I played with Python. Coded with it for a few years, did some small Portage ( Gentoo ) work, wrote a Kazaa-like client with PyQt, hacked on Anaconda job-wise.. I found Python to be very easy to understand, and had a very low level of entry into code which you wrote like 6 months ago without hardly any comments ( i know, shame on me ), and noticed myself being back on track in a matter of hours!

I’ve done quite a lot with PHP. Wrote a couple of websites with it, webservices for system automation, but found myself using it more on the Linux system level in the end ( php-cli ). I still pretty much like PHP, but i HATE web development I’ve used Symfony for quite some time, and really started to like it. I looked at Drupal too, but something about it really turns me off. Can’t say what exactly though..

I’ve used c++ for about 2 years. Mostly with Qt, which i absolutely loved at the time ( been a few years ). The power of c++ with the easiness of Qt. Yummie! I’ve only found the GUI look-n-feel to be… clunky.. Can’t really explain what’s missing, but it just has an awkward feel to it. Gnome/GTK apps for example feel a lot more solid to me for some reason.

Then i tried Java for a few months. Never liked it. In my head I never stopped seeing it as an unsurmountable mountain of code. It just looked a daunting task. Not to mention all the .war / .jar crap.. Bleh!

Then i started with Mono ( C# ). I must say i really like the syntax and feel of it, it’s a joy to code in. It’s not really pleasant to see .dll and .exe’s pop up though.. And i have no idea what to think about the whole ethical aspect of it. I like C# as a language, but i hate the Microsoft side of it. Somehow I have this feeling inside that in the end it’s all yet another plan to dominate/break/destroy the Linux environment, first letting Mono be deeply entrenched, and then executing part 2 of their plans. Call me paranoid I also don’t like the Novell boys bending over and taking it like a man on MS’es every whim.

Never tried Ruby, didn’t appeal to me. No particular reason.

Tried Perl for a while, never liked it, too cryptic for my taste. I actually tried to avoid it whenever it was possible

Lately however, I started longing for development again. Over time, I’ve become less and less a FOSS contributor, which is really starting to annoy me. But I have the feeling that Linux system skills alone don’t allow you to really make a change in the FOSS world.

So.. what to choose to get into the game? As a Gnome user, my efforts would go to Gnome development. But i really don’t want to learn/code in C. I never liked GTK code-wise either. I know there are bindings for a lot of languages, but that feels so third-rank to me.. I could pickup C# instead, but the whole MS mindset behind it really turns me off.

Now, for the point of this rather long post. Anyone more programmer-oriented with any ideas on my dilemma? I would surely appreciate it What language/lib do you recommend? Open for suggestions

By default, Intrepid on both i386 and x86_64 comes with the 32bit flashplayer 10 through nspluginwrapper. A lot of the crashes people see come from nspluginwrapper itself, which is very unstable in Hardy.

A new version of nspluginwrapper in Intrepid fixes a lot of crashes though, so you’re better of with Intrepid in any case.

However, since mid november, Adobe finally came through on one of the most requested feature Linux users around the globe begged for/requested, real 64bit support!

For an alpha version, i must say it is pretty rock solid on my system. Let’s get on and replace the default 32bit flashplayer/nspluginwrapper combo with this new goodie!

First of all, let’s remove any already installed versions of Flash, along with nspluginwrapper.

# apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree nspluginwrapper

Next up, download the 64-bit Flash plugin from Adobe Labs. Select the tar.gz.

Unpack it and copy the resulting libflashplayer.so into /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins if you want to enable it for all users, or in ~/.mozilla/plugins to enable it only for your current user. Restarting Firefox and browsing to about:plugins should show the newly installed Flash plugin.

Enjoy your native 64-bit Flashplayer

I was wondering what the guys over at Mozilla were doing to make the situation a bit more clear. Now that Firefox 3.1 beta2 has been out for a while, i thought i would give it a spin and check out if anything changed since 3.0 in the SSL warning dept.

When you visit an SSL enabled site for the first time, this is presented to you.

In my opinion, this is a step in the right direction, explaining what has happened in semi-bitesize chuncks of text instead of cramming everything in 1 big, daunting blob of text as in FF 3.0.

Clicking on “Technical Details” or “I understand the Risks” show more information about both topics.

I really hope this will be fully translated in the users’ language to lower the barrier even more.

This is pretty much the same dialog as was the case in Firefox 3.0.

Although now it seems to get the certificate automatically, making you click only on “Confirm Security Exception” to proceed to the page you intended to visit.

All in all this seems like a step in the right direction to make this more userfriendly for the big public!

As this is only the second beta, the screenshots above are subject to change by the time 3.1 final is released.

Under the hood, Zimbra is relying on SpamAssassin to weed out the pharma mails. This heuristics-based method is pretty 90′s IMO, and while it still catches a lot of spam, rules have to be added/update on a regular basis in order to stay ahead of – or at least on par with – our good friends the spammers.

Enter DSpam. Dspam has a statistical approach to spam filtering. DSpam only knows that something is spam after you repeatedly show examples of it ( in Zimbra terms, mark it as junk ). After a while, dspam knows which words ( and combinations ) are mostly present in your spam and ham mails. Based on that knowledge, it will make educated guesses on what you consider spam and what you don’t. This means that dspam automatically keeps track of the latest trends in spam, as long as you follow up once in a while. Apart from that, dspam is written in C, and is insanely fast, especially in comparison with bloaty old Spamassassin.

One downside of Dspam however is that the project is pretty much euh.. dead or asleep, whatever you prefer. It sure has its share of quirks, especially on larger environments. But it does the job nicely for most people. Zimbra disabled dspam quite some time ago because of stability issues, so your mileage may vary.

By default, running

# zmamavisdctl stop

# /opt/zimbra/amavisd/sbin/amavisd -c /opt/zimbra/conf/amavisd.conf debug

will show you

Dec 11 13:37:42 zimbra01.verwilst.be /opt/zimbra/amavisd/sbin/amavisd[11878]: No $dspam,             not using it

Enabling Dspam in Zimbra is pretty straightforward though.

First of all, edit /opt/zimbra/conf/amavisd.conf.in . Uncomment the following line:

#$dspam = ‘/opt/zimbra/dspam/bin/dspam’;

Make sure the data dir of dspam is fully writable:

# chown zimbra: /opt/zimbra/data/dspam/data/ -R

Then run the amavisd command ( above ) again, or start it the Zimbra way:

# zmamavisdctl start

That’s pretty much all there is to it. You should see some DSPAM headers in every mail you receive ( look in the source of the mail ).

By default however, Zimbra only assigns a very small score to the mail when dspam marks it as spam. ( 0.5 points out of 6.6 required to be marked as spam by Zimbra ).

I put a lot of trust in DSpam, so i change the 0.5 points to 3 for spam, and -1 if dspam doesn’t think it’s spam.

Put the following lines in /opt/zimbra/conf/spamassassin/local.cf

header DSPAM_SPAM X-DSPAM-Result =~ /^Spam$/
describe DSPAM_SPAM Marked as spam by DSPAM
score DSPAM_SPAM 3

header DSPAM_HAM X-DSPAM-Result =~ /^Innocent$/
describe DSPAM_HAM Marked as ham by DSPAM
score DSPAM_HAM -1

And restart spamassassin:

# zmamavisdctl stop && zmamavisdctl start

Please beware that it might take a while for dspam to really start showing results! It needs to examine quite a lot of mails before it will start making decisions. You might want to set DSPAM_HAM closer to 0 the first few weeks..

Enjoy!

Dressing up the male team members wouldn’t have had the same effect as our female coworkers, so we decided to take some quick pictures about it

It looks like the days of the  “You think monitoring so you think Nagios/Cacti” are really a thing of the past!

On a small update, it seems like great minds post alike

This was the case recently, where we had to deploy a Zabbix server on a CentOS 4.x environment. We opted for Zabbix 1.6.1 for several reasons.

We try not to reinvent the wheel when possible, so I grabbed the RPM for CentOS 5 here. Usually this just compiles on Centos 4 without any issues. Not in this case though.

I’ve cooked up 3 small patches to fix the issues that kept Zabbix 1.6.1 from building on our platforms.

Grab them here, here and here. You might want to use this spec file ( based on the one from OCJTech ) as well!

In short, this disables jabber support ( which doesnt work anyways, you need to let an external script do the work! ), updates snmp support to handle older versions of snmp and lowers the required version of curl during the configure stage.

This should give you a nice shining bunch of zabbix-1.6.1 rpm’s for your beloved CentOS 4 system.

# su – zimbra

# zmprov mc default zimbraFeatureWebSearchEnabled FALSE

When you reload the webinterface, the Yahoo search bar is gone

First of all, open source alternatives such as Gnash and swfdec are not yet ready for the big masses. It’s nice to see them growing bit by bit, but for now, we are bound to the official plugins for ‘decent’ Flash support.

First of all, let’s get rid of libflashsupport if it’s still installed. This little piece of **** is a big cause of instability in our quest to a stable Flash experience. So let’s remove it right away!

# apt-get remove libflashsupport

Ok, now that’s gone, lets make Alsa output to Pulseaudio by default. We do this by installing libasound2-plugins, and creating the file /etc/asound.conf.

# apt-get install libasound2-plugins

Contents of /etc/asound.conf are as follows:

pcm.pulse {
type pulse
}
ctl.pulse {
type pulse
}
pcm.!default {
type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
type pulse
}

Just copy-paste it in the configuration file.

Next up, nspluginwrapper. This package will “jail” Flash inside its own little environment, so that if Flash crashes, it will only take down the wrapper, and not your whole Firefox. A Flash crash will result in a gray area where your Flash should be, instead of a suddenly disappearing Firefox. Quite an improvement already

Let’s install it:

# wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/16234689/nspluginwrapper_0.9.91.5-2ubuntu2.8.04.1~mt1_i386.deb

# dpkg -i “nspluginwrapper_0.9.91.5-2ubuntu2.8.04.1~mt1_i386.deb”

Now you can (re-)install flashplugin-nonfree 9 to make it nspluginwrapper aware. Although it will not take down your Firefox anymore, it will still be incredibly unstable, and lots of sites will have gray areas on their pages.

So we will take one additional step, and install flashplugin-nonfree 10. The latest release candidate to be exact, which appears A LOT more stable than 9 ever was on my several systems.

We will have to download and install the deb manually from https://launchpad.net/~psyke83/+archive .

Click on the Hardy entry for flashplugin-nonfree, and download the correct deb for your system. Currently, for i386 ( 32bit ) desktops, this is the file you need .

Install it either by double clicking it on your desktop, or doing this on the commandline:

# dpkg -i flashplugin-nonfree-*.deb

Restart Firefox just to be sure, and then browse to “about:plugins”.

You should see something similar to the image below:

Which means it worked! Try watching a movie in youtube while listening to some music on your audio player. Both should play without problems, and most of the crashes should be gone!

Enjoy your smooth desktop experience

• Beta 1 12/17/08
• Beta 2 01/19/09
• RC 1 02/23/09
• GA 03/23/09

Since it’s a pretty long road until the GA version, those days will probably slide a bit.

Features include Ubuntu 8.04 LTS support ( BETA in 5.0 ), “Disaster recovery via server-to-server sync” ( which sounds really nice, not sure what exactly it will do yet ), and others found here.

Why oh why does Microsoft always insist in trying to reinvent the wheel ( poorly ).. In every field you can imagine they have a crappy clone ( Zune anyone? ) nobody wants. Same thing with their Live Search. They always end up paying the few fucktards who fall for the peanuts MS throws at them.

I have personally witnessed that they came around the bigger businesses, and actually _giving_ money ( and LOTS of it ) to replace all postfix/courier servers ( who run great for years in a row on commodity hardware ) with Exchange ( which only runs “well” if you have a battery of servers.) Luckily management refused every offer because of the hardware costs and maintenance it would require to keep the crap working. ( Lower TCO my *** )

The merchant paying the customer to take his crap.. How low can you go.

When mounting my Samba share with the following command ( on a gigabit link ):

mount -t smbfs -o username=verwilst //10.0.10.10/data /mnt/smb/

I got these results:

time cp /tmp/blob-1.5G /mnt/smb/blob-1.5G-smbfs

real    4m46.677s
user    0m1.512s
sys    0m27.862s

When the share is mounting with this command:

mount -t cifs -o username=verwilst //10.0.10.10/data /mnt/smb/

The copy command gives us this:

time cp /tmp/blob-1.5G /mnt/smb/blob-1.5G-cifs

real    0m18.050s
user    0m0.028s
sys    0m5.828s

Quite a difference you get by replacing 1 word eh

Ubuntu Hardy ( along with several other new(er) distro’s ) started using PulseAudio to control all audio-related processes on the system. ETQW uses SDL for its sound-needs, but fails to play through pulseaudio. The solution is simple, install the “libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio” package either through Synaptic or with an “apt-get install libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio”, and your ETQW will be able to play sounds/music again

The best way to learn a new operating system is to get your hands dirty, but coming up with fun and practical exercises seem to be pretty hard. They already managed to install Drupal and Joomla on the self-deployed Apache server, but still the general “i-feel-at-home-here” feeling isn’t present yet.

I was wondering of some of you guys/girls know practical and “fun” ways to get better acquainted to the Linux way? I could then use them in my lessons and show them working with the console can be fun, flexible and powerful!

Thanks in advance

Now, in Linux, this would be a piece of cake. In Solaris, it was a bit more challenging.

First of all, a third-party installed the server. The NIC’s came divided in 2 interfaces, aggr1 and aggr2. At first I assumed that bonding was called “aggregation” under Solaris, just as it’s called “teaming” under windows. Since we were experiencing quite a bit of packetloss on those links, we went to investigate some more. We wanted redundant switches, so LACP ( Link Aggregation Control Protocol ) wasn’t an option, since that requires the use of only a single switch.

Our guess was that the Solaris wasn’t configured in active-passive mode, but we lacked the Solaris-knowledge to exactly find out what to fix. Booting the Sun server with a Centos livecd, and configuring bonding the “Linux Way” worked flawlessly, and packetloss disappeared.

Turning our attention back to the Solaris machine ( with the help of an external support guy ), we configured the Solaris box with IPMP ( IP Multipath ). The inner workings are a bit different than good old mode1 bonding, but the result was the same.

We had 4 interfaces, which needed to be grouped in pairs of 2. So e1000g0 and e1000g1 would combine under bond0 and e1000g2 and e1000g3 would be grouped under bond1.

We created 4 files:

/etc/hostname.e1000g0 contained:

group bond0 up

node1

/etc/hostname.e1000g1 contained:

group bond0 up

This added the 2 devices to bond0, and configured the first ( primary ) device with the ip address of node1 ( which is defined in our /etc/hosts file )

/etc/hostname.e1000g2 contained:

group bond1 up

node2

/etc/hostname.e1000g1 contained:

group bond1 up

Then we did the same for the other 2 interfaces, but assigned another ip address ( the address of node2, defined in our /etc/hosts file as well ), and another groupname.

This makes sure that when we reboot the server, the machine comes up in a happily bonded state, without packet loss! Hooray!

An “ifconfig -a” showed us the following:

lo0: flags=2001000849<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4,VIRTUAL> mtu 8232 index 1
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000

e1000g0: flags=1000843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 2
inet 10.0.1.10 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 10.0.1.255
groupname bond0
ether 0:1b:23:a3:42:30

e1000g1: flags=1000843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 3
inet 0.0.0.0 netmask ff000000 broadcast 0.255.255.255
groupname bond0
ether 0:1b:23:a3:42:31

e1000g2: flags=1000843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 4
inet 10.0.2.10 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 10.0.2.255
groupname bond1
ether 0:1b:23:a3:42:32

e1000g3: flags=1000843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 5
inet 0.0.0.0 netmask ff000000 broadcast 0.255.255.255
groupname bond1
ether 0:1b:23:a3:42:33

When we pull out of the cables on any NIC, the system switches the ip address to the secondary NIC in the group, and becomes the active member until the connection of the primary NIC is back up.

Enter RSS. Wether you’re subscribed to 10, 100 or more sites, you race through them so fast, that in 5 minutes time, you’re back to “ok, ive checked out everything that’s new in internet-land, now what…”. Boredom strikes again. No more hunting nice articles, or trying hard to remember that one awesome site that just slips your mind right now.. Pff.. efficiency is overrated.

We tried several bouncers, like psybnc, ircproxy, to no avail. Most would crash after a while, and would overall be horrible in the stability-department. But then we found BIP. It had a few bugs as well, but some personal contact to its’ author quickly solved every bump in the road. Now, 0.7 is out, which incorporates all the fixes to the problems we were having.

The result: a bouncer that has been serving the needs for mutiple IRC users for many weeks now without a single crash or hickup! People looking for a solid IRC bouncer should really check out BIP!

A bit later, sdog pointed me to another post about the incident.

People around the world that are pissed off about this problem, or are moaning/flaming to the devs, please, get a life. As you might have noticed, the word “ALPHA” is used pretty abundantly all over your beloved Hardy system, and the UWN and release pages clearly mention “Pre-releases of Hardy are “NOT” encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage.”. You’ve been warned. Deal with it.

Anyways, kudos to the Ubuntu devs for their swift and prompt fix to this problem! Hardy is shaping up to be a very nice distribution!

Type this in your console: “sudo update-alternatives –set xinput-all_ALL /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/default” .

Restarting X should show you a scim-less systray!

Now let’s hope the Ubuntu guys remove this crap by default again before Hardy hits GA

My girlfriend – who is staying at home – is less excited about it, but, since i just found out she reads this blog too i thought i could dedicate this post to her

I’m sure she’ll like it Luv ya! I’ll be back! </terminator-voice>
( Picture shamelessly stolen from Elise’s blog, but I’m sure she won’t mind )

But you also need to be aware that you’re unwillingly creating a pattern that can be abused when you aren’t paying attention. I got caught by one of these myself for a few weeks now..

Let me explain.. For a couple of weeks, one of my sites was cursed with some strange voodoo. I had a list of some items on a page, and 1 of these items ( always the same one ) kept disappearing on a daily basis, while i was the only one with access to the database. I was puzzled until some mysql logging cleared things up. Some asian IP was executing my website like this: http://mysite.be/item/delete/id/$nr where $nr are the id’s from the list. ( Basic and easy-to-try standard crud thing, available from most frameworks, so if you know Symfony, you could guess that item had a delete, create, edit, show and list action )

Because the item module was forgotten in my security.yml frenzy, everyone could browse to that URL, and delete my items But why did only one item disappear? Well, the other delete requests were denied because of foreign keys, while the deleted one wasn’t coupled to any other field, so it was successfully removed every time.

Anyways, i plugged the hole with a security.yml as follows:

delete:
is_secure: on
credentials: admin

create:
is_secure: on
credentials: admin

edit:
is_secure: on
credentials: admin

One less thing to worry about

When you browse to a site with an invalid/unknown ssl certificate ( such as self-signed certificates ), you see this screen:

At first glance, it seemed the site was down, and i checked whether i typed the URL correctly. Yep, it was. Then i reread the message more clearly, and noticed it was in fact the SSL stuffs. This is where your Joe Schmoe and Jane Doe sits in front of the screen, wondering why their beloved site is down, and go on surfing to another place.

To actually allow you to view the site, it gets even more cumbersome. You need to go to 3 obscure steps to allow the page to be viewed, as seen below:

Clicking “Add Exception” brings you to this page:

Next, “Get Certificate” :

And, finally, the last button, “Confirm Security Exception”. And then we are able to see the page we intended to view

Ofcourse, this is just a beta ( 3 to be exact ), so I’m pretty sure some GUI master will improve the situation

For the rest, I’m absolutely LOVING Firefox 3, sure is heading to be a big winner Now if only the plugins/addons follow soon..