ubuntu

… and some other observations. Warning: use at your own risk! I used to keep some of my photo backups on an external Seagate 500G drive which I also use for travel. Today however as I tried to access it I noticed some problems so I quickly ran: smartctl -t long /dev/sdb #followed by smartctl -l selftest #the result Extended offline Completed: <strong>read failure</strong> 90% 109 <strong>414996448</strong> I started using this useful guide to correct the problems by repeatedly running smartctl, calculating the offset, finding the file with debugfs, forcing reallocation with dd and so on....

The problem was to connect to a L2TP server from linux, no windows available. The required packages: <pre lang="bash">apt-get install l2tp-ipsec-vpn reboot Done the needed configuration but the connection was not established. The gui said error 500. The log said much but apparently not enough. Here is what could be considered as an error: Oct 3 18:55:36 purple xl2tpd[4162]: setsockopt recvref[30]: Protocol not available Oct 3 18:55:36 purple xl2tpd[4162]: This binary does not support kernel L2TP....

There is nothing much to say about Xubuntu 12.04 and this is a very good point. I’ve followed the previous article and everything seemed to work perfectly. Good job. Comments: raluca - Jun 5, 2012 Ubuntu is a super OS i love it…

This is a short collection of subjects related to preventing, detecting and fixing a broken hdd from a raid1 array. Which drive is broken? 1. Check for messages in dmesg [ 1040.470282] ata1.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0 [ 1040.470287] ata1: EH complete [ 6373.208104] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen [ 6373.214488] ata1.00: failed command: FLUSH CACHE EXT [ 6373.221215] ata1.00: cmd ea/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 [ 6373....

Since I migrated to Xfce it seems thunderbird does not uses the default browser setting nor the /etc/alternatives/x-www-browser. The solution to change the default browser to chrome for example is to go to Preferences/Advanced/Config editor and change the network.protocol-handler.warn-external.http to true. This way next time you will open a link you will be prompted to select a browser and you can choose to remember the setting. Comments: ghantoos - Apr 1, 2012 Thanks for the share!...

Why? After having, and not using, Ubuntu 11.10 on my laptop for some time, trying in vain to get used to it, I realized I cannot resist the urge to update so I decided to search for alternatives. One was xubuntu which has an xfce4 based interface which I could customize in about 15 mins to look and feel exactly as I was used to. As such I migrated to xubuntu 11....

This shows how to do special SPF checks for a special recipient. Since the man pages contain wrong examples I’ve decided to read the code myself, from /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/policydspfuser.py. This applies to Ubuntu 10.04. 1. Create a text file containing the exceptions. I created a file called: /etc/postfix-policyd-spf-python/userconf. The man page gives the following example which is wrong: postmaster@example.com,{'Mail_From_reject'='No_Check'|'PermEr‐ ror_reject'= 'False'|'HELO_reject'='SPF_Not_Pass'|'defaultSeedOnly'= 1|'debugLevel'= 5|'skip_addresses'='127.0.0.0/8,::ffff:127.0.0.0//104,::1//128'| 'Tem‐ pError_Defer'='False'} the correct format is: Mail_From_reject=No_Check|PermError_reject=False|HELO_reject=SPF_Not_Pass|defaultSeedOnly=1|debugLevel=5|skip_addresses=127.0.0.0/8,::ffff:12\ 7.0.0.0//104,::1//128|TempError_Defer=False 2....

Each time a new Ubuntu version appeared I was writing an article on how I upgraded and tested it on my laptop. It was not the case for the last version, since ever since Lucid Lynx it seemed everything is on a descending slope as far as I am concerned. Yet these days, in one of my iterations for features I tried to install evince 3 (finally pdf bookmarks!) and realized that so many new versions and unmet dependencies exist, that it might be time to update....

While trying to setup a bunch of virtual machines to test some multi-machine configuration I run into this strange error: libvirtError: Unable to deny all devices for mcc1, no such file or directory There are some threads on the net for this problem and they all relate to cgroups but I don’t have either cgroups-bin or libpam-cgroups installed. I had however this configured in rc.local: mkdir -p /dev/cgroup/cpu mount -t cgroup cgroup /dev/cgroup/cpu -o cpu mkdir -m 0777 /dev/cgroup/cpu/user echo "/usr/local/sbin/cgroup_clean" > /dev/cgroup/cpu/release_agent Unmount cgroup did not fixed the problem either and a new problem occured: cannot create cgroup for mcc1....

Quickly combine pdf files in 2 easy steps: 1. Install required packages apt-get install gs<del> pdftk</del> 2. Combine 1.pdf and 2.pdf into out.pdf gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=out.pdf -dBATCH 1.pdf 2.pdf Comments: Adi - Aug 3, 2011 So.. at which point did you use pdftk? :) len - Aug 3, 2011 @adi -sDEVICE=pdfwrite :) Adi - Aug 3, 2011 Actually, pdfwrite is part of gs len - Aug 4, 2011 You are right, I stand corrected :)...