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In a previous post, I wrote about the release of Open Panel and OpenCLI.

OpenCLI is going to change the way we maintain systems - for too long many repetitive steps have been automated hundreds of times by different sysadmins without having produced a standard. I think OpenCLI will become the standard that covers 99% of the tasks you perform while maintaining your systems.

See OpenCLI in action: http://blog.openpanel.com/2008/04/28/the-openpanel-cli-in-action/

Tired of getting mail notifications of e-mails you’ve already seen but have not read? The default mozilla thunderbird new e-mail notification tool has the tendency to display old mail and mail that has already been moved to junk folders. When you flag your e-mail as ‘read’ when you filter out junk, you can work around the displaying of junk messages.

With this new thunderbird add-on, you can configure more: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2610

note: use “%subject” and “%sender” in the notification text to display message details. More info on these variables on the author’s website: http://tjeb.nl/Projects/Mailbox_Alert/index.html

The past months, I teamed up with the panel6 folks in their project to create a server/webhosting control panel “that eats webmins for breakfast”. I’m very happy with the results so far: the webbased GUI communicates 100% through ajax with the core system.

And it gets even better: it contains a command-line called ‘opencli’

Creating vhosts on servers is repeating the same trick every time. I know most people around me have automated this using ’setup-a-new-domain’-scripts, but handmade scripts usually lack proper errorchecking - unless you spend a lot of time writing them. With opencli creating a new vhost is as simple as entering ‘create vhost www.foo.com’ and apache is up and running the domain \o/.

Openpanel in action:

While upgrading Apache to version 2.2.4-2 for a subversion upgrade (version 1.4.4dfsg1-1) I ran into errors with my auth_pgsql (or any other auth_mysql, auth_ldap or auth_* module) setup:

“Internal error: pcfg_openfile() called with NULL filename”

This is caused by auth_basic and stops the authentication and authorisation process. Adding the following directive to your auth_pgsql or auth_ldap config file solves the problem:

“AuthBasicAuthoritative Off”
It disables basic authorisation being authoritive for the authorisation process. The errors will still be visible in your logfiles, but the authorisation scheme works as normal.

Other tags:

• Apache 2.2 error
• Apache 2.2 subversion 1.4.4 error
• mod_pgsql pcfg_openfile errors

http://gforge.org/forum/message.php?msg_id=10926&group_id=128

In reference to this older post, several people requested my smbd.conf samba configuration file. Here it is:

[global]
refresh = 1
log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m
passwd chat = *Enter\snew\sUNIX\spassword:* %n\n *Retype\snew\sUNIX\spassword:* %n\n *password\supdated\ssuccessfully* .
socket options = TCP_NODELAY
obey pam restrictions = yes
interfaces = 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0
encrypt passwords = true
passwd program = /usr/bin/passwd %u
passdb backend = tdbsam
wins support = true
dns proxy = no
server string = %h server (Samba, Ubuntu)
invalid users = root
unix password sync = yes
workgroup = KOALA
os level = 20
syslog = 0
panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d
max log size = 1000
#strict sync = no
#sync always = no
#oplocks = no
#level 2 oplocks = no
kernel change notify = yes
fam change notify = yes

I’m about to start a new project: a transparent SQL proxy. Connect your PHP-app to this “fake” mysql server, which sits in between your app and postgresql server translating all mysql-specific queries to normal sql’92 compliant format.

Requirements:

• support backend connections to postgres
• emulate mysql behaviour to frontend
• in Release1, queries for ‘X-cart’ shopping cart software should be supported

I have a clear picture of this. Does anyone have more ideas to contribute? I’ll start designing in the next few days.

build.xml:16: The type doesn’t support the “dst” attribute.

Fix: use ‘dest’ instead of ‘dst’.

The eclipse/java error “Error starting modern compiler” when trying to compile something using javac in eclipse is being caused by eclipse using a different java VM than the one JAVA_HOME is pointing to.

Other keywords:

• eclipse compile error
• “13: Error starting modern compiler”
• eclipse cannot compile

After doing a scan in mythtv, you’ll end up with lots of unnamed channels.

This table:
http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20031125/ad787d1d/Cable_casema_DenHaag.obj

Can be converted to SQL using:

perl -we 'while(<>){ /^(.+?)\s+[\d\-\+]+\s+[\d\-\+]+\s+([\w\d]+)\s+([\d\-]+)$/ && do {print “UPDATE channel set name=\”$1\”,callsign=\”$1\” where channum = \”$2\”;\n”} }’ > myth.sql


(just paste the table into the command box where you executed perl)

You can now feed myth.sql to your mythtv mysql instance, and your channel names will be set correctly.

For a while, my internal linux machine was sending strange DNS queries to my providers’ DNS servers.

Packets sniffed with tshark:
0.000000 192.168.1.10 -> 217.19.16.131 DNS Standard query A eth1

Tcpdump adds the port number by default as well:

21:15:36.795149 IP 192.168.1.10.32781 > 217.19.16.131.53:32834+ A? eth1. (22)

Running a loop on lsof:

while :; do lsof -iUDP

Allowed me to catch the bad process:

nmbd 5468 root 9u IPv4 26837 UDP 192.168.1.10:32783->customer.cambrium.nl:domain

Looking at samba’s configuration file, searching for ‘eth1′..:

interfaces = eth1/255.255.255.0


Baaad ubuntu, m'kay.