Thanks pvanhoof for notifying me that my blog got hacked. I performed the XML-RPC upgrade. Bizar thing is that you couldn’t see it on my blog, you had to check the RSS feed to see it. So the planets got the SPAM, my apologies. I deleted the SPAM but I’m not sure if the planets will refetch the data and clear my posts. Some times writing your own software is better than using a well known product 🙂
Subversion issue
Today I lost some time with my local Suversion setup. I kept on getting access denied ???
In the logs I found these errors:
)Error string not specified yet: Can’t open file ‘/raid/public/svnroot/project-name/format’: Permission denied
[Mon Mar 10 12:22:58 2008] [error] [client 10.0.10.91] Could not fetch resource information. [500, #0]
[Mon Mar 10 12:22:58 2008] [error] [client 10.0.10.91] Could not open the requested SVN filesystem [500, #13]
[Mon Mar 10 12:22:58 2008] [error] [client 10.0.10.91] Could not open the requested SVN filesystem [500, #13]
When I checked, the permissions where Okay, www-data was owner of the project-name and all files and subdirs. But still this error. I performed a svnadmin verify and recover as indicated in many posts. But no go 🙁
After some more googling I found the solution. The svnroot dir wasn’t accessible by www-data so changed this as well and now everything works fine. I found this problem many times but the indication to also check your parent directories wasn’t mentioned (off course this is a stupid mistake, but probably more people will forget to check this!). Hopes this helps some people out there!
Vmware copy paste reminder
This post is more for myself (as a reminder) than for others 🙂
I had made a debian 4 image in vmware. I copied the base install and zipped it, when I unpacked it today and ran it, it came to ask me if I wanted to recreate some stuff. I clicked on yes (as I always did) when the Linux came up my network wasn’t working. I checked and my eth0 wasn’t available anymore, so I checked ifconfig and I found a eth1 instead. I could have replaced my eth0 with eth1 in the interfaces file but I wanted to check out why this was.
It seems when you click on the Yes button, you get a new MAC address. What offcourse is logical as you don’t want the same as your other VM. I found some stuff about changing the settings in your vmx file, but found changing the udev rule easer. So I went into /etc/udev/rules.d do a grep eth0 * and you find your old eth0, with the ifconfig find out the new mac address and change it in the rule. Afterwards you do a udevtrigger and off you go.
You have to admit that Linux is just cool 🙂
Traceback SPAM
Dag and http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/ have been talking about comments and tracebacks.
I myself use WordPress and also get a lot of SPAM in my comments, be it traceback or actual comments. But WordPress has the Askimet plugin, you can run it over your pending comments and the SPAM will be mostly filtered out. Don’t you have that feature for Drupal?? Kinda hard to believe it’s not available.
Anyone comments about using WordPress or Drupal. I want to make the switch as I’m somewhat of a patriot and want a new Blog to play with 🙂
Switching back to thunderbird
On my windows and mac machines I’m using Thunderbird but on my Linux machines I was using Evolution but after a lot of crashes and latency with my Imap store I switched also to Thunderbird. I have to say I’m glad I did, everything seems to working much better now.
Wonder why evolution is still the preferred mail client for gnome as I have the feeling that Thunderbird is a much better product?
Reading up on spamassassin
Last week our backup process almost took our mailserver down, not so good. But we managed to fix it. Unfortunately we had a small backlog on our queue that took a bit to catch up. Funny thing is that after restarting the spamassassin process, it seems to have difficulties to detect SPAM . Before the restart I almost didn’t receive any SPAM, now I had to lower my required score for SPAM. It seems it has forgotten some stuff it learned, very strange. So one of these nights, I’m gonna read up on the documentation seeing what could have gone wrong.
Anybody ever seen this phenomenon?
Recovering != Reinstalling
A client of mine his Linux box crashed. I followed the manual that came with the server and the OS that was given with the server (Suse Linux). As I followed the guide the suggested to use ReiserFS (I’m more in favor of ext3) and also to use LVM what I really like 🙂
So the box crashed and I had to reinstall, after discussing with the client we had chosen Ubuntu as distro. I had used an Edgy cd to do a live boot and to make sure their data was still okay. (You have to boot live, then apt install lvm2, modprobe dm-mod,vgscan,vgchange and mount your stuff). This worked perfect in Edgy. So I thought let’s reinstall using Edgy, hmm very strange seems you can’t do that. Parted doesn’t see your LVM. After downloading Ubuntu 7.10 and reinstalling LVM in live mode, still no go. Finally after doing the vgscan and vgchange Parted could finally see the LVM partitions and I could start the reinstall. (Maybe I forgot one off the 2 last steps in Edgy, so it could be possible, but if I remember correctly I did try this but wasn’t successfull.)
Does anybody know of distro’s who come with LVM support out of the box? As I installed Suse like this, Suse should have this. Can’t remember if my Fedora had this option.
Hauppauge 500
My mythtv box died, or better said, it can’t detect my hauppage card anymore :(. I moved it to a new PCI slot but lspci didn’t show anything. My best bet it’s dead.
I’ve been looking around for a hauppage 500 card (the one with the dual tunner). But it seems nobody sells them anymore? Does somebody know a dealer who still sells them, or does hauppauge have a new version out with dual tuner?
I saw they now have some digital cards as well. Maybe interesting to use this in combination with TV vlaanderen ?? Anybody got experience with this ?
KDE 4 dolphin
As most of you know, KDE 4 got released. Jos Henri pointed to a website helping out installing it on ubuntu. I gave it a go, the screenshots of it looked pretty cool.
The file-explorer reminded me of the finder in Mac and it works the same way. I started it up and it works in my gnome environment, probably I’ll start using this instead of krusader and nautilus. Or at least try it for a while to get a better opinion about it. I really didn’t get why nobody wrote the columns view in nautilus. Maybe in the next version?
I’m also planning on installing the full KDE4 environment on my laptop to see it working with full bling bling 🙂
Hotmail another bogus MS product
Lately a lot of my friends (who are not It people) send emails to our group of friends. Because they all use msn and hotmail, they sent it to my hotmail account. Because I have hotmail,gmail,jabber,… accounts I use Pidgin (formerly gaim) to do my chatting. This off course works perfectly. But I can’t see how many messages are in my email inbox (hmm, note feature to check if available). So today I quickly wanted to forward my hotmail mails to my own domain. Well really, you should try doing that … Really try it, I mean it!
In your webmail (hotmail live, piece of crap) you have options -> more options. There is an option forward to other email. If you read the comment, forward your email to other hotmail,msn or custom domains. So I inserted my own email address. Receiving the error that it wasn’t valid. So after reading the help, it stated that custom domains are not microsoft domains managed by microsoft (prolly something like you can do with google domain apps).
Hmm, no go. Then I started downloading some opensource tools (thunderbird extension,gotmail script,…) all couldn’t get the mail. Then I even tried getting it using gmail, still no go.
So in the end I have to say, what a piece of crap product is this. Compare this to google, google offers you pop3 imap to gmail, forwarding of emails even sms notification I believe (I only use this for my calendar and its free!!!! 😛 ) The webmail client of gmail is much better than the dog slow windows application. So tell me, if someone is asking you to make a new email address for him. Please consider before you lock yourself in like I did many many years ago. If only I had known 🙁
Any suggestions as how I can fix this ??? (And no I don’t want to delete my hotmail address, a lot of my friends have pictures from their events on it and prolly I can’t log in anymore) I’m even considering setting up a vmware with outlook express with a rule to forward to my imap box :s but thats really a big stupid work around imho. So … ??
Update
Thnx sch3lp (again) 🙂
But I found a feature in pidgin that displays how many messages are in my inbox. It works for Gmail and hotmail, you just got to love those developers 🙂