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aaron-kelley.net :: Blog Posts |
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Plesk: run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/60sa-update exited with return code 1Monday, April 30th, 2012
Getting a cron error like this from Parallels Plesk Panel?
The solution: Open /etc/cron.daily/60sa-update in your favorite text editor and change the top line from “#!/bin/sh” to “#!/bin/bash“. Credit for this fix goes to this post at Mammuts FAQ (Spanish). Upgrade from Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric” to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise” fails with error: “Couldn’t configure pre-depend libtinfo5 for libncurses5, probably a dependency cycle.”Thursday, April 26th, 2012
…Of course, the error doesn’t come until after a few hours of downloading all of the new packages. Yet another Ubuntu upgrade bug not solved in time for release. The details are in the bug report here. I don’t understand how this bug has been known since February and not fixed in time for release. The workaround: Download and install the Ubuntu 12.04 versions of libtinfo5, libncurses5, and libncursesw5 (in that order). You will have unresolved dependencies until you install all three, but you should be able to do them one by one with dpkg -i. (Do not just double-click and use the graphical Ubuntu software manager; use dpkg -i from the terminal.) After they are installed, run the distribution upgrade like normal. Automatically reset your cable modem when the Internet goes missing — part 2Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
My previous post was about writing a script to automatically reset a cable modem when the Internet dies. My cable modem goes nuts from time to time and needs to be reset to get the Internet connection back. This isn’t that big a deal, in fact it’s not an uncommon problem to have; but, I do access services running at home remotely and I’d like to have it set up to fix itself whenever this happens. As noted in my previous post, I discovered that my particular cable modem has a web interface and you can reset it from the web interface. However, I’ve already discovered instances where it’s gone crazy and does not respond to the http reset command, requiring a full power cycle to get things back in order. Also, some people may not be able to reset the modem from the web interface, so this new method will help them out as well. Automatically reset your cable modem when the Internet goes missingMonday, January 30th, 2012
So… I have Comcast cable Internet service at home, and a Motorola SB6120 cable modem that I own myself. I’m not sure if it is Comcast, the modem, the combination of the two, or something else altogether… but, every now and then, the modem goes into a funk and the Internet stops working, and the only way to fix it is to power-cycle the modem. This doesn’t happen terribly often, maybe once a month or so. (Occasionally it will happen, say, twice in one week and thus cause me to think about it a little more.) Power-cycling the modem is not a big deal, but I do access stuff that I have at home remotely, so if the connection dies while I am at work or away someplace, I can’t fix it until I return home. It would be great if there was a way for a computer at the house to, say, periodically check and see if the Internet is working and if it is not, somehow reset the modem. So, I did some searching on the topic, and… it turns out that it is possible to do this, and in fact, it is pretty simple. Migrating an Ubuntu installation from BIOS to UEFIThursday, December 22nd, 2011
For this article, I am assuming that you are comfortable getting around Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular, and are familar with the ins and outs of disk partitioning. I will be describing the steps that I took to make this happen, but not going into too much detail for each individual step. See the bottom of this post for some useful links if you’d like to read up on the topic first. Note that it is very possible to lose your partitions when doing this sort of work so proceed carefully and do not blame me if something goes awry. Nokia 2320, CA-50 (download drivers here!!), and lack of PC sync capabilitiesThursday, May 26th, 2011
Just looking for the driver? Click here. So… In the not-so-distant past, my smart-ish phone, a Palm Treo 650, kicked the bucket. Not having the budget or desire to pick up a newer smartphone, I ran off to eBay and picked up an unlocked Nokia 2320. I plopped in my SIM card and I was back in business. Now, the Nokia 2320 doesn’t really have any connectivity options. It has no Bluetooth, no infrared, or anything like that. Nonetheless, I am still interested in being able to transfer data to and from the phone (without using MMS). Then, maybe I’d be able to do things like transfer photos to assign to the contacts in my address book, back up my address book in case the phone breaks or gets lost, add a custom ringtone, and so on. The phone does have a data port, which seems like it would be an option, if only I had the right cable. Grub prompt after upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04Friday, April 29th, 2011
I upgraded a couple of machines to Ubuntu 11.04, and after the reboot, they just booted up to a grub prompt. Like this (except an older version of grub reported):
OpenSSL on Windows — Unable to load config info from c:/openssl0.9.8o/ssl/openssl.cnfSaturday, April 23rd, 2011
This is an error message that pops up when trying to do an operation using OpenSSL running on Windows. It appears, best as I can gather, that the path to OpenSSL’s config file is hard-coded into the executable, and it won’t be able to find it if it is not in the expected place. In this case, I was using the copy of OpenSSL bundled with the Windows version of the Apache web server, but I imagine the error message may show up with other Windows distributions of OpenSSL as well. The solution is to add an environment variable, OPENSSL_CONF, and set it to the complete path to an OpenSSL config file. (In this case, again, it is located in Apache’s conf directory.) Then, restart your command prompt instance and all should be good. 6 GB of RAM in the Inspiron 1720Tuesday, February 1st, 2011
So, I have a nearly 3-year-old Inspiron 1720 laptop from Dell that serves as my main PC. This machine still has a couple of years of service left in it. I run VMware at work all day and of course I would want to have plenty of system memory to avoid hard disk paging activity under this high memory load. According to Dell, the maximum memory capacity of this machine is 4 GB (2 GB in each of two slots). However, others have discovered that 6 GB works fine in the machine, so there is no problem installing a 4 GB module along with a 2 GB module. However, installing two 4 GB modules for a total of 8 GB does not work, as there is a bug in the BIOS that will keep the machine from booting. I decided that 4 GB is not enough for my workload so I went for the upgrade to 6 GB. It worked fine. However, I wonder, to you lose any performance by going to 6 GB? Of course, in this configuration you have a mismatched pair of RAM modules. Does stuff like dual-channel access still work? Physical interfaces disappearing from the VMware “Bridge” network interface after resume from hibernate or sleepSaturday, January 22nd, 2011
I’ve been having an issue where my physical ethernet interface would disappear from the choices of interfaces to bridge to in VMware Workstation for Windows whenever I hibernate my machine. This is a little annoying, as I have a VM that I would like attached to the physical network. The easy solution to this problem is to open up the virtual network editor and click on the “Restore Defaults” button. This reinstalls the VMware network components and sets everything back up like it would be if your install was brand new. However, it’s annoying to have to do this every time I power up the machine. continuum over at the VMware Communities message boards pointed me towards the solution — restarting the hidden “vmnetbridge” service also does the trick. However, again, it’s annoying to have to do this every time the machine is powered on. I tried writing a batch file to restart the service and scheduling that to execute at power on but I couldn’t find an appropriate trigger to have the Windows task scheduler execute it. So, I wrote a system service in C# that hangs out in the background and restarts the vmnetbridge service whenever the machine wakes up from hibernate or sleep. This handles the problem brilliantly — no effort required after the service is installed, but the VMware “Bridge” interface keeps working as expected. You can download it from its new project page, here. | ||||
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