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.
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Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
Grub prompt after upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04
Friday, 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.cnf
Saturday, 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.
Physical interfaces disappearing from the VMware “Bridge” network interface after resume from hibernate or sleep
Saturday, 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.
Crappy Desktop Wallpaper Compression in Windows 7
Wednesday, January 19th, 2011
This is a problem I noticed many months ago, but did not seriously look in to until just now.
I like to use the monthly Mozilla Foxkeh desktop wallpaper. Right now, I have the January 2011 wallpaper — this nice, large, lossless PNG. (By the way, the word that he is in the progress of writing is “火狐”, which literally means “fire fox.” How cool!)
Anyway, I noticed that there is crappy compression on the image shown on my desktop, particularly around the numbers that make of the calendar. This has been occurring in the wallpapers for past months as well. If I open up the PNG (that I told Windows to use!!) and zoom way in, the image is crystal clear. But on the desktop, it is junk. Take a look, I zoomed in on the “2011″ at the top-left of the calendar. On the left is the data from the PNG as viewed in any decent graphics application, and on the right is what appears on my desktop.
Yuck!
Have Ubuntu Server hand out “static” or “fixed” addresses via DHCP
Tuesday, January 4th, 2011
Nowadays, most local area networks have a DHCP server running on them. This is, of course, how hosts on the network are assigned their IP address and other stuff they need to know (router address, DNS servers, etc.).
The DHCP server has a pool of addresses that it is allowed to hand out to clients, and it will often hand out these addresses sequentially. In some cases, the address chosen for a particular client may be based on some sort of hash function on the client’s MAC address (so that the client will always be assigned the same address, unless there is a hash collision).
Of course, sometimes it’s nice to assign a particular device on your network a specific IP address (a “static” or “fixed” IP address). This way, you will always know without any doubt what the IP address or your printer or file server or whatever is. Of course, you can just set the address manually on the device, taking care to place it outside of the DHCP pool.
Cannot open file “C:\ProgramData\VMware\dndlogs\dndlog.conf”: The system cannot find the path specified.
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010
In VMware Workstation, I’ve been getting this error for a while when I tried to start up a VM using the “Bridged” network interface.
Cannot open file “C:\ProgramData\VMware\dndlogs\dndlog.conf”: The system cannot find the path specified.
The network bridge on device VMnet0 is temporarily down because the bridged Ethernet interface is down. The virtual machine may not be able to communicate with the host or with other machines on your network.
Not too big a deal, usually using the NAT interface works just fine, but it does prevent other machines on the network from talking to the VM which is sometimes a handy feature to have.
Lightbox 2.04 – close button on top
Saturday, November 13th, 2010
Here’s something that I thought would be nice.
Lightbox is a nifty little JavaScript/CSS package you can download that allows you to make nifty slideshows on a web page with little effort. Pretty much, your page has thumbnail images that link to the larger images, with a specific rel attribute on the a tags that make the links, and Lightbox takes over to display the large image in a nifty Flash-free box when you click on a thumbnail. If you have several images, it’ll make a nifty slide show for you. You can read more and see it in action if you click the link at the start of this paragraph.
Well, the box with the image in it has a close button at the bottom. What if I want to put it on the top instead?
Plesk 10 on Ubuntu 10.04 – Can’t restart DNS service error
Friday, November 12th, 2010
Today, I installed the new Parallels Plesk 10.0.1 on Ubuntu Server 10.04. This is the first release of Plesk that supports any version of Ubuntu newer than 8.04. Anyway, after the install, I went to log in and filled out the initial setup information, and was then given this error:
Unable to restart Named: dnsmng failed: dnsmng failed: dnsmng: Service /etc/init.d/bind9 failed to restart
(What a great error message.)
Whoops. Turns out there’s a problem with the default Plesk configuration of the DNS server BIND (run it in a chrooted environment) and Ubuntu’s configuration (run it with AppArmor, explicitly configuring which files it is allowed to open). You have to give BIND permission to open the files in its chroot environment. The solution to this problem is to edit the file /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.named and add these lines before the closing brace at the end of the file:
/var/named/run-root/etc/* rw,
/var/named/run-root/var/* rw,
/var/named/run-root/dev/* rw,
Then, reboot the machine and you should be good to go.
Can’t pin Eclipse to the taskbar in Windows 7
Friday, November 5th, 2010
Mildly annoying problem with a simple solution.
If you use the Eclipse IDE on Windows 7, you may notice that it does not behave nicely on the taskbar. If you pin it to the taskbar, once your workspace is open, Eclipse will add a second icon to the taskbar (and right-clicking it does not yield any option to pin it). From what I’ve read, you may have to be using the 64-bit version of Eclipse to experience this issue.
To fix it, you need to add the path to your 64-bit JDK’s bin directory to your system PATH variable. And, it needs to come before C:\Windows\system32 on your PATH.
The reason for this is Eclipse will execute under C:\Windows\system32\javaw.exe if that is the first potential JVM that it finds. Eclipse only demonstrates this troublesome taskbar behavior when it is running under javaw.exe. If you add a JDK path to the PATH variable that it will find first, it will use that JDK’s jvm.dll as the JVM and everything will be fine.
If you need help figuring out how to set your system PATH variable or where your JDK is installed, consult Google. If you’re using Eclipse, then you must be a programmer, so I am assuming that you know about such things.
That’s all!
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