Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
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.
Tags: Parallels Plesk, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Server
Posted in Software | 9 Comments »
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!
Tags: Eclipse, Java
Posted in Software | 13 Comments »
Sunday, October 31st, 2010
Have a Canon scanner? Trying to scan from an application that supports TWAIN, but getting an error that rmslantc.dll is not found?
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Tags: Canon, TWAIN, WIA
Posted in Software | 29 Comments »
Friday, October 15th, 2010
Here’s another post wherein I complain about something!
Alright, Google wants to make sure that their software stays up to date. That’s awesome, I’m all for it. But, do they have to be so sneaky about it?
If you’ve installed a piece of Google software like Google Chrome, Google Earth, or the Google Talk plugin for your browser, chances are that a piece of software called Google Update got installed along with it. Google Update’s job is to run in the background and periodically check for updates to any Google software that you have installed, and to install them silently.
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Tags: Google, Google Update
Posted in Software | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 11th, 2010
Running a few VMs in VMware Server 2.0.2 on Ubuntu Linux 10.04. All works good most of the time. Except when one of them, for whatever reason, needs to do a lot of disk I/O. Then, all of the VMs grind to a halt until the disk activity is done.
Why is this? I don’t know. Obviously, if all of the VMs are using the same disk, there’s going to be some contention for disk access. But, it seems that this slowdown is way worse than it should be.
Anyway, there is a solution to greatly reduce the impact of the problem.
Set all of your VMs to use only one CPU! Yeah, that’s right. I don’t know why that makes the situation any better. Of course, there will be less CPU resources available for your VMs, but it’s worth it if they don’t stop responding whenever one of them decides that it needs to use the disk for more than a few seconds.
I got the idea from a post on the VMware Server forums and sure enough it worked fine for me. Now the VMs are much more responsive while the disk is under load. I don’t know if this problem also plagues VMware Server running on Windows, but chances are you can fix it the same way if it does.
Tags: VMware, VMware Server
Posted in Software | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010
I’ve actually run into two separate causes of this problem during my time running Ubuntu Server machines. And while I am discussing Ubuntu Server in this post, I see no reason why this same problem couldn’t affect the desktop version of Ubuntu, or maybe other Ubuntu variants (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc.).
The problem: You’ve enabled automatic security update installation, and yet, security updates are not being automatically installed.
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Tags: Ubuntu, Ubuntu Server
Posted in Software | 2 Comments »
Friday, August 20th, 2010
VMware Server is a cool free product that you can install on an existing Windows or Linux system and run virtual machines in the background. While it’s built on VMware’s awesome virtualization technology, there are a few issues that make the current version of VMware Server (2.0.2) a little annoying to use.
Out-of-the-box, it can only be managed through the web interface. The web interface itself is not too bad, but if you aren’t accessing it from the same machine that it’s running on, it forces you to use HTTPS. This is great, of course, except something is wonky with the https implementation that is used (it appears to only support SSL version 2, for which support is disabled by default or outright removed from the current version of every major browser?). So, blah. I can’t manage my VMs remotely, which is one of the reasons why I’d like to use VMware Server in the first place.
Now, there are ways around this. You could set up an SSH tunnel or some similar network trick so that you could access the web interface without being kicked over to HTTPS. Or you could use Remote Desktop or a remote X application to access it using a web browser on the same machine as the server. These work for getting to the configuration pages, but I still had trouble trying to access the remote console (which relies on a browser plugin that seems a bit flaky).
There are lots of people complaining about both of these issues (flaky HTTPS and flaky remote console). Now, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a downloadable client that could manage said VMs without having to use the web browser?
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Tags: VMware, VMware Server
Posted in Software | 11 Comments »
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
For a while now, I’ve been noticing that my Windows printer list would come up empty in the control panel, or when I tried to print something, I’d get an error that indicates that the Print Spooler service is not running. Going and manually starting the Print Spooler service fixes the problem, but that’s silly, why should I have to do it? Why is the Print Spooler service stopping at all?
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Tags: Printers, Windows 7
Posted in Software | 16 Comments »
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010
On one of the web servers I help run, we noticed some suspicious activity. After poking around, I found a pair of suspicious files in a directory that contains user-uploaded files. One was named .htaccess (typical Apache distributed configuration file), and one was named 203497.php. Here’s my analysis of these mystery files.
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Tags: PHP, Security
Posted in Software | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
Today, support for Windows 2000 from Microsoft ends. Windows 2000 was released over ten years ago, on February 17, 2000. Although it may have had a shaky start as far as application compatibility goes, it is renowned as one of the most stable operating systems ever to come out of Microsoft, and it paved the way for Microsoft to merge the “home” (9x) and “business” (NT) lines of Windows with Windows XP, the following year.
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Tags: Windows, Windows Vista, Windows XP
Posted in Software | No Comments »
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