blog.zelut.org

After typing out that title I wonder if I’ve been spending too much time on forums, hehe. In any case, I ran into a problem today regarding my database tables being read-only so I thought I’d post this for the good of the internets. I had to dig pretty deep to find a solution to it. Hopefully some additional Google fodder will make life a bit easier for the next guy. If you’re a regular reader here you know that I had some database problems this morning with this site. I ended up needing to import some databases from backups and manually tweak a few things to restore the lost data. Well it turns out that after a database import or a change of users and permissions your database tables can become read-only. I’m not entirely sure the reasoning behind this, but I found some discussion about it on a MySQL developers mailing list thread. Read more

I apologize for the trouble on the site today. I made a minor little mistake with a database and spent the entire day trying to solve it. It appears that everything is working as expected now and I want to thank Stephen Shaw for helping me out, just as I was about to give up. Great work–good eye! I’m going to make sure I have some healthy backups at this point, and perhaps I’ll find a little time to blog about the whole situation. Mainly what to avoid and what tips I’ve found in the process. Thank you again for your patience. Let me know if you find anything out of place on the site.

One of the things that has long bugged me about Mac OS X (one of the few things!) is the different way that the Home and End keys function inside a document. I have long been used to Home moving to the beginning of the current line, and End moving to the end of the current line (both on Windows and Linux machines), but on OS X they seem to move to the end of the document and the beginning of the document. After months of working on OS X I have yet to get used to this functionality so today I set out to find a solution. This is what I found. I quickly found that there are a lot of people with this same gripe. Google is ripe with suggestions. Some of them manual keyboard re-mapping tricks, others suggesting the “Mac way” to achieve the same, and some with third-party software solutions. Read more

I’ve been using my Mac more and more while I’m at work these days and one of the things that I quickly started to miss was the Linux keyboard shortcut for locking your screen (ctrl-alt-l) when you’re going to be away from your desk. The first few times I simply resigned myself to trust my office mate, but that wasn’t going to cut it long-term. I set out to find a solution to locking my screen while I was going to be away from my Mac. This is what I found. There are actually a number of solutions that I found. Some require third-party software. Others require creating dock icons to launch command-line tools. The solution I came up with requires no third-party software, custom dock icons or arthritis-inducing keyboard shortcuts. This uses easily configurable options that can also easily be undone if desired. I used Hot Corners. If you’re not familiar with Hot Corners, it is the ability to use your mouse and the four corners of your desktop to achieve additional functionality. Read more

I just downloaded and am now using Google Chrome: Developer Preview for Apple OS X. These builds are also available for Linux, but I have not yet tried them. If you’d like to test them out, you can get the builds here: OS X, Linux 32bit, Linux 64bit. More information available here. So far I have found only one bug, but I’m sure there are others lurking somewhere. Despite the early release and the issues I think this is a great development! Google Chrome is not limited to just Windows anymore! I really think Google is changing the way browsers are not only designed but also leveraged for rich internet applications.

I’ve been spending some time building packages for Arch Linux (very easy, btw!). I’ve put together a package for Origami, the Folding@Home management tool, as I wrote about recently. I’m also now maintaining the Chromium Browser package for Arch Linux in AUR, which has been a lot of fun. Also, just last nite, I built a flashplugin-universal package, which installs both 64bit and 32bit flashplayer. I found that I needed this because I’m running x86_64 but I’m running both 32bit and 64bit browsers regularly. Having both flashplayer architectures installed allows me to have flash in any of the browsers, which is nice. Some of you Arch64 users might find it useful. I’d love any feedback anyone can give me on the packages, particularly with PKGBUILD standards, efficiency and dependencies. Thank you.

As I’m sure you’ve all heard, today is April Fools and the day that the conficker worm is set to… well, do something. I haven’t read any reports on just exactly what it has done, if anything today, but I was able to come up with a solution that will allow you to scan for it using Arch Linux and the latest-greatest build of nmap. I just ran a scan on my home network and didn’t find anything (granted I only have Arch Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X machines here), but the same steps can be used to scan your office networks if you’re still wondering about being vulnerable. I will outline below how to install the Arch Build System (ABS), update the PKGBUILD for nmap to install the latest nmap and finally how to scan a range of networks for the conficker worm. Installation via ABS To build the latest-greatest copy of nmap we’ll use the ABS and simply update the PKGBUILD information. Read more

If you’ve been following my other blog (ubuntu-tutorials.com) you know I’ve developed a management tool for running Folding@Home clients on Linux distributions. It started out a bit Red Hat specific, but has since been ported to Debian families and finally Arch Linux. I just finished applying my latest patches and put together a PKGBUILD for it. I’m happy to be able to say that origami is now available to the general public in the community repository. If you’re interested in trying it out, there are two methods you can use to install it: Method 1 (manual): wget -c http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/origami/origami/PKGBUILD<br /> makepkg -si<br /> Method 2 (yaourt): yaourt -S origami I would probably suggest the yaourt method, as it is a little more automated and will provide the dependencies you might need. One of the dependencies (lsb-release) is only available via the AUR so, again, yaourt will take care of that for you. Read more

For those using FreeBSD, there has been another security update to the 7.1 release family. According to the UPDATING file: 20090323: p4 FreeBSD-SA-09:06.ktimer, FreeBSD-EN-09:01.kenv<br /> Correctly sanity-check timer IDs. [SA-09:06]<br /> Limit the size of malloced buffer when dumping environment<br /> variables. [EN-09:01] If you’re interested in applying this update to your system, here is the method I use: csup -g -L2 cvsup.freebsd.org /usr/share/examples/cvsup/standard-supfile<br /> cd /usr/src<br /> make buildkernel && make installkernel<br /> make buildworld && make installworld<br /> reboot There are other methods for keeping your base system updated, but I prefer the compiling method. What other methods might you suggest?

The other day I blogged about how to extract the kernel and ramdisk from the DBAN downloadable image. These two files would be useful in the situation where you might want to PXE (network) boot a machine and have it wiped. (Something like this may be common prior to dispositioning a machine at work, or before you give an old machine away.) Whatever your reasons might be, I thought I would outline the steps that I have taken to install and configure PXE on a CentOS 5 installation. Installation yum install tftp-server DBAN Configuration After following my previous instructions on how to extract the DBAN PXE images, copy the two files (kernel.bzi and initrd.gz) to the /tftpboot/ directory. mkdir -p /tftpboot/dban<br /> cp kernel.bzi /tftpboot/<br /> cp initrd.gz /tftpboot/<br /> PXE Configuration You’ll also need to configure the PXE system to know what to launch/run when a specific command is given at boot. Read more