I wanted to start a Java Webstart app from Firefox, but got this error. The application could not launch. Apparently IE thought it was offline (File -> Work Offline was checked), and as such Sun decided to follow suit. No real reason me thinks, but if you never use IE it’s hard to find what exactly could be the problem… (obviously tried to reboot etc).

Looks like this tool is going away, it’s not in squeeze or sid anymore, but hey, I needed a newer JDK…

make-jpkg cannot create packages for Java 6 update 10 or newer, to fix this, edit /usr/share/java-package/sun-j2sdk.sh.

Add this stanza:

       "jdk-6u"[0-9][0-9]"-linux-x64.bin") # SUPPORTED
            j2se_version=1.6.0+update${archive_name:6:2}${revision}
            j2se_expected_min_size=130
            found=true
            ;;

right after

        "jdk-6u"[0-9]"-linux-x64.bin") # SUPPORTED
            j2se_version=1.6.0+update${archive_name:6:1}${revision}
            j2se_expected_min_size=130
            found=true
            ;;

Then try again, should be golden.

To disable the Firefox DNS cache, go to about:config in the address bar.
– Right click to select “New” -> “Integer”, enter “network.dnsCacheExpiration” as the preference name and “0″ as the integer value.
– Create another new integer called “network.dnsCacheEntries” as preference name and again enter “0″ as integer value

There is no facility to clear it, but possibly doing the above, then removing it again, could clear the cache.. Didn’t try it – just disabled it. My resolvers are on the local network so they can cache it for me – this way they ‘ll actually have something to do 😉

I was configuring a main smarthost all my other machines should relay though, all Postfix. I configured everything as I should, including allowing Postfix to use PLAIN auth (important step, smtp_sasl_security_options =). However, it still didn’t work.

cannot authenticate to server relay.mx.mydomain[123.123.123.169]: no mechanism available

If you forget smtp_sasl_security_options =, you would get the following error:

cannot authenticate to server relay.mx.mydomain[123.123.123.169]: no worthy mechanisms available

Note the small but important difference: worthy. All Google hits on this problem tell you to allow PLAIN if you get the “worthy” error, except I already did, and this was not the error. #postfix couldn’t help either 🙁 Dug somewhat further…

The missing key? The libsasl2-modules package is also needed, not only libsasl2 (restart Postfix after installing). Tada.

If you’re running Hudson from the Debian package, with the built in Winstone servlet server, and want to serve the application on a specific path rather than the web root (when using it in combination with Apache and reverse proxy), edit /etc/default/hudson and add e.g. “–prefix=/hudson” to the commandline parameters.

Yes, they named it prefix.

To the moron who bound ctrl-down to Lightning in Thunderbird, please roll over and die and/or make me an option to disable this. (possibly there is, but I don’t know where, as there are no real settings for key bindings).

Update: it seems the Mozilla guys are still as great in fixing bugs as they were before – I wonder if this one will also break records in not being fixed (10 years+ anyone?)

For a long while one of my servers “crashed” weekly. Every saturday at 3am the load would just spiral up and everything would become unresponsive (still working but slow) – everything was waiting on disk I/O. I kept putting off checking why this happened, and just rebooted the machine manually every saturday (lazy lazy). After a while I found out it was at 3am, so it had to be a cron job. I then noticed that one of my other servers also had a high load at 3am, but less high and it recovered.

Today I did some thinking and checking, and to blame was.. me! I had configured smartmontools to do a weekly long selfcheck at 3am on all 4 disks in the software RAID5 at the same time. This apparently took so much speed away from the disks that the machine didn’t cope.. Woopsie.

Note: hobby environment of course, real production I would have spent more time figuring it out 🙂

If you’re using smplayer and want to watch something on your second monitor, the video window will most likely stay black with the default settings. Setting your video renderer to “gl” resolves this issue.

If you suddenly find your KDE on Ubuntu Intrepid without working keyboard focus and no window decorations (essentially, no window management functions), try getting to “system configuration” from the menu and check Appearance > Windows. If it says something about being able to load kcm_kwindecoration.so because of a missing libkephal.so, apt-get install kde-window-manager. Although it will already be installed, “somebody” fscked up dependencies.

Installed Debian Etch yesterday (I need a linux kernel with xen and vserver for now, and Lenny doesn’t have one) then upgraded it to Lenny. Afterwards the Xen tools wouldn’t start anymore and produced the following error:

# /etc/init.d/xend start
 
Restarting XEN control daemon: xendTraceback (most recent call last):
 
File "/usr/lib/xen-3.0.3-1/bin/xend", line 40, in <module>
 
from xen.xend.server import SrvDaemon
 
File "/usr/lib/xen-3.0.3-1/lib/python/xen/xend/server/SrvDaemon.py", line 17, in <module>

 import xen.lowlevel.xc
 
ImportError: /usr/lib/xen-3.0.3-1/bin/../lib/python/xen/lowlevel/xc.so: undefined symbol: Py_InitModule4
 

You can solve this in 2 ways. First, the silly way:

rm /usr/bin/python; ln -s /usr/bin/python2.4 /usr/bin/python

Or, the way you’re supposed to:

apt-get install xen-utils-3.2-1