Older blog entries for berend (starting at number 371)

3 Oct 2011 (updated 3 Oct 2011 at 00:20 UTC) »

Just connected a Windows PC to my FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE CUPS printer server. The PC was in the DMZ, so required a bit of firewall poking. The basic thing to do is create a class with CUPS.

I opened two ports in my ipfw firewall: 631 (ipp) and 515 (printer). I added the Window PC's ip address to /etc/hosts.allow:

cups-lpd : windows.example.com : allow


Had to change some settings in /usr/local/etc/cups/cupsd.conf as well: cups must listen on the network card for my DMZ obviously, as it didn't do that before. And in the section had to allow the subnet in the DMZ. I simply allowed the entire subnet as I will control individual access with the firewall.

Next I simply did "Add a printer", clicked on printer is not listed, and specified as name http://www.example.com:631/classes/pcl and that's it. Windows prompted me for a suitable driver, and done.
1 Oct 2011 (updated 1 Oct 2011 at 08:05 UTC) »

Very weird error with evince, and no real good answer if you Google. The error message is File type application/octet-stream type (application/octet-stream) is not supported.

What I did (perhaps some steps can be skipped):

rm ~/.local/share/mime/mime.cache
rm /usr/local/share/mime/mime.cache
update-mime-database /usr/share/mime


The last step fixed it for me, so not sure I needed the first two.

Got a new 3G stick, the K3805-Z, which supposedly gives broadband download speeds and better than broadband upload speeds (5.76MBit/s). Bit of a problem to get this working under Ubuntu Natty. Doesn't work out of the box.

Shows up in the Ubuntu network panel, and you can connect, but it doesn't.

Downloaded the latest Vodafone Mobile connect (2.25.01), and installed. Now the modem no longer shows up in the network panel, but I can use vodafone-mobile-connect-card-driver-for-linux to connect. Doesn't create any routing table I would recognise, but it somehow works. Beats me.

Download speed test wasn't very good, got only 1.7Mbs, but upload was 1.12Mbs, which is better than I get with my ADSL2 connection.

6 Aug 2011 (updated 6 Aug 2011 at 07:28 UTC) »

Bought an Asus Eee Pad transformer, magic machine. I didn't want tablets as I didn't see the point of them, but this tablet comes with a keyboard which also doubles as battery, so 16 hours of battery life!

Obviously I need to have the device rooted, as I need to install openvpn which I use on my network. That wasn't so easy it appears.

The first step is to install adb and make sure your device is recognised. I followed the steps to install adb, but only to there. No need to install USB tools on Linux, and to make sure my Transformer was recognised I simply followed Google's steps.

Finding the right and up-to-date info that is. But once I found rooting for Asus Eee Pad Transformer is a breeze.

The next is to be installing the tun device. Also straight-forward, once you're root that is.

Then it's supposedly following the steps to get openvpn in your system. But that failed. When I tried to install BusyBox it failed on download at step 30/100. Not sure what that was. The OpenVPN installer also failed. So I got the openvpn binary from somewhere else.

Installed that, and installed the OpenVPN settings, and created my openvpn.conf. That worked, but openvpn failed when running ifconfig. I suppose I need the ifconfig from BusyBox.

OK, retry. Don't pick the BusyBox installer, but the main BusyBox. That installed fine, but installed version 1.18. I picked 1.19 to install, and no problems now. Run the OpenVPN installer again, pointing out that my openvpn was in /system/xbin/ and my ifconfig/route in /system/xbin/bb as per the caveats here. Telling openvpn settings that they are in /system/xbin won't work.

I needed to run a script after route was up, as it appears, you can't do that in the .conf file, but must specify that in the settings.

6 Aug 2011 (updated 6 Aug 2011 at 03:54 UTC) »

Bought an Asus Eee Pad transformer, magic machine. I didn't want tablets as I didn't see the point of them, but this tablet comes with a keyboard which also doubles as battery, so 16 hours of battery life!

Obviously I need to have the device rooted, as I need to install openvpn which I use on my network. That wasn't so easy it appears.

Finding the right and up-to-date info that is. But once found rooting for Asus Eee Pad Transformer is a breeze.

The next step is supposed to be installing the tun device. Also straight-forward, once you're root that is.

Then it's

15 Jul 2011 (updated 15 Jul 2011 at 02:08 UTC) »

Unfortunately cmdbulkimp destroyed the KnowledgeTree database, existing documents were moved all over the place. So what now?

Maybe I'm a moron. It appears there is an upload from server link in the admin interface.

Too bad Google didn't return this as the top result.

13 Jul 2011 (updated 15 Jul 2011 at 02:04 UTC) »

Have been doing some work with the KnowledgeTree document management system. Was about 61GB of data, so got the company to sent a disk to Amazon to import. As I didn't know you could import to EBS (or maybe they just announced that) this was imported to S3.

It's a pain to get your data out of S3, let me tell you that, especially as in their case they had deeply structured files. s3fs can mount this, but didn't see any files. In the end I used the Perl Amazon::S3 library to get all files in the bucket and download them one by one.

Although the data is now on the server, it doesn't mean that it's in KnowledgeTree. There is a Best Practice document, but the the link to the bulkimporter is dead. Was able to locate it. Now seeing if this is going to work.

If you ever get:

svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Commit item '/...../some_dir' has copy flag but no copyfrom URL

Try this:

svn delete ..../some_dir
svn revert -R ...../some_dir

Or else the slightly less safe:

rm -rf ..../some_dir
svn update ...../some_dir

Just completed some new kind of work for a Manukau motor lodge, new for me that is: SEO improvements. Got the help from the New Zealand search masters.

Was running on Ubuntu 9.10 for a long time, and very happy with that. But one must move on I suppose, so had a bit of downtime yesterday and decided to upgrade to 10.10. Ubuntu upgrades always went fantastic, never had a problem, but this time it was a nightmare. Had upgraded a couple machines already, but not yet my main machine.

First upgraded to 10.04, the LTS release. Everything went OK, until I booted. When it came up, the nvidia driver didn't load, so into low res graphics mode. Weird. Booted on an older kernel, that went OK. As I had to upgrade to 10.10 anyway, I didn't bother to pursue it. And somehow I got the idea that I should do the upgrade from the latest kernel, so I booted back into the latest kernel with low res graphics. But I think the problem was that this kernel didn't support my Lenovo W700 well, so the kernel simply didn't work and that's why nvidia didn't load.

I could start the upgrade to 10.10 fine, no issues there. But about half way X window/machine/kernel crashed. Could no longer boot.

On Windows this would have been a reinstall, but luckily on Ubuntu you have options. So I downloaded the Ubuntu 10.10 live CD, booted from that, and then chrooted to my disk. With liberal use of "apt-get upgrade", "dpkg --configure -a", etc. and several retries I somehow was able to finish the upgrade and install the 10.10 kernel, which worked fine.

System still in a somewhat bad state though. mysql wasn't installed, so had to do that myself. Bit of a problem as well as my my.cnf had statements in it that prevented it to start. Starting it gave me all kinds of warnings that I needed to upgrade.

Lost my Thunderbird profiles, currently loading them from a backup tape.

And then of course we have the usual and expected: PHP upgraded to 5.3 which will cause issues. I'm first trying to see if I can resolve them, before going back to 5.2. For example SimpleTest doesn't work anymore, but the latest trunk fixes this.

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