Install 4.1.6 on Solaris 11 Express hung my machine and it could not reboot, I suspect a faulty kernel module. Thankfully I have auto-snapshots running and could rollback my rpool after booting from the install cd.

This was a truly miserable experience as my Solaris-Fu is much weaker than my Linux-Fu.

Based off of a script by Adam Pierce. Mine is a little more user friendly.

Get latest version here.

more…

If you use (or are trying to) the very excellent Roundcube but you keep getting the white screen of death, then here’s something to try.

As a quick test, disable the curl extension in your /etc/php.ini

;extension = curl.so

and restart your webserver…

sudo service httpd restart

If that seems to solve the problem (you can see the login screen and not a whitescreen) then try the fix that worked for me. Move curl.so after imap.so.

extension=imap.so
extension=curl.so

Your mileage may vary.

I have two Fedora 15 machines, they both authenticate using NIS and mount home directories via NFS. The first machine worked perfectly, the second did not. I could login via ssh (nis works) but all my file owners were nobody:users.

Anyhow, through much trial and error I learned about /etc/imapd.conf. So after booting my machine, if I restarted rpcidmapd and autofs then the file permissions were correct. After much Googling I found this:  https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=626515

Solution:

edit /etc/idmapd.conf
uncomment and edit Domain = <your nis domain>

If I had to guess, I think the NIS domain isn’t being set until after rpc.idmapd and automount are started. That’s why restarting the services later seems to work. Or whatever. Why it works on one fresh install but not the next I’ll never know.

On Fedora 15 if you can’t login because you get a

gconf-sanity-check-2 exited with status code 256 error

login via the text console (ctrl-alt-f2) and make a tmp directory.

cd
mkdir tmp

I recently purchased the hardware for a new server, I’ll get into the details of that in a later post, however I did want to quickly mention a problem I had.

I tried to burn in my S5512WGM2NR motherboard, a Sandy Bridge motherboard from Tyan. It has the the C204 chipset and I’ve got a Xeon e3 1230 with 16 GB of ram (4 x KVR1333D3E9S/4G).

Anyhow, the MemTest from Fedora 15 locked up instantly and the official MemTest from http://www.memtest86.com/ locked up within 60 seconds or whenever you hit a key. I’m now using MemTest86+ from http://www.memtest.org/ and it works great.

tl;dr – Use MemTest86+ from .org not MemTest86 from .com.

If you want to randomly change the wallpaper on mac osx you can use the built-in functionality. However, if you want to pick an image from a subdirectory you need to use this little script.

more…

Continuing from maze solver update, I came across another very large maze at Purpy Pupple wikipedia page. And when I say large, I mean 4000×4000 large. Purpy calls it 2000×2000 but since it is very clearly 4000 pixels by 4000 pixels I’m calling it as 4k.

more…

The Sandy Bridge reviews sure paint a nice picture for this new cpu. I’m currently leaning towards the i5-2400 or the i7-2600 if I’m feeling rich. The K series are unacceptable since they don’t support VT-d.

However, unless the platform can do the following I won’t be buying it.

I want to use a discreet video card and the on-chip video card simultaneously. I want to run my htpc in a virtual machine and “give” either of the cards to it via pci passthrough. By having the htpc own the card it should have great performance and if I break X on either the host or the htpc guest I just have to flip the input on my receiver and continue on my way.

Since I currently use kvm and not xen, kvm will need to be upgraded to support display pci passthrough. The guest will need to be full screen of course, Spice may be required.

So hopefully Fedora 15 will be able to handle all that.

Here’s a follow up to my previous post, maze solver. I’ve finally gotten around to solving this properly with a breadth-first search. Shortest path is 16031, 11% better than my previous best.

more…