Site With The Lamp

I have mentioned here and there that I am using usmb to mount remote folders. It was only after a little bit of head scratching that I manged to figure it out though. Samba server is one of those things that I never really learned to setup/use. So I decided to take the easy way out and to install the Samba Web Administration Tool (SWAT). That didn’t quite work out.

Connection Interrupted
The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.

At first I thought this was an SSL error but it wasn’t anything like that. I found the solution in an old mailing list entry made by one Cris Nolan: http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2002-August/049448.html

SWAT still relies on xinetd, been a long time since I ran into a daemon that does so. Once xinetd was editing usmb could be started easily and mostly it works fine. However if it’s left ideling and the computer goes to sleep the connection is dropped. You can easily unmount and mount it again and most things are uneffected but there is an exception. VirtualBox goes crazy when that happens. That’s because my virtual machines actualy reside on the remote folder. If the machine goes to sleep VirtualBox just dies off and even completely refuses to start up again. That leaves me wondering if I should go back to ftpfs.

My Fedora 10 installation is now booting up with Plymouth.

It was only after I added the ‘vga=0×318′ flag (as mentioned at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/Alpha/ReleaseNotes#Boot_up
and disabled bootchart that the splash screen appeared.

The new boot process is supposed to be faster but it doesn’t feel like it in fact it feels slightly slower. Without boot chart I will need to revert to a stopwatch to time it. The fact that this installation is the result of a live upgrade rather than a proper upgrade from a DVD might be the cause of it (some of the init scripts etc that the installer might have changed might not have been changed by yum)

Just five minutes ago, I did a search and got the same old same old Google UI. Just now I did a search and got something completely different.

What does this mean? has google become a social network. Will spammers now be able to vote legitimate search results out of existence? Will companies with a large number of employees be able to get the number 1 rank simply by asking all their employees to vote for their pages?

Only time will tell.

Earlier, I blogged about upgrading from Fedora 9 to 10 with Yum. Then I mentioned that it didn’t go too well and decided to get a full DVD image with jigdo.  Here are some of the things that went wrong with the live update.

The Gnome menu bar disappears when ever an applications is started. It’s place is taken up by that applications own menu. The running applications title bar also goes on a trip. You cannot resize or drag it. So the only way to get the menu back is to close what’s running. It’s almost like having a single tasking operating system.

I later found that metacity –replace can get your menu back but only temporarily. It disappears if you logout or reboot. Then I found that updating metacity manually solves it permanently.

Firefox doesn’t start up at all. When trying to execute from the command line, the following error is reported:

could not find compatible GRE between version 1.9b5 and 1.9b5

No surprise that it can’t find anything between 1.9b5 and 1.9b5 because there is nothing in between (assuming that version numbers are real numbers and do not have imaginary components in them of course). This issue did go away with the Firefox upgrade. Yet when FF started I was forced to check for Firefox extension updates and to install them because I just couldn’t say no! (the buttons were hidden due to the above metacity issue)

One other minor matter was the bootup process stopping at runlevel 3 - the init update had modified the inittab file to set the runlevel to 3. To get the the plymouth splash screen I had to disable bootchart.