Escape from boredom

Needed an application to help me do remote support on my old pc now running Ubuntu which I’m about to send home to my little sister. Well aware of the fact that Linux and Ubuntu might be a giant step for mankind home at Nesna, I was on the lookout for an app that could help me out. Lars Tormod have used Teamviewer with success giving remote support to his dad, so I tested it out. Installed both on my Mac and on the Ubuntu pc in less than five minutes (including download). Started Teamviewer on the pc, got the session id, started same app on the Mac – entered session id and password…voila, full control of the Ubuntu pc…plain and very simple and easily recommended to others. Free for personal use as well, can it be better?

Yet another successful and easy upgrade, now running 4.0.5 of B2Evolution. Had to spend some time uploading the files to the server due to very limited bandwidth this evening, but apart from that, no problems. Also used WinScp to move the media-folder on the server before upgrade and then move it back, in that way I could delete files and upload a fresh copy afterwards.

Yet again http://hellem.org is up and running again after the hosting server was hacked last weekend. No real issues for me apart from a few days of not bothering to update my blog until they had fixed the security hole and rolled back to the needed backup. As I know they did not do anything other than change all index files as described here http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=546049.

Anyhow, I had a backup of my blog, did not loose any information, also thanks to an exact local copy of my folders and files.

Just perfect!

######VARIABLE DEFINITIONS#######
LIST=1,2,3,4,5
#################################

# Add a trailing comma to the list variable
LOOPVAR=${LIST},

# Loop as long as there is a comma in the variable
while echo $LOOPVAR | grep \, &> /dev/null
do

# Grab one item out of the list
LOOPTEMP=${LOOPVAR%%\,*}

# Remove the item we just grabbed from the list,
# as well as the trailing comma
LOOPVAR=${LOOPVAR#*\,}

# some action with your variable
#
# echo $LOOPTEMP
#
# for example

done

Thanks to “The Code and the Fury” for providing the script, see the blog post for more details about how the script actually works.

I’m now testing OpenDNS at home. You get

• Web Content Filtering
• Anti Phising
• Malware protection
• Whitelist/Blacklist
• Block P2P, and more…

Have not noticed any drops in speed. Ok, a ping to the DNS server of OpenDNS is slower than to my “real” DNS, but that does not tell the whole story, since you do not surf on pages hosted on your DNS-server. It might also depend on the size of the DNS-cache on the server…have I been told…

A bit confused when it comes to verifying if I’m really using OpenDNS using the webpage http://www.opendns.com/welcome/ but it all turned out to be a need to just restart Firefox combined with a few minutes of waiting time.

My brother and sister are visiting us this weekend and while my brother is playing some online game I was checking the web console on my WRT54GL for ways to block the gaming. That was when I noticed that my firmware version was 4.30.7, and the latest was 4.30.15…so I decided that it was time to upgrade. Quite easy in fact, just verify hardware version, then download the .bin-file and upload it using the web console. Should work like a charm I my thought was, but nope…”Upgrade failed”, back to the manual. Noticed “Use Internet Explorer or Safari”, I was using Firefox. Fired up Safari, and tried again, about 20 seconds and “Upgrade Successful”, which also included a reboot causing my brother cursing…double success! 🙂

Had a folder with about 350 property files, but with only 150 of them having a valid file name. No problem finding the files with a valid file name using find in combination with regex

find . -regex '.*__.*properties'

Problem is that I do not want to find the files with valid file names, I needed the ones with invalid names, but all the time regex is powerfull doing almost anything except excluding phrases and such (as I have read in various sources found by Google) I had to find a workaround.

So here goes, all from the directory where the files are located

1. ls > allfiles.txt create a file with all filenames
2. perl -pi -e ‘s#.*__.*properties##g’ allfiles.txt Remove all valid filenames
3. perl -pi -e ‘s#^\n##g’ allfiles.txt Turned out that I did not remove the newlines, so to get rid of all the blank lines I needed to issue this command as well.
4. for i in `cat allfiles.txt`; do svn delete $i; done This oneliner loops through the file, for each line delete the file from subversion (which deletes the file for me)

Voila! Pleased with myself 🙂

Nokia + Microsoft. Here we go! 11.2.11

…and my next phone will be running on Android…why? Just because!

Got the error yesterday while trying to install WebSphere using RAFW on an old Linux installation, having the media-folder mounted from a network share on a Windows XP-box. I had unzipped the tar-files containing the installation binaries on my own laptop, then just copied them using Windows Explorer to the pc where I had shared out the folder. Apparently it should be no problem doing this, I could without any problem navigate down the folder structure on the Linux machine viewing all the files. But still I got errors such as the

UNIXProcess.forkAndExec native error: No such file or directory

and later while changing the log level to =ALL, I found

/usr/RAFW/product/actions/install/was/common/install_update_was_common.xml:89: /usr/RAFW/media/linux/X32/was/70/patches/was70_fp13 not found.
but, it was there, I know…

So, after receiving a tip from my colleagues, I deleted the media tree, using ftp transferred the tar-files containing the binaries to the pc with the share, installed Cygwin and unpacked the files using the tar command. Voila…problem solved…stupid, stupid!!! But problem gone, on to the next…

Yesterday my homepage experienced about 12 hours of downtime due to the hosting server host.hostean.com being unavailable. Not a good thing, but always good to figure out that it is not my fault. Have not seen any explanations of what the root cause was, but as I could see MySQL was struggling pretty hard.