Somewhere out there!

I’ve turned off Intense Debate and also set comments off for all posts older than 30 days.

Depending on my schedule, I may make an occasional post here again. I do have to do some work on the template and few other things first though.

I haven’t posted here for a while. Usually because my google searches turn up the answers pretty quickly, so I don’t feel the need to add anything additional via this blog.

Nautilus 3.6 on 13.04 is inane! They have gotten rid of drop down menus as far as I can tell.

While trying to figure out how to connect to a file share via the file explorer – a completely reasonable and supposedly simple task – I discovered that it was no longer easily possible on the 13.04 file explorer. I lot of hunting and I finally discovered a post that gave me the magic keyboard combination in order to open a file location dialog: CTRL-L.

Once I had this is was relatively easily to connect to the remote server I wanted. After that right-click add bookmark is your friend.

It’s really stupid when the backend can still do things, but the power of the front end is reduced.

Edit: Sigh… It is worse that I thought. Dropping tree view is a particularly egregious crime.

Lucid does not seem to work well with libvirt/kvm, there are several bugs that seem to be fixed in Maverick but not in Lucid.

From syslog:

error : qemuSetupCgroup:1955 : Unable to create cgroup for DOMAIN: No such file or directory
error : qemuRemoveCgroup:2045 : internal error Unable to find cgroup for DOMAIN#012

Re: [libvirt] FYI, “Unable to create cgroup for …”

This is a bug in systemd. It periodically scans all mounted cgroups
and deletes any directories which don’t contain any attached processes.
Needless to say this breaks libvirt, and possibly other apps, which
don’t expect 3rd parties to be deleting their directories.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=678555

Best solution for this that I’ve found on lucid is: Bug 696218 – Unable to create cgroup: No such file or directory

I was able to solve it by modifying the configuration in the file
/etc/libvirt/qemu.conf:

 cgroup_controllers = [ ]

setgid, setuid needed by /etc/apparmor.d/abstractions/libvirt-qemu

=== modified file 'apparmor.d/abstractions/libvirt-qemu'
--- apparmor.d/abstractions/libvirt-qemu 2010-04-30 15:33:20 +0000
+++ apparmor.d/abstractions/libvirt-qemu 2010-05-12 17:26:56 +0000
@@ -8,6 +8,8 @@
   capability dac_override,
   capability dac_read_search,
   capability chown,
+ capability setgid,
+ capability setuid,

Libvirt/kvm permissions/ownership issue on upgrade from Karmic to Lucid and error: operation failed: failed to retrieve chardev info in qemu with ‘indev’

libvirtError: internal error unable to start guest: libvir: QEMU
error : cannot set ownership

or

 error: operation failed: failed to retrieve chardev info in qemu with 'indev'

Add the following to /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf:

# The user ID for QEMU processes run by the system instance
#user = "libvirt-qemu"
user = "root"

# The group ID for QEMU processes run by the system instance
group = "kvm"

map serial port throws “chardev: opening backend “tty” failed”

There seems to be a problem with the apparmor profile of libvirt (see bug #54579). After adding the line to /etc/apparmor.d/abstractions/libvirt-qemu and reloading the profile it worked for me.

/dev/ttyS* rw,

Few other links:

• Bug 666130 – Cgroups cause libvirt to be unable to start virtual machines
• SELinux basic confinement – also some cgroup details
• Using CGroups with libvirt and LXC/KVM guests in Fedora 12
• libvirt started after cgred – cgroup not working correctly
• cgred should be started before libvirt-bin
• [SOLVED] Virt-manager picks wrong qcow2/raw format for new VMs (No bootable device.)
• LXC on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx – some cgroup notes.

Snippet for generating a random MAC address. Useful if adding interfaces to a libvirt xml define file.

MACADDR="52:54:$(dd if=/dev/urandom count=1 2>/dev/null | md5sum | sed 's/^\(..\)\(..\)\(..\)\(..\).*$/\1:\2:\3:\4/')";
echo $MACADDR
echo "
<interface type='bridge'>
<mac address='$MACADDR'/>
<source bridge='br233'/>
<model type='virtio'/>
</interface>
"

If you have a BSOD crash and the BIOS defaults after a checksum error, make sure you check the SATA ACHI/IDE settings. Otherwise window will not boot and you’ll get confused.

Seems kinit is particular:

I had similar problems. I figured out that krb5.conf requires the realm names to be in upper case. I have converted the domain names (wherever it appears in krb5.conf) to uppercase.

[root@LinuxLS logicalfuzz]# kinit myaccount@corp.example.com
Password for myaccount@corp.example.com:
kinit(v5): KDC reply did not match expectations while getting initial credentials
[root@LinuxLS logicalfuzz]# kinit myaccount@CORP.EXAMPLE.COM
Password for myaccount@CORP.EXAMPLE.COM:
[root@LinuxLS logicalfuzz]#

While setting up Nexenta 3.0 on a Intel SS4200, I hit this error: “transport failed reason tran_err“. The reason – a SATA cable was caught and being compressed between a drive cage and the case.

Ubuntu recently change their package names for kvm.  This comment posted on qemu-0.11.0 Released provides an explanation:

qemu-kvm includes features and fixes from upstream qemu and so takes its naming scheme from upstream qemu. You can think of it as qemu optimized for kvm. Note too that qemu-kvm does not include the kernel module but only the userspace and considered to be stable.

kvm-xx on the other hand is the development branch of kvm and not considered to be stable. It’s naming scheme is arbitrary and it also takes features from upstream qemu.

…

kvm-kmod is different to kvm-xx. You can think of kvm-kmod as a subset of the kvm-xx. KVM-xx = userspace + kernel where kvm-kmod is the kernel part of it and qemu-kvm is the userspace part (the guest process itself). You can apply the kvm-kmod to any distro version or linux version.. it’s just the kernel driver. However, without the userspace part, you can’t do much with it.

This is something I’ve been wanting in a DMS for a while. Alfresco now have native IMAP support. They also offer apt-get installable goodness for januty. It is possible there is some performance issues with the IMAP functionality, but I’m sure these will be fixed.  It might be time for me to do another review the DMS landscape.

A popular NZ blog I follow got infected by something like the worm mention in this wordpress.org post. They were running a very old version of wordpress, 2.5.X or some such. When I spoke to one of them, they said they knew they were running an old version, but their answer was move to drupal. It just had not happened yet.  While their move might be for other reasons than security, leaving a public piece of software unmaintained while waiting for a replacement is a bad idea.

Upgrading wordpress is now pretty seamless. Please follow the advice in the wordpress post.