Notes and more

With the release of Ubuntu 16.04 it was time to do some maintenance on my home ESXi server.  This server is a small variation of the Baby Dragon II and is so low maintenance that I even forgot what version of ESXi it was running.

But, I did remember that you could actually download the Vsphere client from the home page from the ESXi server.

Turns out I was running ESXi 5.1.0 and the installer did not work on Windows 10.

The installer looked like it was working but after extracting the MSI it would disappear. After some probing I found out that there was an issue with installing the following frameworks:

• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
• Microsoft Visual J# 2.0 x64

As a workaround I used 7zip and extracted the installer.

In the .Net folder you can run the dotnetfx35.exe but Windows 10 will tell you that an older version of .Net is required by a program and will install it for you.

Next, install the Visual J redistributable and you are ready to run the installer in the bin folder.

Now it is time to start upgrading my Ubuntu 12.04 instances to Ubuntu 16.04 and maybe even replace the Solaris Open Indiana ZFS with the Ubuntu 16.04 ZFS.

Pureftp is a simple and secure ftp server that supports virtual users that can be chrooted. That was I was looking for when I needed to provide some external access to my home server. However, as often, on Ubuntu things work a bit different then on other platforms and the documentation I found was only partial.

The basic installation is simple, then the documentation mention you need to create one user that can be used by all the virtual users.

# Install pure-ftpd
sudo apt-get install pure-ftpd
# add group for virtual users
sudo groupadd ftpgroup
# add ftp user for virtual user
sudo useradd -g ftpgroup -d /dev/null -s /etc

Before creating any virtual users you need to change the settings. The way the settings work is that the /etc/pure-ftpd/conf contains files that specify the settings. To enable the ChrootEveryone option you need to create a file with that name with the contents "on".

# Enable ChrootEveryone option
sudo echo on > /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/ChrootEveryone

What took me the longest to figure out is that the virtual users authentication is not enabled by default. To enable this you need to create a link in the auth folder to the PureDB.

# Enable the virtual user authentication
sudo ln -s /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/PureDB /etc/pure-ftpd/auth/40PureDB
# And restart pure-ftpd
sudo /etc/init.d/pure-ftpd restart
Restarting ftp server: Running: /usr/sbin/pure-ftpd -l puredb:/etc/pure-ftpd/pureftpd.pdb -l pam -8 UTF-8 -O clf:/var/log/pure-ftpd/transfer.log -u 1000 -E -A -B

Make sure that the -l puredb:/etc/pure-ftpd/pureftpd.pdb is present, this is the option for the virtual users authentication and the - A as this is the chroot option.

After this you can pretty much follow the standard procedures:

# Create the user dir
mkdir /srv/ftp/joe
# Change the owner/group to the ftp user
sudo chown ftpuser:ftpgroup /srv/ftp/joe
# Create user joe with home directory /srv/ftp/joe
pure-pw useradd joe -u ftpuser -d /srv/ftp/joe
# Write changes to the database
pure-pw mkdb

After this you can login with the newly created user.

While I was evaluating Gerrit 2.6 I ended up installing the building the latest snapshot version (2.7RC) myself. All was fine until I was about to setup Jenkins to verify my commits. I was surprised to find the label "Verified" missing from the reviews. After some googling I found that in version 2.7 this has been removed and needed to be added manually in the project.config. After searching my drives I could not find this project.config only to realize that this is a file in the meta config. And this below is how you edit it:

mkdir tmp
cd tmp
git init
git remote add origin ssh://admin@remote.site.com:29418/All-Projects
git fetch origin refs/meta/config:refs/remotes/origin/meta/config
git checkout meta/config

Now you should have the project.config in you temp folder. Add the label as below:

[label "Verified"]
       function = MaxWithBlock
       value = -1 Fails
       value =  0 No score
       value = +1 Verified

Next you need to commit and push back to Gerrit. Ofcourse make sure you have the appropriate rights.

git commit -a
git push origin meta/config:meta/config

I was trying to install Openindiana using the Supermico AOC S2308L-L8i HBA but I was unable to get Openindiana to recognize the card.

At this point I decided to cross flash the card to the LSI SAS 9207-8i firmware that uses the same controller.

As a back up I downloaded the original Supermicro firmware from there ftp server.

In the original firmware there is a nice script for UEFI boot that shows you how to flash the card.
This is the original script:

echo -off
sas2flash.efi -o -e 7
cls
sas2flash.efi -f 2308IT14.ROM
cls
sas2flash.efi -b mptsas2.rom
cls
sas2flash.efi -o -sasaddhi 5003048

To flash using the LSI firmware you just need to replace the 2308IT14.ROM with the 9207-8.BIN. Copy the script and the 9207-8.ROM and mptsas2.bin into the same folder and you are good to go.

Memory leak detection: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e5ewb1h3(v=vs.80).aspx
Visual leak detector: http://vld.codeplex.com/
For Linux, valgrind: http://valgrind.org/info/about.html

I recently migrated my tomcat7 server to a new esxi server and had the following issue:

Caused by: java.lang.Error: Probable fatal error:No fonts found.

There are a few explanations found on the web:

1. Tomcat is running headless. Add this -Djava.awt.headless to /etc/init.d/tomcat7. Checked, was there already so this is not the cause.
2. Add missing fonts: apt-get install msttcorefonts This also didn't fix the problem
3. Used Sun Java. Hmmm, indeed I just installed tomcat and let the dependencies automatically install. Should have used the sun java.
4. One more fix: apt-get install ttf-dejavu

Ok, installing the ttf-dejavu fixed the issue!

Next time I will make sure not to use the open-jdk but the sun-jdk to prevent this issue.

These are some quick notes on how to setup a subversion mirror on ubuntu 12.04

First install apache2, subversion and the binding

apt-get install apache2
apt-get install subversion
apt-get install libapache2-svn

create dir /etc/apache2/ssl and copy you ssl files to this folder.

Update /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl or create a new site.

Make these changes to the site config.

SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/my-site.com.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/my-site.com.key
SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/apache2/ssl/gd_bundle.crt

Enable ssl module, the ssl site and then restart apache2:

a2enmod ssl
a2ensite default-ssl
service apache2 restart

Now you should ssl working and it is time to add the subversion proxy.

Add the proxy module to apache2:

a2enmod proxy
a2enmod proxy_http
a2enmod rewrite

Update default-sll, after ServerName add
SSLProxyEngine on
Before BrowserMatch add:

SSLProtocol -ALL +SSLv3

<Location /svn>
DAV svn
SVNParentPath /www1/svn
SVNMasterURI https://masterip/svn
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Subversion repository"
AuthUserFile /www1/etc/local-authentication
Require valid-user
</Location>

Proxy for a Trac instance:

ProxyPass /trac https://masterip/trac
ProxyPassReverse /trac https://masterip/trac

Make sure you proxy https to https. Mixing http and https will cause problem later on when performing copies in subversion commits and they will fail.

I am running a small Ubuntu server that I have just given 8GB of virtual HD space. I thought that would be enough. However, as I was trying to transfer some data to it I ran out of space. This left me wondering what happened.

I went to search where the data was stored and it was in /var/cache/apt. It contained 560MB. This is what I did to clean it.

# sudo apt-get autoclean
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Del libapt-inst1.4 0.8.16~exp12ubuntu10.5 [99.8 kB]
Del linux-image-server 3.2.0.33.36 [2,652 B]
Del linux-headers-virtual 3.2.0.33.36 [2,642 B]
Del perl 5.14.2-6ubuntu2.1 [4,416 kB]
Del libapt-pkg4.12 0.8.16~exp12ubuntu10.5 [939 kB]
Del perl-modules 5.14.2-6ubuntu2.1 [3,396 kB]
Del firefox-locale-en 17.0+build2-0ubuntu0.12.04.1 [482 kB]
Del perl-base 5.14.2-6ubuntu2.1 [1,498 kB]
Del apt 0.8.16~exp12ubuntu10.5 [1,100 kB]
Del linux-libc-dev 3.2.0-33.52 [867 kB]
Del linux-headers-server 3.2.0.33.36 [2,648 B]
Del apt-utils 0.8.16~exp12ubuntu10.5 [190 kB]
Del coreutils 8.13-3ubuntu3.1 [2,216 kB]
Del apt-transport-https 0.8.16~exp12ubuntu10.5 [16.3 kB]
Del linux-server 3.2.0.33.36 [1,728 B]
Del firefox-locale-en 16.0.2+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1 [481 kB]

Cache reduced a little bit to 545MB, clearly that was not what I was looking for. Time to wipe out the cache!

sudo apt-get clean

Almost enough space now, but not quite. What else was taking up space. The /usr/src contained 1.2GB of linux headers of all previous kernels that were installed.
Then I came across this post by Ubuntu Genius where he gave this nice one line command:

dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge

or interactive:

sudo apt-get remove --purge $(dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d')

Just make sure you have rebooted since your last kernel upgrade!

This cleared another 2.5GB!!!!

I recently upgrade an Ubuntu server from 10.04 to 12.04 and I encountered this error when trying to mount a cifs folder on a Windows 7 machine.

mount error(12): Cannot allocate memory
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs)

I suspected it was related to the recent upgrade but it turns out that the error was caused by the Windows 7 system. I only mount this folder on rare occasions when I want to back up some folders to this system. Therefore I can not be sure if the problem was caused by my recent server update or some recent Windows 7 updates.

I found the solution in this post and some more details here:

These registery items need to be changed to make Windows 7 act more as a file server and prevent the error:

• HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory ManagementLargeSystemCache change to 1
• HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesLanmanServerParametersSize change to 3

This site runs on a Ubuntu 12.04 LAMP server behind another Ubuntu Apache proxy using a virtual host. When I tried to set up the permalinks it didn't work straight away. The .htaccess file was correct and mod_rewrite was enabled. It was the virtual host that had some issue.
The website has been configured under /var/www/blog.your-site.name and these are the steps you should take to make sure the permalinks work:

• Open .htacces in /var/www/blog.your-site.name and change it to look like this:

  # BEGIN WordPress
  <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteBase /
  RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
  </IfModule>
  

• Enable mod_rewrite for Apache:

  sudo ae2enmod rewrite

• Create your host configuration in /etc/apache2/sites-available/blog.your-site.name and make it look like this:
  

  <VirtualHost *:80>
      ServerName blog.your-site.name
      ServerAdmin admin@your-site.name
  
      DocumentRoot /var/www/blog.your-site.name
      
          Options FollowSymLinks
          AllowOverride None
          Order deny,allow
          Deny from all
      
      
          Options Indexes FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
          AllowOverride all
          Order allow,deny
          allow from all
      
  
  
      ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/blog.your-site.name-error.log
  
      # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
      # alert, emerg.
      LogLevel warn
  
      CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/blog.your-site.name-access.log combined
  
  </VirtualHost>
  

That should do the job.