a technical IT blog
Archive for the ‘Misc’ Category.
If your server happened to crash, Postgres database is corrupted, but didn’t contain too precious information, you may try the following fix.
The typical symptoms of a corrupted Postgres database would be like below:
Continue reading ‘repairing broken PostgreSQL databases / tables’ »
If you ever wondered how to generate a sitemap file for Mailman (the GNU Mailing List Manager), to be submitted i.e. to Google, here is how.
All you have to do is replacing a few variables, and submitting the sitemap to your favourite search engine.
It is based on a real website running Mailman: http://lists.wpkg.org
With below code, it takes around 5 seconds to generate a sitemap consisting of 10000 articles.
If you’re looking for a way to add Facebook, Twitter, Google+ buttons in your MediaWiki installation, you may be disappointed – there are no plugins offering all three social buttons. There are some other plugins, but they are often outdated, don’t work with current MediaWiki versions, or are simply broken.
How about doing a small change to your skin then and adding the buttons yourself?
Continue reading ‘Facebook, Twitter, Google+ buttons in MediaWiki’ »
Some datacenters and hosting providers in New York area are still down following the Sandy storm hurricane.
One of them is ezzi.net, which is offline since around 1 am, 30-Oct-2012, CET time (or, 8 pm, 29-Oct-2012 EDT).
Continue reading ‘ezzi.net still down following Sandy storm hurricane’ »
It’s 22 Oct 2012, 18:30 UTC and it’s not possible to use Amazon EC2 web interface located at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/:
# curl https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/
Http/1.1 Service Unavailable
Continue reading ‘Amazon EC2 outage + web interface not working’ »
If you want to root your Motorola Droid Razr xt910, but can’t find proper Linux docs, here is a small howto. Do it on your own responsibility, you may brick your device!
Continue reading ‘rooting Motorola Droid Razr xt910 from Linux’ »
Quite unexpectedly, around 19.oo-20.oo CET, on 10 September 2012, many of my clients reported their websites or servers are down and unreachable.
Turns out Godaddy has some serious issues:
What kind of Godaddy outage is it, and how long will it take? Many, many websites are affected and offline at the moment. Globally, it probably translates to millions of losses.
Update: Apparently, the Anonymous claim responsibility for this outage.
$ host www.godaddy.com
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
$ date
Mon Sep 10 20:10:32 CEST 2012
$ time whois godaddy.com
Whois Server Version 2.0
Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
(...)
The Registry database contains ONLY .COM, .NET, .EDU domains and
Registrars.
Timeout.
real 1m1.377s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.000s
I’ve used desktop Linux for 15 years, and for all these years, it’s a continuous path of failures and sorry state.
Anyone still remembers KDE? KDE2 wasn’t so great, but KDE3 improved a lot and was really pleasant to use. Heck, no, the developers had to introduce the chaotic and unstable KDE4 – user base dramatically dropped and nobody has confidence in KDE anymore.
Gnome? Became even more popular after KDE4 was introduced. Unfortunately, Gnome developers, much as most Linux desktop developers, don’t learn on success of the others, rather, they repeat the errors of the others (KDE4). So Gnome 3 made it to the world, with users leaving and having same mixed feelings about it, just like they have with KDE4.
The new kid on the block, Unity, is as controversial and annoys a lot of its user with its inconsistency.
There are others, too, like MATE, Cinnamon, Xfce, but they suffer from even more immaturity than their bigger brothers.
What do we have so far on the Linux desktop? No organised engineering, no long term plans, no QA, releasing alpha versions as stable products, in short, just total revolutions every couple of years.
Frustrating.
If you’re one of these Motorola Razr or Motorola Razr Maxx owner, you’ve perhaps waited pretty long for the Android Ice Cream Sandwitch (ICS) / 4.0 upgrade.
Fortunately, it’s being deployed on more and more handsets now.
Continue reading ‘Motorola Razr and Android ICS / 4.0 upgrade screenshots’ »
If your java applications suddenly started to use 100% CPU, you’ve hit java leap second bug (actually it’s a bug in Linux kernel, just java programs seem to be severely affected).
First, you may check if you have the following in your dmesg:
[10703552.860274] Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC
Fortunately the fix is straightforward:
/etc/init.d/ntp stop
date -s "$(date)"
(the other suggested way around the web would be date `date +"%m%d%H%M%C%y.%S"`, having the same effect).
You don’t have to restart your java applications (tomcat, solr, wowza, or whatever using java, but also non-java Ruby, Redmine, collectd etc. were affected); it should be enough to run the above commands.
You may want to enable ntp the next day (there were some reports that enabling it makes java misbehave on some installations).
Apparently this issue has knocked down lots of Linux servers running Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and the like around the globe!
Continue reading ‘java leap second bug – 30 June / 1 July 2012 – fix’ »