February 19, 2008
Connection dropped
One of the aggravating issues I still have is that my wifi connection will get dropped once in awhile, and the only way to reconnect is by manually running this script that I created.
Ideally I want to have this happen automatically, but much investigation and googling has turned up little information.
Someone mentioned that wpa_supplicant might offer a solution, so I'll have a look there when I get more time.
Posted at 8:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 24, 2008
Brute force attack
Those regular ssh attacks to my web server have been bugging me now for some time. Those jerks needed to be taught a lesson.
This evening I gathered up my courage and decided to finally do something about it. Printed out a document about firewalling, studied them well and became an expert in no time.
So I fired up the good old PF packet filter firewall, added a simple pass rule which inserts the baddies into a table, blocking them for good.
That's more like it.
Posted at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
October 31, 2007
One lousy asterisk
I struggled last night into the wee hours of the morning scratching my head and yanking out my hair trying to figure out why I kept getting those awful 403 forbidden error pages when all I was trying to do was run a simple CGI-script.
That's when all of a sudden I realized that I had forgotten that all import asterisk, meaning that the correct apache directive should be:
<Directory /var/www/*>
Options +ExecCGI
</Directory>
Let's be more careful the next time, alright?!
Posted at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
October 30, 2007
Gnome desktop upgrade
I upgraded my Gnome desktop to 2.20 and everything went perfectly well.
Well, almost.
My fonts looked overly large and botched, but this was quickly remedied by firing up the good old gnome-control-panel and changing the appearance of the fonts to 96 dots per inch.
Posted at 8:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 12, 2007
OpenVPN
Trying to get OpenVPN to work properly under FreeBSD is turning out to become quite a bear, e.g. a much bigger bummer than I had originally expected it to be.
Up to now all this effort has become almost a complete waste of time, because I haven't accomplished anything (though of course I've learned an awful lot).
What's funny is that according to the installation instructions it should be a piece of cake, but it isn't.
This is yet another ongoing goal in life which hopefully someday I will be able to resolve in my spare time, depending on how sharp my technical acumen remains.
Posted at 1:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 9, 2007
APCUPSD working again
For quite some time now my APCUPSD daemon has been broken, and such an aggravation is something one typically postpones fixing forever. I'd expected the worst.
However, just a quick look and I figured it out fairly quickly. In the newer versions of apcupsd, the syntax of two parameters in the configuration file /usr/local/etc/apcupsd/apcupsd.conf have changed to:
UPSCLASS standalone
UPSMODE disable
Check it out for yourself by having your own look at my APCUPSD UPS Network Monitor on the kiffingish.com webserver.
Didn't realize it would be so trivial, should have checked it out earlier.
Posted at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 21, 2007
Fatal server error
After several weeks now, I finally got my X.org environment up and running after my ill-fated 7.2 upgrade mess.
The last obstacle was a mysterious error which popped up every time I ran startx, namely:
fatal server error: caught signal 10.
server aborting.
Yuk! So how did I fix this? The answer is simple: I simply commented out the following line in the /etc/xorg.conf file:
Section "Module"
...
#Load "glx"
...
EndSection
Seems to be something wrong with the OpenGL file included with the FreeBSD NVidia driver I downloaded and installed. I'll have to deal with this at a later time if ever.
Posted at 4:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 9, 2007
Upgrade mess
I should have never gotten started with the X.org 7.2 upgrade.
Two weeks later and my poor FreeBSD laptop is a complete mess, despite me having followed the upgrade instructions to a tee.
I'll give it one last try this weekend and see what happens.
Perhaps it is finally time to migrate over to Ubuntu.
Posted at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 27, 2007
Wacko mouse wheel
So why the heck was my mouse wheel causing the Firefox browser to move back/forward in history when I hit the top/bottom of the page?
This aggravating action has been bugging me for some time now, so you can imagine how relieved I was when I found the solution.
In summary, here is what I had to do:
- Open up the settings page by typing
about:configin the address bar and pressing Enter. - Filter on the word 'mousewheel'.
- Select
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.actionwith the mouse. - Click using right mouse button and select
Modifyfrom the drop-down list. - Change the value from
2to1
What a relief now that I can whiz my way up and down the page with the mouse wheel without worrying anymore.
Posted at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 16, 2007
Simply added
So this is what I did. I simply added gnome_enable="TRUE" in my /etc/rc.conf file. Now everything works just fine now.
Don't forget to include the following lines in the same order, namely:
dbus_enable="YES"
polkitd_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"
Also, in order to disable all that accounting stuff, I added the following line:
accounting_enable="NO"
When in doubt about these kind of aggravating issues a good place to visit is the web page at FreeBSD GNOME Project: GNOME 2.18 FAQ.
Posted at 9:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 1, 2007
Making gnome-terminal even better
In order to get the gnome-terminal to acquire your complete environment variables which is normally the case by default when firing up the plain-vanilla xterm program, all you have to do is add the following line to the .bashrc file:
. .bash_profile
Finally figured it out after all these years...
Posted at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 10, 2007
Recover lost wifi
For some strange unknown reason, since I changed ISP and started using a different SpeedTouch wireless access point, my Internet connection occasionally gets drop. My wi0 driver doesn't reconnect like it is supposed to which is pretty aggravating to say the least.
So when this happens I can use a simple script that I wrote which will in one go reconnect everything like magic as if nothing happened in the first place. Here it is:
#!/bin/sh
echo "Configuring wi0 for home ..."
ifconfig wi0 down
ifconfig wi0 media autoselect
ifconfig wi0 channel 1
ifconfig wi0 ssid [SSID goes here...]
ifconfig wi0 authmode open
ifconfig wi0 wepmode on
ifconfig wi0 weptxkey 1
ifconfig wi0 wepkey 0x[wepkey goes here...]
ifconfig wi0 up
dhclient wi0
Posted at 6:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 10, 2007
Clean-up ports
Whenever I do a
portsclean -CDD [ ✔ ]
and after a while I am returned to the prompt I feel alot better as if in some way or another I have cleansed my soul and prepared myself for the next step in life.
Posted at 9:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 7, 2007
Keyboard shortcut
Switch to workspace on the right:
<control><alt><right>
Posted at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 27, 2007
Installing Komodo IDE 4.0 on FreeBSD
After struggling awhile with the installation of Komodo on my FreeBSD 6.2 system, I *finally* was successful in getting it up-and-running. Therefore I would like to share my experiences in the hopes that in the future it may be helpful for some other fellow FreeBSD-er.
Installation:
- Download the linux libcpp5 tarball.
- Unpack and cd into extracted dirtectory.
- As root run ./install.sh
- Choose install directory: /usr/compat/linux/opt/Komodo-IDE-4.0
- As root cd /usr/compat/linux/opt/Komodo-IDE-4.0
- For the bin, share and lib directories do the following:
- chmod -R +x dirname
- chmod -R -s dirname
- chmod -R -t dirname
- chmod -R +r dirname
- Download the license and install on Windows or Linux (not FreeBSD)
- Copy ~/.ActiveState/ActiveState.lic and place in ~/.ActiveState directory
- Komodo can now be started as: /usr/compat/linux/opt/Komodo-IDE-4.0/bin/komodo
You can now create a quick launcher by using one of the images found in: /usr/compat/linux/opt/Komodo-IDE-4.0/share/icons/
I hope that this may be helpful to someone someday. I sure would have liked to know this in advance as it would have saved me a day of sweating and hair-pulling.
Posted at 6:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 20, 2007
Yet another wonderful upgrade
"So what are my interesting plans for the weekend?" you may ask.
Well, how about this? Upgrading to FreeBSD 6.2 and rebuilding my ports. More polished, stable.
That sure sounds like a fun and relaxing activity for the weekend, don't you think?
Posted at 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 15, 2007
Flash plugin
After all these years I finally figured out how to get the Macromedia flash plugin working under FreeBSD using the Firefox web browser.
Go to the Browsers page in the FreeBSD Handbook and look under chapter 6.2.4 Firefox, Mozilla and Macromedia® Flash™ plugin.
Just follow the directions step by step and then everything will work out just fine. (Don't forget to restart)
Posted at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 28, 2006
Missing menus
When I upgraded from Gnome 2.14 to 2.16 everything seemed to go along just fine, except for one very aggravating thing: my menus were missing.
In desperation I have been searching around forever trying to find a solution, but to no avail.
Finally this morning I figured it out, and now all my wonderful menus have magically returned, and they are beautiful.
Reinstall the gnome menus stuff and delete my user-defined config stuff just in case.
More accurately, this is what I had to do:
# su -
# pkg_delete -f gnome-menus-2.16.1
# rm -rf /var/db/pkg/gnome-menus-2.16.1
# cd /usr/ports/x11/gnome-menus
# make install clean
# exit
# cd
# rm -rf .config
# startx
Lo and behold it works and I am happy again.
Posted at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 2, 2006
So much easier
Here is something that you might be interested in.
portsnap fetch update
In the long run it is so much easier and quicker. Check it out yourself more information about portsnap and how it might simplify things.
Posted at 9:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 27, 2006
Three aggravations
If I could have things my way, there are three main frustrations related to my FreeBSD computer hobby activities that I would like to resolve, namely the following:
- Being able to print to my old-fashioned HP DeskJet 720C using the apsfilter utility. For some reason printing to a remote network printer works just fine but not locally via my printer port lpt0, as well as under good old Windows XP.
- Getting Asterisk configured so that it connects alright to the TDM400 telephony card I installed from Digium and connected to a Dect telephone.
- Configuring the Nagios host and service monitor to run correctly on my server and trigger me when something unusual is detected.
In the last year or so I have been working on and off trying to get these fixed but to no avail.
My life would become much less stressful and a hundred times more enjoyable if these issues could be reconciled in the not so distant future.
What are the chances of getting that to happen?
Posted at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 23, 2006
Wacko server
For some weird reason my server has been going completely wacko on a daily basis at around eleven o'clock or so every single evening. And I mean completely wacko.
Tons of file access activity, that little red led flashing endlessly, i/o overload is what it is all about, the sounds of disk access echoing all over the place. No way to even access my web site because it all times out. What to do?
In order to investigate things further I have installed Nagios to see if perhaps I can figure out what the heck is happening.
Hopefully I will come up with an answer in the not so distant future, but we will have to see.
Posted at 8:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 16, 2006
Komodo broken
When in doubt then perhaps it is a good idea to get rid of everything and start all over again.
That's what I decided to do when all of a sudden Komodo stopped working becuase of some linux emulation hiccup when I upgraded FreeBSD.
Have a look in the file /usr/ports/UPDATING and this is what you see:
20060616:
AFFECTS users of emulation/linux_base-*
We now use Fedora Core 4 as the linux base port, and the corresponding xorg libs for the linux X11 libs port.
To upgrade you have to run
portupgrade -f -o emulators/linux_base-fc4 linux_base\*
portupgrade -f -o x11/linux-xorg-libs linux-XFree86-libs
...
After this start a linux program to test, e.g., acroread. If you get
errors when starting linux programs about problems with libraries, and
you made sure no LD_* variable is set as described above, you are one of
those unlucky people where we do not have a better solution as to tell
you to deinstall every linux port, remove /compat/linux completely to
make sure no cruft is left and reinstall everything you need.
So that's what I did and things have improved greatly since then.
Posted at 7:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 18, 2006
Gnome back to normal
Don't know how I managed it really, but all of a sudden since this afternoon my Gnome desktop seems to be performing back to normal. What a relief.
I suspect that it had something to do with some weird mismatch during the upgrade where my previous private settings messed things up for some reason.
So what I did is this. Delete all of the dot-directories located in my home directory that looked like they had something to do with gnome, like .gnome, .gnome2, .gnome2_private, .icons, .themes, .gconf and .gconfd using good old rm -rf.
Posted at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 12, 2006
Gnome very sluggish
With much enthusiasm, they claim that the latest 2.14 version of Gnome was supposed to be a quantum leap in improvement, what with all that memory optimization, performance gains and a number of other truly amazing tweaks.
However, after having attempted to upgrade from the 2.12 version a number of times, reporting this and that, and reinstalling packages, I am afraid that I have been experiencing the exact opposite on my FreeBSD 6.1 platform.
The newest Gnome desktop has become a veritable nightmare for me. So much wasted time. Very sluggish and unresponsive, applications take forever to startup, and at times things become frozen and/or displaying erratic repaints and all.
I've pretty much given up all hope.
Posted at 2:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 25, 2006
BSD talk
|
bsdtalk Talking about the BSD family of free operating systems. |
This is a really good place to find interesting interviews, lessons, whatever about bsd-related information.
Be sure to check it out.
Posted at 3:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 8, 2006
All go for komodo pro
So how the heck did I somehow manage to get the newest release Komodo 3.5 Pro installed and up and running under my FreeBSD 6.0 system?
Much sweating and cussing and struggling into the wee hours of the night, but I did it and that is all that counts.
By the way, to save you tons of extra time, please take note that the following linux compatable packages are required:
- linux-gtk2
- linux-XFree86-libs
- linux-pango
If you have any other questions do not hesitate to place them here.
Posted at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 29, 2005
Upgrade successful
Whenever a new version of FreeBSD comes out, I get very impatient, endlessly feeling itchy and uncomfortable and sleeping lousy until I have finally upgraded my system to the latest and greatest.
The only problem is that upgrades like this are not trivial and there are certain risks involved, for example your whole system not working anymore.
So to make a long story short, despite the dangers involved and the chances of blowing up my poor laptop, I have managed to upgrade successfully from version 5.4 to 6.0, hurrah.
Only had some problems with my wi0 wireless interface due to some subtle changes (I mean improvements) for wireless networks that have been introduced. Namely the following error message kept appearing during boot:
ieee80211_load_module: load the wlan_wep module by hand for now.
This is what I had to do. Add the following line to my kernel configuration file LAPTOP and do a rebuild:
device wlan
device wlan_wep # Added this line.
and change the ifconfig stuff in my /etc/rc.conf file to this:
ifconfig_wi0="inet [ip_addr] netmask 255.255.255.0 ssid [ssid_name] mode auto wepmode on weptxkey N wepkey N:0x[hex-password]"
I had to add the weptxkey N command and the wepkey N: prefix. Replace the [hex-password] etc. values with your own, of course.
That's it.
Posted at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 3, 2005
ICE-unix must be root owned
Whatever you do, please be sure that you do NOT include the following line in your rc.conf file:
# /etc/rc.conf
clear_tmp_enable="YES"
I thought I was being overly clever again by having all of my so-called leftover temporary files removed during each reboot, but boy was I mistaken.
The next time I tried to fire up my good old Gnome Desktop it blew up with the following cryptic error message:
_ICETransmkdir: ERROR: euid != 0, directory /tmp/.ICE-unix will not be created.
As it turns out, after nearly a whole day of struggling and searching, I finally figured out what the problem was. You see, the clear_tmp_enable="YES" directive in the rc.conf file was deleting the /tmp/.ICE-unix file. Due to some security feature of X Windows, this file (and also the file /tmp/.X11-unix by the way) has to be root owned. You can't just create it via the desktop as the usual default user.
Here is the workaround in case you too have become entangled in this dilemma. First make sure you are logged in as root, then do the following:
# cd /tmp
# mkdir .ICE-unix
# chmod 777 .ICE-unix
# chmod +t .ICE-unix
So try not to be too clever unless you are absolutely sure of the potential consequences and do not especially like wasting a whole day searching and struggling for nothing.
Posted at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 2, 2005
UPS and running
Got my Uninterruptable Power Supply (a.k.a. UPS) installed and now it seems to be running alright. Thanks to the apcupsd driver which offers much in terms of monitoring the power supply and getting your servers shutdown cleanly in case of electrical spikes and/or interrupted power.
Then the test... When it came down to testing the setup to make sure it was working, I must admit feeling a little bit nervous about pulling the plug to see what would happen. However, it was actually kind of fun when you think about it. Living on the edge by closing my eyes tight and ripping out the plug. There we go, I did it. The master-slave setup went fine, enough power for two machines continuing for nearly fiftteen minutes. Then the automatic shutdown, beep-beep, and the power off sequence. Truly amazing. Put the plug back, the UPS beeped alive and the two machines rebooted perfectly. Just as if nothing had ever happened.
Posted at 5:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 2, 2005
Important decisions
This fine weekend I made a number of very important decisions that will more than likely make my life much less complicated and therefore much more enjoyable, namely the following:
- Dump that annoying Windows XP completely and replace it with the much more advanced FreeBSD operating system.
- Forget about XFCE for now and concentrate on adapting to the slightly more fattening Gnome desktop instead.
- Remove Firefox which is unstable and slow anyway, and just use the default Epiphany web browser which is native to the Gnome desktop.
- Stay with the standard integrated Evolution mail program rather than the more boring Thunderbird mail client.
My feeling is that while those products like Firefox and Thunderbird started out innocently enough, because of their wonderful success they have just become too bloated and unwieldly for me. Too bad, but see you later.
I prefer speed and simplicity to advanced functionality ninety percent of which I will never ever use anyway.
Posted at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 10, 2005
Bulk package delete
This was the dilemma I found myself in today. I wanted to remove all of the Gnome stuff from my FreeBSD installation in order to make a clean start by reinstalling it all over again.
However, what's a poor soul to do when 'pkg_info | grep -i gnome | wc -l' results in a long list of packages (36) that all need to be removed safely first?
# pkg_info | awk '/gnome/ { print $1; system("pkg_delete " $1); }'
That's just one possible way of achieving this, maybe not the best but it works anyway.
Posted at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 2, 2005
Web server upgrade
Without a single hiccup, I somehow managed to upgrade my web server to the latest version of FreeBSD 5.4, that wonderful operating system we have come to love and cherish.
Much to my amazement, this conversion took place with a couple hours. Hurrah.
Of course, I could have never done it alone. A fine colleague who is an expert on these kinds of tricky issues gave me a helping hand.
So here is a very special thanks to An for the extra help.
Posted at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 28, 2005
Flash plugin up and running
Finally got the linux flash player plugin to work properly with firefox running on my freebsd 5.3 system.
Such a pain sweating and struggling for hours on end for something which by default should be running fine from the very beginning.
That's one (dis)advantage of trying to become a pioneer freebsd geek type person.
Posted at 1:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
January 21, 2005
Another upgrade
Alright so I finally managed to upgrade my web server to FreeBSD 5.3 after putting it off endlessly and gathering up enough courage to do the unthinkable.
So far this is what is all running there:
- www.kiffingish.com
- www.kiffinsblog.com
- www.kiffin.nl
- www.kiffin.org (soon to come)
- www.cyber-gish.com (soon to come)
Is this getting a bit too exaggerated or what?
Posted at 1:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 9, 2005
Doing a port upgrade
Alright so I figured I would try to prove myself as a full-fledged FreeBSD guru kind of guy by doing this:
portupgrade -arR
After more than twelve hours my poor laptop is still gobbling up all kinds of stuff, compiling. linking and installing who knows what.
That means that I will have to be patient and hope that all turns out alright in the end.
Posted at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
December 11, 2004
Gnome up and running
Alright then, after spending most of the day and evening staring at the monitor and pounding on the keyboard, I finally got my wireless card configured correctly.
ifconfig wi0 ssid gish wepmode on wepkey etc.
Now that I have the usual connection to the Internet again, I could finish off getting the Gnome Desktop working on my FreeBSD machine.
So far so good...
Posted at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
November 27, 2004
Something daring
Now is the time to do something daring in life for a change.
Like re-partitioning the hard disk of my laptop and installing FreeBSD on it. I sure hope it works and that in the process I do not accidently destroy my settings.
Maybe most people would think I am acting crazy, but weekends might otherwise become too boring.
So far so good (I hope).
Posted at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
