It turns out that from VMware Player 3.0 onwards, vmnetcfg.exe is included in the installer package but is not installed by default, so configuring NAT or additional network interfaces is next to impossible. Luckily, Tony has devised a solution for this particularly annoying problem.

I just implemented elwell’s notify_via_jabber and it did not work at first. I got the following message in nagios.log:

I promptly apt-get installed libnet-xmpp-perl but the problem persisted — with the exact same error message. But Net::XMPP was now there!!
Well it happens that Embedded Perl Nagios (ePN) caches the compiled script and does not try to recompile it until its timestamp changes. So I touched(1) the script and this time the dependency was resolved correctly and the script was compiled sucessfully.

This is probably documented somewhere, but I could not find any reference to this kind of problem with Nagios cached scripts so I tought I would share this simple recipe.

As it turns out, there is a “cure” for shyness. Seth Stevenson’s story “Extroverted Like Me” is a journey into the world of coolness through chemical aids but it quickly turns into a cautionary tale for those willing to overcome their social awkwardness through the use of mood-altering drugs.
Chocolate still seems safe.

Say that you need to add a unique index to an existing catalog table, so you decide to add a new column with a consecutive number in it. You may make it an auto_increment column, but that would work only for new inserts. How would you populate the column for the exisiting rows?
If you’re using mySQL you may try this little recipe:
First let’s add the column that we’ll use later as primary key.

Now we declare a counter and use it to populate each row.

Finally, we transform the new column into the primary key.

There you go. A new auto-increment primary key that has been correctly populated for all existing rows.

A few months ago I installed a Firefox 3 beta in my Linux laptop to… well you know, just to fool around. And it crashed spectacularly. I tried again with RC1. No such luck. When 3.0 came around I installed it in several machines –including my wife’s– but it still refused to run in mine.
Today I decided I had enough and ran FF under strace and generally whacked it around hoping to make it work without much luck. I finally decided to apt-get install iceweasel 3.0.1 expecting to have apt-get iron out any possible library conflict but the problem persisted. If anything Firefox crashed even harder because Debian’s Iceweasel does not include Mozilla’s Crash Reporter — it suggests that you install bug-buddy instead. I obligued dutifully and much to my surprise, bug-buddy’s crash report had an extensive and very useful stack trace that revealed libpango as the real culprit.

After zapping libpango I had a working Iceweasel and a few seconds later I was running FF 3.0.1 as well. Now I will check the status of my 23 installed extensions (or at least of those I just can’t live without) and consider Firefox 3.0.1 seriously for my everyday browsing.