javier arturo rodríguez

Missing vmnetcfg.exe?

javier — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 06:57:11 +0000

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.

Link: JSESSIONID considered harmful

javier — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:00:13 +0000

Craig Condit makes a strong case against JSESSIONID in JSESSIONID considered harmful. And I just learned that it is disabled by default in Grails 1.1.

uHOWTO: Force script recompilation in embedded Perl Nagios

javier — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 05:46:16 +0000

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

[1237223883] **ePN failed to compile /usr/local/bin/notify_via_jabber: “Can’t locate Net/XMPP.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/perl/5.8.8 /usr/local/sh
are/perl/5.8.8 /usr/lib/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/5.8 /usr/share/perl/5.8 /usr/local/lib/site_perl .) at (eval 1) line 14,
BEGIN failed–compilatio” at /usr/lib/nagios2/p1.pl line 157.

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.

A dubious cure for shyness

javier — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:08:50 +0000

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.

U2 360º

javier — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:13:28 +0000

In other news, I just got my tickets for U2s’ first concert of the 360º tour in Barcelona!!! *Yay!*. Thanks, Jordi!

uHOWTO: Recover an empty Podcast playlist in iTunes

javier — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:20:44 +0000

Our main iTunes box had flaky RAM -a heck of a problem to debug by itself- so it used to BSOD quite a lot during the past couple of months. One of the most common side effects was that the iTunes Podcast playlist would appear empty every now and then. Luckily this is addressed in the Apple Knowledge Base and the solution amounts to using File|Add Folder to Library to add the {iTunes Music folder}/podcast folder to the library. Then you will have to re-activate your subscriptions by pressing the “Subscribe” button for all your favorite podcasts.

uHOWTO: Recover stuck modified keys from VMware Player or Workstation

javier — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:12:53 +0000

If you use VMware Player or VMware workstation under Linux and you’re an alt-tab fan like me, you might end up with stuck modifier keys, so you can’t use keys like Ctrl, Alt or Shift outside of VMware. Xiao Feng has written a nice script to recover from this annoying condition without having to reboot, and I tought I’d share it with everyone out there:

#!/bin/sh

# Xiao Feng’s "Recovering from stuck modifier keys caused by VMware"

# http://bitubique.com/tutorials/recovering-from-stuck-modifier-keys

/usr/bin/xmodmap – << fixme

clear shift

add shift = Shift_L Shift_R

clear lock

add lock = Caps_Lock

clear control

add control = Control_L Control_R

clear mod1

add mod1 = Alt_L Alt_R

clear mod2

add mod2 = Num_Lock

clear mod3

clear mod4

add mod4 = Super_L Super_R

clear mod5

add mod5 = Scroll_Lock

fixme

xset r on

xset m 3.5 4

xset b off

xset s off

uHOWTO: Speed up RAID resync

javier — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 06:54:37 +0000

So you’re tired of watching the grass grow while your Linux RAID2 array rebuilds itself. Let’s take care of it:
$ echo 10000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min
This should give you a 10x speedup over the 1000kB/sec default — subject to the limitations of your actual bus bandwidth, of course.

A brief note about Spamhaus Policy Block List

javier — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 01:23:59 +0000

After getting in closer-than-usual acquaintance with my mail server logs I thought I’d share a brief note I found in the Spamhaus PBL FAQ:

The first thing to know is: THE PBL IS NOT A BLACKLIST.

Oh, and since you’re already there you may want to linger a bit in this warning:

WARNING! Some post-delivery filters use “full Received line traversal” or “deep parsing”, where the filter reads all the IPs in the Received lines. Legitimate users, correctly sending good mail out through their ISP’s smarthost, will have PBL-listed IPs show up in the first (lowest) Received header where their ISP picks it up. Such mail should not be blocked! So, you should tell your filters to stop comparing IPs against PBL at the IP which hands off to your mail server! That last hand-off IP is the one which PBL is designed to check. If you cannot configure your filters that way, then do not use PBL to filter your mail. Instead, you may wish to use sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org, but even that may have unacceptable “false positive” filtering, for example when a an exploited end-user machine sends legitimate mail out through the ISP smarthost, or when the dynamic assignment changes the IP to an uninfected machine. Do not use PBL or XBL if you do not understand the issues of “deep parsing”.

(Emphasis mine)
So if your top-of-the-line multi-thousand-dollar antispam appliance starts blocking all my email just because there’s a dynamic IP address somewhere in the header and there’s no freaking way to turn it off please go ask for a refund. And stop bouncing my messages.
Oh and by the way the default SpamAssassin configuration in Debian assigns a 0.905 score if the last hop is in PBL.

score RCVD_IN_PBL 0 0.509 0 0.905

…

header RCVD_IN_PBL              eval:check_rbl(‘zen-lastexternal’, ‘zen.spamhaus.org.’, ’127.0.0.1[01]‘)

And yes, SpamAssassin does the right thing and checks only the *last* external address — I’ve seen the code:

package Mail::SpamAssassin::PerMsgStatus;

…

    # If name is foo-lastexternal, check only the Received header just before

    # it enters our internal networks; we can trust it and it’s the one that

    # passed mail between networks

So once again kudos to Open Source — and Common Sense.

DiskAid: access the files in your iPhone or iPod Touch

javier — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:14:31 +0000

A few weeks ago I upgraded my wife’s iPod Touch to 2.1, and I just can’t believe that iTunes won’t let you backup your content even if it means a paid firmware upgrade. I would have used PodsBlitz to back it up, except that Apple decided that it would be a good idea to strip off the disk mode from the iPod Touch.
I decided that there was nothing to be done for the music files: I would have copy the files manually after the upgrade, hoping to replicate my wife’s original selection as closely as possible. But that iPod also has a few of my daugther’s favorite movies… I rightly believed we could have a problem there. I’ve been converting her favorite DVDs for a year, and I carelessly deleted the converted files from the PC a long time ago leaving two options: either invest a few afternoons re-converting those DVDs, or somehow get those files out of the iPod and restore them later.
After a few google searches I stumbled upon a couple of promising projects that some day may grant you unrestricted access to the media residing in your iPod Touch, but those just refused to work in my wife’s PC. A few more queries later I found DigiDNA DiskAid, a nice little utility that speaks the iPod’s obscure file transfer protocol over USB and that lets you copy files back and forth. It’s far from perfect — it wiill only show the physical filename instead of the “real”, tag-based one, and it only does alphabetical sorting, even when sorting by file size. This made hunting for those movie files kind of annoying — annoying but *possible*, which is a lot more that can be said for Apple’s tools.