Author: David (admin)

IT

VMWare Data Recovery is crap

VMWare Data Recovery is crap:

  • VMWare Data Recovery cannot be monitored and does not send out any warnings.
  • Running one instance of VMWare Data Recovery is too heavy for the appliance, causing the backups to be corrupted all the time
  • When running multiple instances of VMWare Data Recovery, say one instance per host, the whole thing is still slow as hell
  • Every few weeks, one backup gets corrupted. Of course the appliance does not notify you, no, instead you must login to the appliance to check the logs.
  • When you find a backup that is corrupted, you need to manually flag the restore point as "marked for deletion" and then start the integrity check.
  • When doing the integrity check, better pray that none of the other instances starts using the same nas/fileserver, as it gets so slow that the whole integrity check never gets completed.
  • I just tried to split the backups to multiple destinations, so that we can backup each virtual machine to its very own destination, and reduce the shitload of work the integrity check has to do when another backup is broken. Appears that VMWare Data Recovery only supports 2 destination per appliance instance.

I seriously consider VMWare Data Recovery to be the worst backup solution I've ever used.

© GeekLabInfo VMWare Data Recovery is crap is a post from GeekLab.info. You are free to copy materials from GeekLab.info, but you are required to link back to http://www.geeklab.info

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IT

HylaFax needs fonts

Trying to use HylaFax on CentOS 6, I got the following message:

/usr/sbin/textfmt: No font metric information found for "Courier-Bold".
Usage: /usr/sbin/textfmt [-1] [-2] [-B] [-c] [-D] [-f fontname] [-F fontdir(s)] [-m N] [-o #] [-p #] [-r] [-U] [-Ml=#,r=#,t=#,b=#] [-V #] files... >out.ps
Default options: -f Courier -1 -p 11bp -o 0
Error converting data; command was "/usr/sbin/textfmt -B -f Courier-Bold        -Ml=0.4in -p 11 -s default

This means that the font Courier-Bold is not installed on the system. On my CentOS 6 installation, I got it working by performing the following actions:

  • adding /usr/share/enscript/afm to both FontMap: and FontPath: in /etc/hylafax/hyla.conf
  • run sed -i "s/Courier-Bold/cob/g" /etc/hylafax/typerules
  • also, you need to install the package enscript: yum -y install enscript
© GeekLabInfo HylaFax needs fonts is a post from GeekLab.info. You are free to copy materials from GeekLab.info, but you are required to link back to http://www.geeklab.info

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IT

Un-hide the “http://” in Firefox 7

Firefox 7 has this annoying feature to hide the http:// in front of an address and to hide a single trailing forward slash. What's most annoying, is that when copying the url to a clipboard, it prepends the http:// again. So when I enter a website, then copy the domainname to a console in order to ping/trace/whois it, I have to remove the http:// manually.

To restore the prefix, enter the url about:config. Search for browser.urlbar.trimURLs and toggle it to false. That's all folks.

© GeekLabInfo Un-hide the "http://" in Firefox 7 is a post from GeekLab.info. You are free to copy materials from GeekLab.info, but you are required to link back to http://www.geeklab.info

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IT

Reconfigure nspluginwrapper

Yay, I just upgraded my nspluginwrapper and everything broke. Again. Couldn't use youtube or any of my other favorite sites anymore.

Running firefox from the console gave me some feedback:

*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: NP_Initialize() get args: Message argument mismatch
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: rpc_end_sync called when not in sync!
*** NSPlugin Wrapper *** ERROR: NP_Initialize() wait for reply: Connection closed
NOTE: child process received `Goodbye', closing down

When I google'd around a bit, I found some commands for older/different versions of nspluginwrapper. Finally, I tried the parameters of the old binary on the new binary:
/usr/lib64/nspluginwrapper/npconfig -a -v -i
and got the output:

Auto-install plugins from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
Looking for plugins in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
Install plugin /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
  into /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so
Auto-install plugins from /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins
Looking for plugins in /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-gmp-plugin.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
Install plugin /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-gmp-plugin.so
  into /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.libtotem-gmp-plugin.so
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/skypebuttons.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
Install plugin /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/skypebuttons.so
  into /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.skypebuttons.so
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-cone-plugin.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
Install plugin /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-cone-plugin.so
  into /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.libtotem-cone-plugin.so
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/librhythmbox-itms-detection-plugin.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
Install plugin /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/librhythmbox-itms-detection-plugin.so
  into /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.librhythmbox-itms-detection-plugin.so
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-narrowspace-plugin.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
Install plugin /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-narrowspace-plugin.so
  into /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.libtotem-narrowspace-plugin.so
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-mully-plugin.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
Install plugin /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-mully-plugin.so
  into /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.libtotem-mully-plugin.so
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
Install plugin /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
  into /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.libjavaplugin.so
Auto-install plugins from /home/username/.mozilla/plugins
Looking for plugins in /home/username/.mozilla/plugins
Install plugin /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
  into /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/libnpgoogletalk64.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
Install plugin /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/libnpgoogletalk64.so
  into /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.libnpgoogletalk64.so
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/libnpgtpo3dautoplugin.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
Install plugin /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/libnpgtpo3dautoplugin.so
  into /home/username/.mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.libnpgtpo3dautoplugin.so

After this, my Firefox was running as usual.

© GeekLabInfo Reconfigure nspluginwrapper is a post from GeekLab.info. You are free to copy materials from GeekLab.info, but you are required to link back to http://www.geeklab.info

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IT

WordPress: Posting images using XML-RPC

The following code uploads a file using xmlrpc... and without using all kinds of libs, you just need the regular php-xmlrpc module.

$rpcurl='http://www.enter-your-domain-name-he.re/xmlrpc.php';
$username='admin';
$password='your-password';
$blogid=1; //Post ID
 
$file=file_get_contents('file.jpg');
$filetype = "image/jpeg";
$filename = "remote_filename.jpg";
 
xmlrpc_set_type($file,'base64'); // <-- required!
$params = array($blogid,$username,$password,
            array('name'=>$filename,'type'=>$filetype,'bits'=>$file,'overwrite'=>false));
$request = xmlrpc_encode_request('wp.uploadFile',$params);
 
$result = go($request,$rpcurl);
print_r($result);
 
function go($request,$rpcurl){
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST,1);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$rpcurl);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$request );
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    return $result;
}
© GeekLabInfo WordPress: Posting images using XML-RPC is a post from GeekLab.info. You are free to copy materials from GeekLab.info, but you are required to link back to http://www.geeklab.info

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IT

Syslog kills Postfix performance

This night, some scriptkiddie decided it'd be fun to overload one of my servers by bruteforcing the FTP. The FTP server taking 90% of the CPU made the whole server slow. Especially the Postfix mailserver experienced a huge delay.

Anyway, I just firewalled out the scriptkiddie and Postfix could start processing the queue. But for some reason, it delivered no more than 5-10 mails a second. That would mean that processing the queue of 18.000 mails would take 30-60 minutes.

I've tried to figure out why Postfix was so slow before. Without any luck. Using the well known tuning pages didn't help me at all. Today, I opened up /usr/bin/top, to see that the system was doing a lot of I/O. I accidently found out why: I like to have syslog write *.* to /var/log/allmessages.

This simple rule caused so much extra I/O, that postfix was slowed down 90%. After disabling "allmessages" performance went up, and the queue was processed within minutes. Makes me wonder what happens if I...

  • disable logging at all, which is a bad idea as you can no longer spot abuse
  • find a way to enable write-cache - the default syslog of CentOS 5 does not support this AFAIK
  • write logs to another device

Interesting...

© GeekLabInfo Syslog kills Postfix performance is a post from GeekLab.info. You are free to copy materials from GeekLab.info, but you are required to link back to http://www.geeklab.info

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IT

My little SEO project (part 2)

Last week I built a site for rental of sinterklaas, a figure in Dutch holiday tradition.

I set up a WordPress blog with Woothemes Inspire. I used a few plugins to do SEO and to speed up the site:
Contact Form 7
Google Analyticator
Google XML Sitemaps
My Page Order
W3 Total Cache
WordPress SEO (yoast)
WP to Twitter
Yoast Breadcrumbs

Within 24 hours, we made it to the first page for relevant keywords. I got a first response in about 20 hours from launch. Then the ranking dropped. Anyway, I'm still pretty impressed.

© GeekLabInfo My little SEO project (part 2) is a post from GeekLab.info. You are free to copy materials from GeekLab.info, but you are required to link back to http://www.geeklab.info

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