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Two power outages this morning (or more — I was out). The results: one dead Kaveman and one dead power supply on a switch (external, thankfully). Which in turn resulted in some hunting of rogue DHCP leases from an OpenWRT AP…
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Being on the road is a challenge to my music listening habits: no Squeezebox and no Spotify. I’ve managed ok with my iPods and Last.fm streaming. However, there’s been no good reason to miss Spotify, though, even when running Ubuntu on the laptop. Just follow the instructions to install and run Spotify under Wine.
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“Suddenly” Firefox had begun to pin the CPU at 100% even when not doing anything. I started to uninstall related recently added software. Looks like the culprit was swfdec-mozilla, which I had added hoping to get Cooliris working (no such luck — didn’t work with flashplugin-installer either). No flash now, but also no load when browsing the web. (And no burning sensation from the laptop.) (1)

Asterisk installation

Written late in the afternoon in English • Tags: , , , ,

Just a short note on getting a minimal Asterisk environment installed on current versions of Debian and Ubuntu:

aptitude install asterisk
m-a a-i zaptel
modprobe ztdummy

Also add ztdummy to /etc/modules so it gets loaded when the system starts.

If the m-a command is not found, install the module-assistant package.

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New installations of Debian have rsyslog as the system logging daemon. Upgraders, however, will be left with sysklogd — and no instructions on how to switch. I’m hoping purging the old one and adding the new one will work ok, as I’ve made no local mods to the logging configuration…

Upgrading to lenny

Written in the mid-morning in English • Tags: , , , ,

I’ve been always a fan of the robust upgrade procedure documented in the Debian release notes, which has worked without problems even over ssh to remote machines. This has made upgrading very painless (at least since sarge — I haven’t used Debian actively longer than that).

Yesterday I ran into a problem, though, which was only saved by having remote console access. I have a system with a slightly more complicated disk setup: it has two SCSI disks running as a RAID 1 array using md and lvm. Upon rebooting after the upgrade, the system didn’t reappear on the network. What I found on the console was the initramfs panic shell: the root file system had not been found. Rebooting the old etch kernel worked fine.

The workaround proved to be very simple, once I distilled it from the search engine results. Just add rootdelay=10 to the kernel options in the bootloader. I’m using GRUB so this translates to editing the kopt line in /boot/grub/menu.lst and running update-grub.

I had also added raid1 to modules in /etc/initramfs-tools and regenerated the initrd, but that (alone) didn’t help. I’m not even sure it is needed at all — it might already be included anyway when using MODULES=most in initramfs.conf.

Images, please

Written at lunch time in English • Tags: , ,

I’m following most web sites with Google Reader these days. With some sites I’ve noticed that images don’t show up in the reader interface. I figured this would be because the site is attempting to protect against hot-linking to its resources — and it seems I was right.

The quick fix with Firefox is to disable sending referer-information for inlined images. You can do this in about:config by changing the value of network.http.sendRefererHeader to 1.

While there, I also changed network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferrer to false. This prevents referer-information from being sent between different secure sites.