troubleshooting

I've been using Samba for awhile to allow (among other things) my Windows boxes to print to my CUPS-based printer on Gentoo Linux. Haven't had any problems in a good long while (not since getting it set up initially, 4-5 years ago). Until this week, when portage updated my Samba.

After applying this weeks iTunes/Quicktime update, Butler would hang when launched. Deleting prefs and moving config files didn't help. I use Butler so extensively that losing its features is a big deal - certainly a big enough deal that I was wishing I could rollback the last update. Luckily there's an easy solution, but it took me a few minutes to figure out.

The 10.4.9 update of Mac OS X has a "feature" where it will automatically fsck your .dmg's when you mount them, and if the fsck fails it will give the error "The disk image you are opening may be damaged and could damage your system."

Hopefully none of you will ever need to run tcpdump on Windows, but if you do, I found one today that worked pretty well, at http://microolap.com/products/network/tcpdump

So I decided to experiment with NetBSD (i386, the 'stable' 3.1 version). So far... eh. Not that impressed, especially since I encountered two issues just trying to get it installed and bootable:

There is a bit of frustration with trying to get Drupal working on a GoDaddy Linux shared hosting plan, specifically the "Clean URLs" feature. I don't pretend to understand it, but in case anyone else is struggling with this, here's how it went for me:

1. For starters, I was porting an existing Drupal from another site over to GoDaddy. The previous installation had "Clean URLs" working fine.
2. I moved the code over to GoDaddy, updated the database settings, and was happy to see the home page come up.
3. Sadly, that is ALL that would come up. Any other link gives a 404 Error page.

I just wasted the better part of an hour trying to troubleshoot a "cron run failed" error on one of my Drupal sites (oddly, only one of four was affected). Trying to run cron manually from the status page gives a "cron run failed" error, and looking at the "Recent log entries" (aka watchdog, apparently) showed a message "Attempting to re-run cron while it is already running".

Having just spent way too long (couple hours) figuring out how to set environment variables on Mac OS X 10.5 in such a way that they were accessible from a bundled Java application (specifically, M2_HOME in IntelliJ so that the Maven integration would work 100%), I'm writing this up so that 1) I don't have to remember it later, and 2) to possibly save other folks the hassle.

For the impatient, the solution is

1) edit /etc/launchd.conf to contain a line like this:

setenv M2_HOME /opt/maven/2.0.9

2) reboot

Your environment variable will now be accessible in every possible context (that I could find) in which you can run your application. There are other ways to do this, but none of them worked for me. If you're interested in the details, read on.

So I have a brand new DELL XPS M1530, which has Vista pre-installed, and also comes with MediaDirect. Its been working good for about 2-3 wks, until today, whilst doing a normal power cycle to install some software, I inadvertently pressed the MediaDirect key (the little button with the house on it, just left of the power button). Now, before now, I had no idea what that button was. I'm still not sure what it is supposed to do, other than the end result was IT MADE MY SYSTEM COMPLETELY UNBOOTABLE!

So today I'm fiddling a bit with my hosting setup, and part of that involved shuffling my Drupal installation from the root to a subdirectory. Which caused the "clean urls" not to work.

Now back when I first migrated my Drupal to GoDaddy, I had problems with clean urls not working. Which resolved itself and to this day I don't know why. Today it was something different.

What I ended up needing to do, was to uncomment the RewriteBase directive in htaccess. Once I did that, things started working. For the curious, here's how I got there: