GD Library versions and Ubuntu

Posted on January 14th, 2010 in General, Technology, Work by Jim Prince

I'd been having a problem with GD being out of date on a LAMP installation on Ubuntu. This was odd because the installation is the latest (9.10) release. After some digging, it would seem that in Ubuntu PHP5 is not compiled with the version of GD that comes bundled with PHP! 

There's a really helpful article explaining how to recompile PHP5 with support for the latest version of GD here. You'll probably need to update the directories and file names depending on the release you're using but it worked for me.

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Overclocking an Intel E2160

Posted on January 4th, 2010 in General, Personal, Technology by Jim Prince

A while back I overclocked my aging Gigabyte motherboard and Intel Pentium 2160 processor. I overclocked the CPU from 1.8Ghz to 3.0Ghz and the machine has been rock solid with the CPU core temperature around 45° even under load.
 
The motherboard is a Gigabyte ga-p35-s3. Here are the settings I used;
 
CPU Clock Ratio [9x]
CPU Frequency [3.00 Ghz (333x9)]
CPU Host Freqency [333]
System Memory Multiplier [2.40]
System Voltage Control [Manual]
DDR2 Overvoltage Control [+0.1v]
PCI-E Overvoltage Control [+0.1v]
FSB Overvoltage Control [+0.1v]
CPU Voltage Control [1.50000v]
 
I hope this helps someone but of course your mileage may vary. Any changes you make as a result of this post are entirely at your own risk…
 

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Publishing vsftp though ISA – 550 permission denied

Posted on November 24th, 2009 in General, Technology, Work by Jim Prince

A simple one that caught me out recently. I’d setup an FTP site using vsftpd which was published through ISA 2006. By default FTP Filtering on an ISA rule is setup as read only. So if you try to upload a file you’ll get an error 550 permission denied.

Read Only

The fix is simply to right click on the rule in ISA and select Configure FTP. Then un-tick Read Only. Click OK and Apply.


Dell OpenManage on CentOS 5.4

Posted on November 23rd, 2009 in General, Technology, Work by Jim Prince

I'd been having a problem configuring Dell OpenManage with CentOS 5.4 so I've written it up here so that;

  1. I don't forget it.
  2. It may help someone else with the same problem.

Basically when starting the daemons you'd get the following error;

/etc/init.d/dsm_om_shrsvc start
Starting DSM SA Shared Services: /bin/bash: line 1: 3119 Aborted /etc/delloma.d/oma/bin/dsm_om_shrsvc32d [FAILED]

I'd already made sure that all pre-requisites had been met and that the software installed correctly. A colleague even posted the problem on the Dell Support Forums. I got fed up waiting for a response so I installed strace to see what was going on behind the scenes. 

Looking at the system calls I could see lots of errors of the type;

open('/usr/lib/locale/en_UK.UTF-8/LC_IDENTIFICATION';, O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

So I ran locale which produced

locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

The fix was to add;

export LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-8
export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

to /etc/profile and then run . /etc/profile.

Now the daemons start correctly and the locale command runs without errors.

 

Posted via email from Jim’s Posterous Blog


Merry Christmas!

Posted on November 5th, 2009 in General, Personal, Technology by Jim Prince

Had the following email from Orange…

Thank you for registering your interest in the iPhone.

Orange isn’t just bringing you the iPhone. Together with the UK’s
biggest 3G network, covering more people than any other, we’re
bringing you a winning combination.

You will be eligible for an upgrade on 25/12/2009, so when the time
comes, you can enjoy one of the best handsets on the market.

Posted via email from Jim’s Posterous Blog


Error Code: 500 Internal Server Error. An internal error occurred. (1359)

Posted on October 18th, 2009 in General, Technology, Work by Jim Prince

I spent more time than I should have trying to diagnose, what turned out to be, a relatively simple problem last week.
 
We were using an ISA 2006 Array to load balance a Silverlight App between multiple web servers. Each server was added to a web farm in ISA and the rule was configured using the ISA publishing wizard. The app was accessed via the Internet over SSL with the SSL connection terminating on the ISA server.
 
Having applied the rule changes I attempted to access the website through the browser only to be greeted with a dirty great 500 internal server error. I double checked the settings for the rule and clicked the 'test rule' button and everything seemed to be correct. Slightly baffled I confirmed that I could access each of the web servers directly, and again didn't get any errors.
 
Next I clicked on the Monitoring option in ISA and navigated to the monitoring tab, I setup a filter to monitor traffic specifically for the rule and could see the requests were reaching the relevant ISA Server then bombing out with the 500 error.
 
It was only when I clicked the connectivity verifier tab that I noticed the big red x-marks next to each of the servers. It transpires that ISA had setup a connectivity verifier in the format https://*/ which had of course failed because the servers were serving requests over http not https. As each verifier failed ISA removed the offending server from the array leaving no available servers to handle requests!
 
Once I'd updated the connectivity verifier everything settled down and started working correctly.
 
In hindsight if I'd bothered to check the Event Viewer on each of the ISA servers I'd have spotted the root cause much sooner… you live and learn.

Posted via email from Jim’s Posterous Blog


Windows 7 – Getting Live Messenger off the Taskbar

Posted on September 11th, 2009 in General, Technology, Work by Jim Prince

Time for another quick post about Windows 7. If you’re irritated by Windows Live Messenger appearing in your taskbar instead of as a tray icon, as it did in Windows Vista/XP, then there’s a really simple fix.

Messenger""


Just right click on the taskbar icon, then right click Windows Live Messenger and select properties.



Click on the compatibility tab and check the box “Run this program in compatibility mode for” and select Windows Vista Service Pack 2. Job done.

Tray Icon


Copying error messages from dialog boxes

Posted on August 17th, 2009 in General, Technology, Work by Jim Prince

I made an interesting discovery recently. It would appear that if you press CTRL + C when the focus is on a error message it copies the text from the dialog box onto your clipboard. How useful is that?

Here’s an example;


Contents from the clipboard after pressing CTRL + C.


---------------------------
Message from webpage
---------------------------
Unable to retrieve configuration settings.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

I wonder what other useful features I’m still to discover? Oh and if anyone knows why I’m unable to retrieve configuration settings I’d like to know ;-)


How to use the Cisco VPN Client on 64bit Windows 7

Posted on June 29th, 2009 in Technology, Work by Jim Prince

XP Mode is a new feature of Windows 7 which allows you to run apps from a Windows XP Virtual Machine as if it was on the desktop of your Windows 7 PC.

The following details how to use this facility in order to run the Cisco 32bit VPN Client from a Windows 7 64bit Install.

First you need to get XP Mode installed and running. I followed the instructions on LifeHacker. I used the official Intel Processor Identification Utility to confirm my CPU supported Hardware Virtualisation so can’t comment on SecurAble.

Ensure you download the x64 software packages for your PC, but note that the XP Virtual Machine will be 32bit regardless.

Once you’ve followed the instructions on Lifehacker boot up the XP Virtual Machine and install the Cisco VPN Client. Once the install is complete you should see the Cisco program group appear on your Windows 7 programs menu under Windows Virtual PC -> Virtual Windows XP Applications.

I mainly use VPN to access servers using remote desktop so I tried making a shortcut to mstsc.exe in the programs menu of my Virtual Machine. Unfortunately this didn’t appear in the Virtual Windows XP Applications menu. I’m not sure why this is, but after some searching I found a comment on Virtual PC Guys Weblog with some instructions.

Basically copy mstsc.exe and the en-us directory from “c:\windows\system32″ to a folder under c:\program files in your VM. Then create a shortcut under “c:\documents and settings\all users\start menu\programs” to the mstsc.exe under program files. Hey presto remote desktop appears under the Virtual Windows XP Applications Folder.


I can now run the Cisco VPN Client and access remote severs from my 64bit Windows 7 desktop without having to boot up and log into an x86 VM. :-D


.Net Framework and MOSS 2007

Posted on June 10th, 2009 in Technology, Work by Jim Prince

Yesterday I had a frustrating experience trying to install .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 in one of our dev environments. Due to some, frankly bizarre, dependency problems I found myself having to uninstall .Net 3.5, .Net 3.0 and .Net 2.0. I was then finally able to install .Net 3.5 SP1 which thankfully is cumulative.

Optimistically I thought that would be the end of the issue but SharePoint seemed to be very broken. For example if I tried to navigate to the root of a site collection I’d get a 404 error. If I navigated to the full URL using /pages/default.aspx the site would load but images called from a document library were missing. If I accessed pages under /_layouts such as settings.aspx then everything loaded just fine.

The Windows Event logs were empty and since SharePoint Central Administration was exhibiting the same behaviour I ran the SharePoint Config Wizard. Once this completed CA was fine but I still had problems with the other Webapps and Site Collections.

At this point I resorted to trawling Google and perhaps for the first time in my career found the solution on Experts Exchange.

Open IIS Manager and for each Webapp navigate to Properties -> Home Directory -> Configuration -> Wildcard Application Maps.




If you’re experiencing the same problem as I did you’ll see that this is box is empty. Click on insert and add C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll.

Ensure that the check box “Verify that the file exists” is unchecked and click on Ok. After running IISRESET everything was working again and the problem was resolved.


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