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Ubuntu 11.04 fsck/MOTD bug/issue

Benny Chew — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 06:43:39 +0000

Recently this message popped up on the MOTD of the Ubuntu servers on EC2:

*** /dev/xvda1 will be checked for errors at next reboot ***

After proceeding to do a fsck and restarting, the message still kept appearing. After some debugging with wk, it apparently was due to a stale fsck-at-reboot file left around causing the message to keep popping up.

Here are the steps I used to make sure they stopped popping up again:

sudo touch /forcefsck sudo shutdown -r now sudo rm /var/lib/update-notifier/fsck-at-reboot cd /usr/lib/update-notifier/ sudo ./update-motd-fsck-at-reboot sudo rm /forcefsck

Thanks wk!

Installing MySQL 5.5 on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty)

Benny Chew — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:22:43 +0000

Steps I used to get MySQL 5.5 working on Ubuntu 11.04 AMD64 (behind Aptitude’s back sadly since it’s still not packaged up due to copyright statuses..):

Download the following from here.

mysql-common_5.5.13-2_all.deb
libmysqlclient18_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
libmysqlclient-dev_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
mysql-client-5.5_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
libmysqld-dev_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
libmysqld-pic_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
mysql-server-core-5.5_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
mysql-server-5.5_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb

Run the following to remove older versions of MySQL client/server:

sudo aptitude remove mysql-client mysql-client-5.1 mysql-client-core-5.1 mysql-common mysql-server mysql-server-5.1 mysql-server-core-5.1

From the directory you downloaded the files above to:

sudo aptitude install libmysqld-dev
sudo dpkg -i mysql-common_5.5.13-2_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i libmysqlclient18_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
sudo aptitude install zlib1g-dev
sudo dpkg -i libmysqlclient-dev_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
sudo aptitude install libdbi-perl libdbd-mysql-perl
sudo dpkg -i mysql-client-5.5_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i libmysqld-dev_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i libmysqld-pic_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i mysql-server-core-5.5_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i mysql-server-5.5_5.5.13-2_amd64.deb

Took me awhile of messing around to get the sequence right, hope this helps!

Reference/links from blog post/comments here.

SSD tweak utility for Windows

Benny Chew — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 01:21:35 +0000

All machines I regularly use are now using SSDs (60GB/120GB OCZ Vertex 2E), and this handy utility has done all the tweaks for me: SSD Tweaker

More info on it here and here.

4GB of RAM on a 32bit Windows OS

Benny Chew — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:36:49 +0000

Most machines now configured with 4GB of RAM but continue to be bundled with the 32-bit version of Windows. You might’ve noticed that in this situation it does not fully utilise all of it, but here’s a simple fix to work around this issue instead of putting a 64-bit OS instead:

To enable PAE mode, you have to add PAE to the boot entry in the BCD file. Open an elevated command prompt. Type BCDEDIT /SET PAE ForceEnable.

via: Microsoft’s help article

ipfilter (blocklist) update

Benny Chew — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 08:18:21 +0000

There has been update to the ipfilter.dat source which I posted up before (have just updated that post). The previous source was from BISS but the people who maintain the blocklists now publish it at this site.

Whether or not the blocklists are of any use is up for debate, and definitely not something I’m going to go into in this post..

via here

Let me google that for you

Benny Chew — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 03:30:16 +0000

If you participate in online forums or groups, you would realise that a majority of queries could be answered simply by googling. Colleague sent this site around today which potentially could help those whom are in need of guidance: Let me google that for you

Type in the phrase in the search box.
Hit Google Search.
Copy and paste the link to the person who requires guidance.

For e.g., click here.

iTunes 100% CPU on closing

Benny Chew — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 02:32:12 +0000

After I got my iPhone 3G a couple about 2 months ago, I had no other choice but to use iTunes for all the syncing, backups, music etc as Apple wants total control of what you can or can’t do with its devices (was using YamiPod previously, writeup here). :|

My loathing for it got worse as it didn’t seem to be closing gracefully on quitting besides causing software restores which all ended up with iTunes.exe taking up 100% CPU. I decided to stop swearing at it and search around for the root cause as this behaviour wasn’t replicated on my work machine and on colleague’s variety of machines.

Turns out it wasn’t iTunes, but the antivirus (NOD32 2.7) which wasn’t playing nice. After adding various iTunes paths to AMON/IMON exclusion lists, there has not been crashes or 100% CPU since (instructions on how to do this here). Guess I was cursing the wrong software but anyhow..

Just a note, this is a fairly belated post as I was having this issue with iTunes 7.x and have since upgraded to 8.0.1 which may no longer require this workaround. ;)

Firefox 3 is out

Benny Chew — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:51:25 +0000

After trying it out for the past 24 hours, I must say I’m very impressed by the improvements over version 2. For starters, it has not hogged up to 500+MB of memory after a couple of hours, no crashes thus far too. Besides that, the new location bar (a.k.a. AwesomeBar) is simply fantastic. Most extensions have been updated to work with the latest version but you may have to switch to different ones if they aren’t updated anymore (or do some workarounds). Go get your copy of Firefox 3 here.

While on the subject of Firefox 3, BBspot has an article on it here. And before you go about saying ‘about time!’, BBspot is a satire news site. :P

My Google Reader shared items

Benny Chew — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:35:37 +0000

I subscribe to a considerable amount of feeds (which occasionally can get tiresome to clear, removed Digg as the volume was way too great) and I have a filtered list/feed available here which are items from feeds which I think is noteworthy.

It can be added to any RSS reader if you wish to be kept updated of the items which I share. ;)

Cross street in Google Maps

Benny Chew — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:29:06 +0000

I decided to find out if cross streets (intersections) can be easily searched via Google Maps rather than searching for one street and just scrolling around to find the intersection with the other recently, and realised there was a keyword to do that.

For e.g., typing a very frequently used rendezvous point into Google Maps:

Swanston St at Bourke St VIC 3000

Would give you the intersection of Swanston St and Bourke St (ex-Nike Melbourne). Link to the page here.

Pretty nifty since it’s common place for shop lot locations to be listed as ‘corner X road and Y road’.

via MalekTips