bryans-list 3.0

Just to give equal opportunity to issues I have with Ubuntu, here’s one that bit me today.

I like to use a dual monitor configuration with my laptops, because I tend to have a lot of windows open when I work (terminals, browsers, remote desktops, email, various documents, etc). With Windows this is fairly straight forward, just suspend the laptop, connect the monitor, and bring the laptop back up. Go into your display properties and setup as desired. Most modern video drivers/chipsets will work fine, or at least get the basics right.

Historically with the olde X Window system just setting up one monitor was tricky enough, and two monitors was quite a challenge. Swapping monitors around on the fly was unheard of. Luckily, we’ve moved past those days, mostly. You can do the same thing with Ubuntu 9.04 (maybe 8.10) as with Windows – suspend the laptop, attach the monitor, bring the laptop back up, and go to the display properties — the external monitor just works.

Except…
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I’ve started trying the new Bing search engine now that Microsoft has relaunched it as a replacement for Live Search. Bing is WAY better than Live was, but still fails in interesting ways. I’m especially entertained that generic searches (ie, not specifying the site) for things in MS TechNet return more relevant results in Google Search than Bing.

Today I had an interesting experience using Bing from Firefox 3.0.x on my Ubuntu box.
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So, as noted in my previous post, I’ve changed from running Vista on my work laptop to running Ubuntu and Windows 7 in a VM.

One of the tools we use a lot at work is SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), used to connect to our clustered MS SQL server instances. I’ve been using SSMS 2008, since the 2005 version can’t connect to MS SQL 2008 instances, and we’re now running both versions of the servers.

I installed SSMS 2008 in my Windows 7 VM, typed in the connection string and the authentication information, and… it can’t connect. This worked perfectly on my old Vista install, so I’m pretty sure I should be able to connect to the clusters — it’s remotely possible that IT changed the firewalls, but unlikely, a lot of people would be complaining.
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I’ve been running Vista on my work laptop since I started at the current job a couple of months ago. It’s mostly been OK, though early on I ran into a fun bug where Windows Updates got stuck in an install loop that never ended, rebooting over and over again, and so had to boot off the DVD and repair the install.

Last week, however, things went all to hell after I cleaned up some unused files off the drive and tried to defragment. The file system became corrupted, apparently breaking some important system files, and the system was hanging and blue screening randomly. I tried a bunch of things, eventually booting off a DVD again and running an offline chkdsk /b (checks all blocks for bad ones and remaps). There were a bunch of logical filesystem errors found, but no bad blocks, which was both a good sign and bad sign. The type of failure I was seeing acted more like a bad drive, I thought, but on the other hand I could always reinstall. Then I ran a sfc /scannow, which scans all known system files and repairs them from backup copies. Unfortunately a bunch of them were broken, and so were the backups.

I could have repaired again, but it was more of a pain than it was worth, and I wanted to be 100% sure the corruption was gone. Which means formatting. Which means reinstall.

So I had to decide what to reinstall.
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Just for fun, since I use Google Chrome as my main browser on my Windows desktop now, I decided to try the very first public Dev release of Google Chrome for Linux. It’s interesting that they’ve only released the package for Ubuntu and Debian — apparently Google believes, as I do, that the other distributions are on the wane.

Unfortunately, so far it’s not going so well. I downloaded the .deb file fine, but on attempting to install…

bryanf@ronin2:~/Downloads$ sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb
(Reading database ... 165673 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking google-chrome-unstable (from google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb (--install):
 corrupted filesystem tarfile - corrupted package archive
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
 google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb

I’ll try the next build…

I recently spent almost a year at an interactive/digital agency, and despite that I’m still interested in what they do. I think this is a great post about what interactive agencies, including my previous employer and their affiliated parent/sibling companies, are doing wrong and what they should be doing to correct it.

I should note that my previous employer does get some of these points some of the time, but in my opinion they should be getting all of them all of the time and acting on them.

Found via Inter-Action.

Courtesy of Wikipedia, here’s a list of all (?) the humourous RFCs (Internet standards documents).

Note: understanding the humour in these may require fundamental technical understanding of how the Internet works.

I have an ISO of Windows 2008 Server and need to burn a disc so I can install it on a bunch of servers at work tomorrow. (mmm, Dell R610s) Yes, we have licenses.

On my work laptop, running Vista, I can’t figure any way to write the ISO — the freeware I tried (ISO Recorder, CDburnerXP) just keeps giving errors about the media being bad, and of course there’s no way to write an ISO built into Vista. I could’ve messed around with mounting the image in a virtual CD drive (which I would’ve had to install software for) and trying disc duplication instead of just writing an ISO, but frankly I’d like to go to bed soon.

Copied the ISO to my home Ubuntu laptop, inserted the blank DVD, ran ‘wodim [iso file]‘, and voila, about 10 minutes later one burned disc. Confirmed that it wrote OK by popping it back into the Vista machine, looks great. I could’ve used the GUI just as easily (right-click on the ISO file and select “write to disc”), but I do like the command line.

I`m using TortoiseSVN at my current job, and have at several past jobs as well. It`s a pretty good SVN client implementation for Windows, with the usual issues that SVN has (including caveats about case sensitive client/server files systems).

However, one thing that’s continually irritated me about TortoiseSVN is that every time I update or check out something, a process called TSVNCache.exe kicks off and chews CPU for a long time. My understanding was that it was going through all my SVN files and updating their icons according to their SVN status (checked out OK, updated and not checked in, merged, deleted, etc). It was just one of those things I put up with.

However, just for fun today I did a Google search and found this interesting post about how to restrict the locations that TSVNCache scans when it’s called. The implication here is that if you don’t restrict it, it’s going to scan your entire system drive, and possibly all your local drives. Ack!

I dropped in an exclusion for C:\* (don’t have any other local drives on this machine) and explicitly included my SVN checkout directories. There was a brief surge in CPU and I/O after I did an update (some of our projects are very large) it was nowhere near as significant or long-lived as before. Yay!

After about 1/2hr of trying to figure out why the proc and exec directives don’t work in Ubuntu’s snmpd server (at least in Ubuntu 8.10), I finally found a reference to having to recompile and use a non-standard package because only a subset of all the service modules are compiled in the default package.

Grr.

For reference, you can find out what the compile-time options are using “net-snmp-config –configure-options”, and here are the default compile options in Ubuntu 8.10:

--with-mib-modules=host smux ucd-snmp/dlmod ucd-snmp/diskio ucd-snmp/lmSensors

The module I need (in order to monitor running processes) is ucd_snmp, which provides both the proc and exec directives. There’s also the extend directive, from the NET-SNMP-EXTEND-MIB, but I can’t even see what module that’s added from right now.

Grr!