Maintenance

Java headless

Greg — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:20:57 +0000

The ISE was getting the error
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class sun.awt.X11GraphicsEnvironment
when running xwiki.
It turns out that the existence of quotes in JAVA_OPTS directives causes the option to be ignored. So, for future reference, use -Djava.awt.headless=true instead of -Djava.awt.headless="true" when launching tomcat on a headless server.

Rsync problem on rutabaga

Greg — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:14:12 +0000

After an update to DSM 4.2 rutabaga no longer allowed rsync backups, failing with:

sh: rsync: not found
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [Receiver]
rsync error: remote command not found (code 127) at io.c(605) [Receiver=3.0.9]

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth we discovered that non-interactive users do not have /usr/syno/bin in their path (it *is* in their path if they shell in to the NAS, so they can run rsync *from* the NAS when shell'd in).

So, that's an easy fix, says us: add a symlink to /usr/syno/bin/rsync in a logical spot that *is* in a non-interactive path, like /usr/bin.

Problem: admin user cannot su root (error message = su: must be suid to work properly), so cannot create symlink.

Answer: TURN ON TELNET AND LOG IN AS ROOT USING THE WORST POSSIBLE METHOD!!! Then, you make the symlink and turn off telnet - quick!

Network troubles - solved

Greg — Wed, 08 May 2013 21:57:09 +0000

This morning we got nets to set up B047 on the switch. Some time after that 3 machines lost the ability to get a DHCP address - I have no idea if there is a causal relationship between these things.

After much mucking about, it *looks* like it might have been a communication problem between the DHCP server and the machines.
Even forcibly releasing the DHCP lease didn't make any difference.

In the end, I booted the machine with a LiveCD and fiddled with enabling/disabling the network (in the network manger). I got a proper IP and rebooted in the installed OS. That seemed to break it out of the loop.

A bit perplexing and aggravating because I don't actually know what the problem was...

All projects moved to Peach

mholmes — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 20:26:53 +0000

All current Tomcat-based projects have now been moved to Peach, with the help of RE, who has re-pointed all the relevant domains. The IALLTJournal project has been retired, since it's no longer in use, as has the old version of Francotoile, which was built on eXist 1.4. This was a fairly slow and careful migration over a couple of days, and we expect no problems, but Pear will continue to run for a little while just in case.

Testing on Peach

mholmes — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 19:29:36 +0000

Tomcat has now been configured so that a slash not followed by a filename is handled by the webapp, not trapped as an error by Tomcat itself. I've also uploaded and tested the new Moses app on Peach, confirming that while the eXist dashboard and eXide fail under Tomcat 6, they work under Tomcat 7.

Creating a gource visualization of SVN work

mholmes — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:58:53 +0000

To create a visualization with gource (on Linux), first install gource (it's in the Ubuntu repo), then:

cd [the SVN directory you want to work on]

svn log -r 11019:11452 --xml --verbose --quiet > svnlog.xml
[Choose the revision numbers you want.]

gource -1280x720 -o - svnlog.xml | ffmpeg -y -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - -vcodec libx264 -preset ultrafast -crf 1 -threads 0 -bf 0 video.mp4

ssh recursively remove folders and their contents

sarneil — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 18:33:13 +0000

to recursively remove folders and their contents rm -rf path/to/folder

Rutabaga rsync problem

mholmes — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:09:07 +0000

After a system update, rsync stopped working over ssh on Rutabaga. We eventually discovered that users rsyncing over ssh require the ssh service to be turned on (Control panel/Terminal/SSH service). This was apparently not necessary in previous builds, or perhaps it was turned off by the update for some reason.

Peach update

Greg — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 17:50:53 +0000

Peach is now ready for us to start testing. Most apps are working as expected, but a few apps do not work quite the way they do on pear. It seems like it may be a Cocoon thing - for example, I notice that http://tomcat-devel.hcmc.uvic.ca:8080/coldesp does not redirect in the same way that pear does (same goes for mariage), while Map of London seems to work quite well.

Boot partition out of space

mholmes — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 17:40:45 +0000

teijenkins found itself unable to complete an update because it was out of disk space. This was initially surprising, but I discovered that it was actually the small boot partition that was out of space, because of the accumulation of old kernels. This command:

dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge

cribbed from this page cleaned out the old kernels and solved the problem.