ryanduff.net

I just noticed that Mailman stopped working about 6 weeks ago. I have a (dv) server at MediaTemple and it runs Plesk 9.x. This has been an issue for a while now, where it randomly stops working. If you have the same issues with Mailman under Plesk, here’s a fix for you. Run the following command:

$ /usr/lib/plesk-9.0/mailman_conf_init  /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py  qmail

This will force a reconfiguration of Mailman for qmail. After that, restart qmail and Mailman

$ service restart qmail

$ service restart mailman

Found and modified via Plesk forums

Ryan Plesk Email, linux, mailman, Plesk

I run all my WordPress installs as Subversion checkouts. This makes it easier to upgrade since there’s no FTP involved and I can choose when to upgrade as well as to what version. Since I have multiple blogs, I created a script to facilitate an easy upgrade all of them at once when a new version is released.

As a Christmas present to the WordPress community I’m making my script available to the public.

The only requirement is that you’re using subversion to manage your WordPress installs already. Other than that, the script is pretty simple to use, there’s just one line of paths that needs to be updated.

To use this script, start by creating a new bash script on your server:

vi wpupdate.sh

Press “I” to turn insert mode in vim and paste in the following:

#! /bin/bash
# Copyright (c) 2009 Ryan Duff <http://ryanduff.net>
# This script is licensed under GNU GPL version 2.0 or above
#
# This script upgrades (switches) a subversion copy of WordPress to a tagged version of your choice
# List of Current WordPress tag versions can be found at <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags>

# Set your paths
paths=(/path/to/install/1/ /path/to/install/2/)

clear

echo WordPress Update Script
echo ------------------------
echo
echo -n "Please enter version number and press [ENTER]: "
read version

for path in ${paths[@]}
do
cd $path
svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/$version/ .
done

Move your cursor up to the paths line and change to match the full paths to your WordPress installs.

Save the file. (Press Esc to exit insert mode. Type :wq and press Enter to save the file and quit vim)

Make the file executable:

chmod +x wpupdate.sh

To run the script type:

./wpupdate.sh

When prompted, enter the version tag you want to update to and press Enter. Current WordPress version tags can be found here.

If you have any questions or problems, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Ryan Wordpress bash, linux, script, subversion, Wordpress

Microsoft COO Kevin Turner proclaimed

Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we’ve ever built. It’s also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It’s the safest and most secure OS on the planet today.

Sounds like a bunch of marketing hype. I’ll believe it when an indepent study or two verifies that information.

Ryan Technology Leopard, linux, Microsoft, OS, OS X, Security, Vista

I recently had to reboot a machine following a kernel upgrade and was getting the “ATA: Slow to respond” error. Googling the error message left me with nothing but the fact it was a kernel issue. I made some changes and rebooted the machine to the previous kernel version. Before I even got that far, I noticed BIOS was hanging when detecting the drives.

Great, I have a bad hard drive. Luckilly they were mirrored, which was why the system still booted. I decided to power it down and just double check the all the cables. When I booted it up again, it detected the drive fine and the system booted without an issue. The system is running fine now and I haven’t determined it the drive is going bad, the cable is bad, or the SATA port on the motherboard is going bad.

Either way, if you start getting random “ATA: Slow to respond” errors, check the cables and check BIOS to make sure the drive is even recognized.

Ryan linux hardware, linux, server

Currently, when I create a new Xen DomU, I have to create a new logical volume, edit a configuration template, install the OS, and finally modify the configuration file to its final post-install parameters. This is a time-consuming process that should be avoided if at all possible, yet I have not been able to find tools to do so.

I came across xen-tools, but its mainly for Debian based systems. It does have some tools to assist in deploying rpm based systems, but they appear to be clunky. The required rinse tool basically downloads packages twice to do the install. Why?

There is also the Red Hat provided Virtual Machine Manager which is GUI based. I like to stick to command line, but that’s OK since they have a tool called virt-install that will either prompt you for information or will accept arguments to configure the new DomU. The issue here is that virt-install creates the sxp file in /var/lib/xend/domains/(hex number)/ making it impossible to restart the machine after it has been started, as well as place a copy in the /etc/xen/auto folder for automatic startup at boot. However, there is a tool to parse the sxp formatted configuration file, back to the normal format… but its an extra step. Why can’t it just use the simple configuration file format from the start?

All I want is a simple tool that I can throw a few arguments at such as hostname and ip addreess to pass to kickstart, something I can have create the LVM partitions for me, and something that will properly output the configuration file to /etc/xen. Why is this so hard and why has this not been done yet?

Ryan xen linux, server, virtualization, xen

I just received a new book the other day: Pulling Strings With Puppet by James Turnbull. I got turned on to Puppet as a server management tool recently and wanted to try it out. There is a lot of good information on the Puppet project page, but I wanted a book, that spelled things out in a logical order. So far, I’m liking the book, and would recommend it to anybody looking to get into using Puppet.

For those unfamiliar with Puppet, its a configuration management utility that’s cross platform. You can run a central server with a client on each machine to be managed or just run the client with a configuration file. It makes more sense to use a central server in most cases though, but the latter is good for bootstrapping your initial server install and configuration before you can install Puppet. Puppet is nice because it is cross platform in the Unix/Linux world.

You don’t need to specificially know how to do things on each platform. You tell Puppet what you want and it will do it for you. For example:

file {
     "/etc/passwd":
     owner => "root",
     group => "root",
}

This sets ownership properties on the file /etc/passwd. You don’t need to know the commands to do so, just what you want the result to be. Its that simple.

Ryan puppet linux, puppet

I got my new MSI Wind U100-432US on Friday. After starting it up and updating the BIOS, I installed Fedora 10. Since many netbooks don’t have CD/DVD drives and I already had a network server set up to do network installs from, I made a local copy of the Fedora 10 base repo via rsync before it arrived. I then found a utility called unetbootin to make a bootable USB drive that I could start the network install from and it worked great. I basically installed it and plugged in the USB drive, told it I wanted Fedora 10 i386 network install and selected my boot drive. unetbootin copied the image files from the Fedora repo and made my USB drive bootable. I then restarted and installed Fedora 10 in a matter of minutes over my local network.

After the install, everything seemed to be working except the wireless. I was able to find out that the wireless card was a RaLink card instead of RealTek like I had expected. That caused a change of plans. I was having trouble tracking down drivers for the RaLink card and was having issues trying to build from source with WPA support. In the end, I found a repo that had the drivers already there and it simplified things. My system was a mess after that so, alas, I booted from my USB drive again and did a clean install.

Here are the quick and easy steps to get wireless working on a MSI Wind U100-432US:

1. Install Fedora 10

2. Post install, run a yum upgrade to get your system up to date:

sudo yum upgrade

3. Once you’re up to date, install the RPM Fusion repos

sudo rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

sudo rpm --import "http://rpmfusion.org/keys?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-free-fedora"

sudo rpm --import "http://rpmfusion.org/keys?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-nonfree-fedora"

4. Install the RaLink 2860 driver which is compatible with the RaLink 2790 installed in the MSI Wind U100-432US

sudo yum install kmod-rt2860

5. Reboot

After the reboot, if you click the Network Manager icon, you should see wireless options that were previously not there.

Ryan Technology Fedora, Laptop, linux, MSI Wind, Wireless

This morning somebody posted on the Plesk Support Forums that they had a fix for the Mailman issues in Plesk 9.0. They suggested symlinking the mm_wrapper file to the location it should be. On my server, Plesk had a mm_wrapper file at

/usr/lib/plesk-9.0/mm_wrapper

To put it in the correct place run:

cd \var\qmail\bin
ln -s /usr/lib/plesk-9.0/mm_wrapper mm_wrapper

So far, the test emails are going through and being sent back via Mailman with no errors.

Ryan Plesk linux, mailman, Plesk, server

For those of you out there that use Plesk and Mailman, if you have not yet upgraded to 9.0, hold off. Once I upgraded to 9.0, Mailman stopped working. Any email sent to the lists return with this error:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at xxxxxxxxxx.com.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.

<xxxx-xxx@xxxxxxx.org>:
preline: fatal: unable to run /var/qmail/bin/mm_wrapper: file does not exist

This has been noted on the Parallels Plesk forums and a few tickets have been opened with Parallels, but no response so far. This seems to be the same treatment we get every time Plesk is upgraded. Parallels breaks things and then expects you to pay for them to be fixed. Its a horrible business model and a lose-lose for Parallels customers.

Ryan Plesk linux, mailman, Plesk, server