Khanun Fodder

I found out I should upgrade my MySQL from 5.1 to 5.5. No big deal, I thought… But of course the installer did an excellent job of being difficult. First, the installer did not at all mention it found an already existing version of the software, attempting a parallell config, something I of course did not detect until it complained about the service port 3306 already being used. Ignore and continue.

Next, it wanted to install a service so MySQL would run on system startup. Great – do that. No? MySQL already exists as a system service. OK – cancel install and remove version 5.1, then rerun the config… No. The config proogram was not visible in the menu and I didn’t bother looking for it, so I reran the install.

This time I got a maintenance install asking if I wanted to repair or remove, so I removed. Now I essentially had a system with no MySQL at all. So what happened? Complaints about the MySQL service running, of course. So, I had to delete the service. Manually. Great.

I opened the command prompt “Run as administrator”, mind you, and ran the following:

C:\Program Files\Console>sc delete MySQL
[SC] DeleteService SUCCESS

And then I continued the setup. Woohoo…! MySQL service still running. How great that the installer does not check to see if there are any changes. So I quit the setup and uninstalled/reinstalled once more. This time it worked.

New Fedora and – you guessed it – new “denials of service” regarding MP3 music and other goodies. Turned out that it was “easy” getting what I wanted. Do these two:

[root@saruman ~]# rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
[root@saruman ~]# rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

followed by:

[root@saruman ~]# yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly xine-lib-extras-nonfree gstreamer-ffmpeg

And – now it works.

Annoying. My freshly installed Fedora 15 connected just fine to the Internet, but refused to even show my local network. Nothing. Actually, all I got was “Failed to retrieve share list from server.” Nice.

First thing I tried was adding one of the missing items to /etc/hosts/ – nothing useful came out of that. So I moved on. Next item was checking the Samba installation. One article I found said not trusting “what should be installed to actually being installed”, so I ran the following command as root:

[root@saruman ~]# yum install samba

And, of course, still nothing. Boot, then? Since I installed a new package? Nope. OK, what’s the status of two essential services, then?

[root@saruman ~]# service smb status
smb.service - SYSV: Starts and stops the Samba smbd daemon used to provide SMB network services.
Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb)
Active: inactive (dead)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/smb.service
[root@saruman ~]# service nmb status
nmb.service - SYSV: Starts and stops the Samba smbd and nmbd daemons used to provide SMB network services.
Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/nmb)
Active: inactive (dead)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/nmb.service

Oops…? Let’s restart them and try again.

[root@saruman ~]# service smb restart
Restarting smb (via systemctl): [ OK ]
[root@saruman ~]# service smb status
smb.service - SYSV: Starts and stops the Samba smbd daemon used to provide SMB network services.
Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb)
Active: active (running) since Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:29:37 +0100; 5s ago
Process: 1811 ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 1821 (smbd)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/smb.service
? 1821 smbd -D
? 1823 smbd -D
[root@saruman ~]# service nmb restart
Restarting nmb (via systemctl): [ OK ]
[root@saruman ~]# service nmb status
nmb.service - SYSV: Starts and stops the Samba smbd and nmbd daemons used to provide SMB network services.
Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/nmb)
Active: active (running) since Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:29:59 +0100; 3s ago
Process: 1870 ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/nmb start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 1879 (nmbd)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/nmb.service
? 1879 nmbd -D
[root@saruman ~]# service smb status
smb.service - SYSV: Starts and stops the Samba smbd daemon used to provide SMB network services.
Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb)
Active: active (running) since Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:29:37 +0100; 35s ago
Process: 1811 ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 1821 (smbd)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/smb.service
? 1821 smbd -D
? 1823 smbd -D

You guessed it. No success so far. BUT… I did not get an error message. Hmm… Wonderful. A complex problem. Same basic result, but different causes. Next one out – the firewall. It turns out that the firewall is set to maximum security, meaning it does not allow certain types of traffic. The following command starts your firewall GUI:

[root@saruman ~]# system-config-firewall

Now, two rather essential services are not ticked off: Samba and Samba Client. I enabled them (as in the printscreen above), pressed the Apply button top left and tried again.

Touchdown!

One of my neighbors rang the doorbell last night, gave me his laptop and asked if I could have a look at it. It wasn’t very hard to discover what he wanted. All menus and all writing on the screen were total and utter gibberish. At first, I believed he’d turned on Burmese, but after a closer look I guessed it had to be a symbol font.

By glancing at the top left symbol, I figured it had to be Ubuntu Linux (with Gnome) of some recent version, meaning I would be able to get into things by figuring out what to press by looking at the icons in the menus, so I opened a command shell and started typing exactly the following:

gconftool-2 --unset /desktop/gnome/interface/font_name
gconftool-2 --unset /desktop/gnome/interface/document_font_name
gconftool-2 --unset /desktop/gnome/interface/monospace_font_name
gconftool-2 --unset /apps/metacity/general/titlebar_font
gconftool-2 --unset /apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_font


The gibberish after the --unset switch is not a file path you can expand automatically, so just type the first one, hit Enter, and then modify the line as needed for the rest. If using bash or similar shells, arrow up to retrieve the previous command line should work, saving you a lot of typing.

Well, already after the first entry, I was able to read the menus on the desktop again and after #3, even the command line looked way better.

Instead of crying and thrashing your desktop (and eventually reformatting your PC when you sort of calming down), download this utility:

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

Burn the image to a disk, boot from the CD and follow the instructions.

First, go here: http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration

Then, RPM Fusion free for Fedora 10, 11 and 12

Then, yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-flumpegdemux gstreamer-tools gstreamer-python gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-plugins-base gstreamer-plugins-bad totem-gstreamer gstreamer-plugins-bad-extras

If your Notes is in trouble, you can try and fix it by deleting three files. Close notes if it is running. Locate C:\Program Files\Lotus\Notes\Data\ and remove

• desktop6.ndk (or desktop8.ndk)
• bookmark.nsf
• cache.ndk

Alternatively, rename or move the files out of the way. Restart Notes and see if it works. if it didn’t, see this article.

If Lotus notes goes dead for some reason and it refuses to start og gives off strange error messages, you can reset it and reconfigure the user from scratch as if Notes was recently installed. Do this:

Delete these files from C:\Program Files\Lotus\Notes\Data\

• bookmark.nsf
• cache.NDK
• names.nfs
• desktop6.ndk (or desktop8.ndk)

Find notes.ini in (normally) C:\Program Files\Lotus\Notes\ Find the section timezone and delete this line and the rest of that file. Restart Notes and it should ask you to setup the user again.

If you need to forward visitors from one web page to another, you can do it with a HTML meta tag. This website, for instance, has a parent of “http://torgersens.net/” which then again contains this WordPress based blog/lookup database for IT related subjects http://torgersens.net/wordpress/. For a while I’ve been letting people figure out by themselves that there actually is more to this site than the front page, but people may slip away because they don’t see the link at the bottom. So – I added this nearly at the top of the code following the “html” and “head” tags:


So, what does this mean?
We use a so-called meta tag with parameters as follows:

• http-equiv=”refresh” means we will ask the webpage to reload
• content=3 is a three-second delay to let people have a fair chance of reading your front page
• url=http://www.torgersens.net/wordpress/ is where you want your page to go

Adjust as you need and it will work like a charm. There are java versions out there, too, but I see no point in complicting matters more than necessary when this one is a sure-fire way of achieving success.

Been on the command line and want to restart your computer? Windows XP and up contain the shutdown command. But you have to type yourself to death, remembering a zillion of options. shutdown -h does not show the help screen, for instance. Guess how I found out that.

Try this one – listing for poweroff.cmd:

@echo off
if "%1" == "-h" goto HELP
goto %~n0
goto END
:HALT
:POWEROFF
echo Shutting down...
shutdown -s -f -t 0
goto END
:REBOOT
echo Restarting...
shutdown -r -f -t 0
goto END
:HIBERNATE
echo Hibernating...
shutdown -h -t 0
goto END
:SLEEP
echo Sleeping...
goto END
:HELP
echo.
echo "%~n0" is an alias for "poweroff"
echo.
echo Invoke as halt or poweroff to shut down.
echo Invoke as reboot to restart.
echo.
:END


then, create junctions for halt, reboot, hibernate and sleep:

mklink/h halt.cmd poweroff.cmd
mklink/h reboot.cmd poweroff.cmd
mklink/h hibernate.cmd poweroff.cmd
mklink/h sleep.cmd poweroff.cmd

Yep, shutdown -h is HIBERNATE…

Addendum: The shutdown -h seems to be a bit of a problem. Within a command file, it displays the help screen, but from the command line it runs just fine. So, if that is the norm, try this one instead:

rundll32.exe PowrProf.dll,SetSuspendState

Worth trying :)