Thanks to the k9mail wiki on debugging connection issues and the fact that I already had the Android SDK installed, I was able to solve the 2 related errors I was getting. I would either get an “HTTP 404 not found” or an “HTTP 501 Not Implemented” depending on the settings I chose. With no additional settings other than suggested in the Wiki, I’d get a “501 not implemented”. If I tried to set a mailbox path, or a WebDAV path, I’d get the HTTP 404 Not Found.

In the debugging log, I saw that the system was calling “http://mail.$domain.exchange.ms/”$webDAVpath/Inbox – if I set it to a full URL, the full URL was getting appended. When I attempted to hit those same paths in a full browser, I’d always get an HTTP 404. So, digging in my history in Firefox, I found the following (cleaned) path:
http://mail.$domain.exchange.ms/exchange/$emailaddress/
In this case $emailaddress was my Exchange mail address with the “@” stripped out. Appending “Inbox” to the end of this path resulted in a valid load of my OWA inbox.

Plugging then: /exchange/$emailaddress/ into the WebDAV box in K9Mail, and my email immediately loaded up.

Now I have Android syncing my calendars and contacts, and k9mail is handling my massive inbox!

A few months ago I hot-added a new disk to an ssh bastion host (a VM on ESX). As these things tend to go, I eventually took a maintenance window and updated firmware/BIOS/OS on the ESX host. When the bastion VM came back online, however, I was presented with an odd error:

[root@bastion ~]: fsck /dev/sdc1
e2fsck 1.39 (29-May-2006)
fsck.ext3: Device or resource busy while trying to open /dev/sdc1
Filesystem mounted or opened exclusively by another program?
[root@oracle1 ~]# cat /proc/mounts
rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0
/dev/root / ext3 rw,data=ordered 0 0
/dev /dev tmpfs rw 0 0
/proc /proc proc rw 0 0
none /selinux selinuxfs rw 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw 0 0
none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw 0 0
sunrpc /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs rw 0 0
[root@oracle1 ~]# cat /etc/fstab
/dev/main/root / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/sdc1 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/main/var /var ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/main/tmp /tmp ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/main/swap swap swap defaults 0 0
# Beginning of the block added by the VMware software
.host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5 0 0
# End of the block added by the VMware software

So everything in the fstab is how I left it – /dev/sdc1 is the new disk I added that is giving errors mounting. So I thought to check for corruption on the disk, and found the problem:

[root@oracle1 ~]# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 42.9 GB, 42949672960 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 5221 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 14 5221 41833260 8e Linux LVM
Disk /dev/sdb: 42.9 GB, 42949672960 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 5221 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 5221 41937651 83 Linux
Disk /dev/sdc: 32.2 GB, 32212254720 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3916 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 3917 31457279+ 8e Linux LVM


So, a simple fix – change “/dev/sdc1″ to “/dev/sdb1″ in /etc/fstab (or to VOLUME=home), and boot back up.

It’s not something that’ll probably happen on this server again, but it is something to be aware of, on both VM guests and on physical servers. This is why so many newer Linux OSes are using UUID= or VOLUME= instead of device path for SCSI disks.

@docsmooth: Signs of twitspam: bio is tinyurl; <100 updates, >200 following/ers;all updates “from twitfeed”, inc. link; no conversation. Check yourself!

I just went through my followers list on twitblock.org and thought I’d write a bit deeper on this subject.

Ways to determine a twitter spammer – higher scores are more likely spammers:

• Bio link is tinyurl or bit.ly or other URL shortener. There is *never* a reason to put this in your URL link on Twitter, unless you’re hiding the destination. +10 pts
• you have more than 200 “friends” and less than 100 updates. +2 pts
• you have a follower/following ratio below. .5 +2pts
• Every single tweet has a link. +5 pts
• Every single tweet is from TwitFeed. +5 pts
• More than 2 tweets are from an unregistered API app. +8 pts
• You have never @replied anyone. +1 pts

I generally block anyone above a “9″ score on this scale.

(cross-posted from my personal blog as well)

I’ve been doing the automatic upgrades on one of my other sites since they came out.  They’re easy, fast, and even more painless than the 3-step upgrade that works so well. So now, I should be able to keep TNS much further away from the “cobbler’s kids” syndrome so many small company’s systems suffer with.

The biggest issue I had, though, was after the upgrade, TweetDeck was just showing a blank window, with only the “Tweet/All Friends/Replies/Direct Messages/Groups/Favorites” etc. buttons on the top. There are a lot of posts about how to run Adobe Air and TweetDeck on x64 Ubuntu, but this is a 32-bit machine, so those fixes weren’t working.

The fix is surprisingly simple: make sure kwallet is running with an open wallet. Full details in a nice concise post from Peter Upfold, here. One of his commenters mentioned an issue, but I believe it turned out to be a “no wallets were open” problem. Thanks Peter!

So, to turn off console (not X terminal, but tty) beeps, you can do one of the following:
1) (This is my preference)

echo blacklist snd_pcsp >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf


2) (I’ve done this, but it doesn’t affect all software)

for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6
do
setterm -blength 0 > /dev/tty$i
done

3) (Only works per shell if ~/.inputrc is included)

echo set bell-style visible >> ~/.inputrc


Enjoy more-sane editing from ttyX in the future!

After four hours on the phone I was able to determine the two tapes that would be needed to recover the 79Gb database file and started reading in the specific saveset that was needed.  Two hours later I was able to start a restore, which failed.  2Gb of the restore file was missing.  After another two hours on the phone with support I was told “Let’s reposition the tape.  It could take a while, on newer technology I’ve seen it take an hour, on LTO1 and LTO2 drives I’ve seen it take 8 hours.”  You guessed it, I have LTO2 drives.  Fortunately I have a multitude of drives to reposition the tapes with so it won’t impact backups, unfortunately I have a time limit on the restore that’s fast approaching.

So what do you do when you backup your file systems?  Do you simply believe that the software you backup with validates your tapes or do you test them regularly?  Are you satisfied with seeing an email at the end of a backup routine stating “SUCCESS”?  Then answer is simply NO.  Your backups are only as good as your ability to restore from them. Keeping that in mind and all the different technologies and services available what do you choose?

For us the answer is simple.  We require low cost, reliable, offsite secure data storage as do most companies nowadays.  TAPE.  We’ve looked into collocated services and replicated SANs with virtual tape backup but the cost far exceeds it’s benefits.  Tape technology has been proven over and over for decades.  There is no cost effective replacement for a good old fashioned tape, even taking into consideration the troubles it can give you.  Our entire datacenter can be put onto 6 tapes costing $25 each.  4.8TB for $150.

Any good backup initiative should be followed up with an equally adequate restore plan.  So next time you recommend a backup solution plan a regular restore plan to test because there’s nothing worse than spending an entire week restoring one file.

On a Samba server joined to AD with winbind, this is easy to deal with because Samba’s winbind can treat the computer accounts just like user accounts, and assign them access to the unix filesystem with whatever backend has been configured. When a Samba server is joined with Likewise, however, the machine accounts are not visible, and the “username is invalid” message comes up.

Fortunately, Samba gives us a method to handle this, in form of the “username map” directive in /etc/samba/smb.conf.  There are two ways to use this, the first is with the username map file.
In smb.conf, to simply add:
[global ]
username map = /etc/samba/smbusers
then create a file named /etc/samba/smbusers and populate it with localuser=aduser pairs, like:
COMPUTER1$ = compacct
COMPUTER2$ = compacct
CITRIXFARM1$ = citrxact
and so on. Lastly, you’ll have to add the local accounts from the pairs above:
useradd -c "Account for AD Computers to use Samba" compacct -G users -u 998
useradd -c "Account for AD Citrix Servers to use Samba" citrxact -G users -u 999
Then, whenever one of the AD computers in the list attempts to access the Samba share, it’ll be mapped to the local account.

The problem with this is when you have a lot of servers, like a Citrix MetaFrame farm, or a Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services farm, that may be changing frequently, because managing that file could get hard. In this case there is the username map script directive, which is added to smb.conf as:
[global ]
username map script = /usr/lib/samba/auth/machine-acct-map.pl
Then download this script and save it in /usr/lib/samba/auth/ and make it executable (chmod +x /usr/lib/samba/auth/machine-acct-map.pl). Then run:
useradd -c "Account for AD Computers to use Samba" compacct -G users -u 998
Now, all computers which access the share will be remapped to the “compacct” user, and you won’t have to manage a file for every time the server farm changes.

Get the file here.

The act of “trusting” that a computer will do something every time the same way, only because it did the last 2 times you tried it.

The alternative is to actually learn what the computer is doing, so that you can know it will do the same thing each time, because you’ve controlled all of the appropriate parameters.

Usage: “This sysadmin is performing IT by Voodoo – he just asked if I have faith that my file copy will work.”

Now that it’s defined, can we all stop doing it?  There’s enough resources on the internet to figure out how anything works down to the API call at least, and in some cases down to the processor registers, if you care to go that far.

Anyways; Workstation 6.5 has been giving me problems.  Because of the newness of KDE4, I initially thought it was a KDE problem, but it turns out it’s something between Workstation 6.5 and Ubuntu 8.10.  I just ran the “adapt –dist-upgrade-devel” command from the Ubuntu wiki to upgrade, and upon reboot, I couldn’t “ctrl-alt-ins” or “ctrl-alt-del” to log into my Windows VM, my “Windows/Start” key on the keyboard wouldn’t respond, and my arrow keys wouldn’t work.  Incredibly, when I’d hit the “down” arrow, I’d get the Windows Start menu pop up!!

Fix is easy, edit /etc/vmware/config and add the line below like:

sudo vim /etc/vmware/config
:$
A (that's vi-command for "go to the end of the file, and start writing a new line")
xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true


Have to restart your VMs for this change to take effect. Thanks to Duncan Epping for this fix (he posted it in the forums, where I found it).