sphinxsearch reborn as manticoresearch?

for the past year number of commits in my favorite open source text-search server – the sphinxsearch project – has dropped to nearly 0. looks like in the meanwhile some of the old contributors moved to another project – manticoresearch. the website of the new project features two prominent supporters – craigslist and boardreader. fingers ... Read More

unwanted wordpress trackback spam

today i’ve learned that disabling trackback in wordpress’s settings > discussion [ ] Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new articles is not enough. your old posts, created before the date when this check-box was un-ticked, will still allow trackback which might be spammy. solution? adjust the trackback setting on per-post ... Read More

varying svn checkout times under virtualized windows server 2016

we’ve set up a new build server using Windows Server 2016 running under ESXi 6.5. few days later devs came back with a complain: full svn checkout time varies a lot – it takes between 1 and 8 minutes. steps taken that hopefully resolved the issue: disable the icon cache of tortoise svn, then eventually ... Read More

posting a file from command line with CURL

i needed to write a .bat script for windows to upload a log file. quick and nasty hack.. on the sending end: looks straightforward, worked when i tested; but failed to upload in the production setup. on the http server/PHP i was getting: turned out that the log file was growing. curl at the beginning ... Read More

extracting attachments from unix mail files

i log some of the messages passing by Postfix-based relay using always_bcc = bcc@somewhere.com in main.cf. Sometimes – to track spam or problems – i need to check content of the attachments. this comes handy if content is embedded inline i have to edit the file and replace or just add the 2nd part if ... Read More

dlink DXS-1210-12TC – web interface hanging

i’ve made a mistake again and bought a ‘cheap’, smart-managed network switch. dlink DXS-1210-12TC with 12 10gbase-t ports. and i got punished nearly immediately – the web interface of the device would hang on me after few days of uptime. sometimes it wasn’t even possible to log in, other times – i could log in ... Read More

drac5 / 6 with latest java 1.8.73

new java – new problems. “Error when reading form SSL socket connection” showed again after the upgrade to new java follow the steps from the earlier post and edit those in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre1.8.0_73\lib\security\java.security: also: go to the Control panel > java in the General tab: Settings > Delete files – mark all the ... Read More

Dell’s 10gbase-t network cards on Intel’s x540 chips

we’re upgrading few servers at work to have 10gbit/s connectivity. to keep things familiar i’ve decided to stick with [power hungry and latency-inducing] cat7 copper cabling and 10gbase-t. there are few dell poweredge r620 and r630 to be upgraded. currently those have proprietary broadcom-based daughter-cards with 4x 1000base-t ports. i preferred to replace them with ... Read More

drac5 / 6 with latest java 1.8.60

new java, new headaches. but my colleague figured a way how to get the ip kvm working again with the latest java. here are his findings: ingredients: windows 8.1, j2se 1.8.60, firefox 41 or chrome 45.0.2454.99: go to the Control panel > java in the General tab: Settings > Delete files – mark all the ... Read More

more smaller icons in the windows 8 alt+tab / cool switch

recently i’ve moved from win7 to win8. i tend to have dozens of applications open and the default number of programs displayed after pressing alt+tab in win8 is too low. this registry change brings the win7-alike layout and adds more columns and rows: you might want to log off and log on for all the ... Read More

openvpn point-to-point server listening both on v4 and v6

at work i have openvpn between OVH dedicated server and our datacenter. due to varying bandwidth we sometimes use udp over ipv6 and sometimes over ipv4 as an encapsulation method. whenever we did the switch we always had to reconfigure both ends of the tunnel. it turns out that with recent openvpns and kernels it’s ... Read More

squid3 no longer working after upgrade to jessie

on one of the servers i’ve just upgraded to jessie i got my squid3 bricked. i could see the process in ps, yet it did not listen on tcp/3128: restarting it did not give anything interesting in /var/log/squid3/cache.log: after a while of clueless googling i thought – maybe there’s some problem with communication over loopback. ... Read More

upgrade from wordpress 4.1.x to 4.2.x broke my menu editor

i’ve done a routine upgrade of wordpress 4.1.x to 4.2 and later 4.2.1. all seemed fine until the day i wanted to manually adjust the menu structure using wp-admin > appearance > menus. each attempt of saving my menu resulted in it being wiped out completely