unimportant – Page 6

unwanted wordpress trackback spam

2017-07-172017-07-17 by .pQd

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

2017-06-152017-06-15 by .pQd

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

2017-02-022017-02-04 by .pQd

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

2016-12-30 by .pQd

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

bind9 on debian jessie ignores -4 in /etc/default/bind9 and tries to make lookups via ipv6

2016-11-012016-11-01 by .pQd

while checking one of the servers running debian jessie i’ve noticed that logs are full of: strange… didn’t i put “-4” in the /etc/default/bind9 ages ago? apparently i did but ps shows that it was ignored: a bit of googling told me it’s a known problem with systemd [sic!] – the /etc/default/bind9 is ignored. workaround? ... Read More

sphinx search 2.2.11 – column count does not match schema (expected 3, got 2)

2016-09-07 by .pQd

i have a real-time sphinx that was configured in this way:\ it was updated using REPLACE INTO myrt VALUES(?,?)… until the day i’ve upgraded to 2.2.11. the update command started to give me: after a bit of investigation i’ve discovered that: with RT index it’s obligatory to have at least one attribute [not id], even ... Read More

dlink DXS-1210-12TC – web interface hanging

2016-07-262016-07-26 by .pQd

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

“operator or administrator has refused the request (0x800710E0)” in the windows task scheduler

2016-06-302016-07-25 by .pQd

at work we have a Windows 2012 server [ more than one. sadly… ]. one of them had few nightly batch jobs started from the task scheduler. a certain task would fail occasionally and give us the “operator or administrator has refused the request (0x800710E0)” error. googling did not help much – it’s a server, ... Read More

drac5 / 6 with latest java 1.8.73

2016-03-032016-09-30 by .pQd

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

2016-02-122016-03-03 by .pQd

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

esxi 6.0: “create virtual machine snapshot” “a general system error occurred”

2015-10-312015-10-31 by .pQd

i’ve upgraded from esxi 5.5 to 6.0 a couple of servers. soon after i’ve discovered that ghettoVCB would fail on some of VMs while it worked fine on the others. i’ve started poking around and found out that for those VMs where backup failed i creation of snapshot would fail with the following error: while ... Read More

“Waiting for TUN/TAP interface to come up” in OpenVPN logs under windows 10

2015-10-102023-01-23 by .pQd

i run windows 10 on one of the computers, it also has a ‘dial up’ openvpn – started from openvpn gui. it worked fine for a few days but then i started to see repeting in the logs and tunnel would not get up for 20-60 seconds. and sometimes even after that the right entries ... Read More

drac5 / 6 with latest java 1.8.60

2015-09-242015-09-24 by .pQd

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

2015-07-242015-07-24 by .pQd

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

2015-07-03 by .pQd

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

2015-06-20 by .pQd

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

2015-05-032015-05-03 by .pQd

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

openvpn – TLS Error: local/remote TLS keys are out of sync and VPN restarts

2015-04-302015-05-03 by .pQd

one day an openvpn that used to carry traffic for the last 7 years started to misbehave. openvpn’s own built in watchdog was restarting it every few minutes. one of the tunnels endpoints – a- is behind NAT that we don’t control, another – b – is a host with public ip address.

forcing re-scan of hot-plugged esata drives

2015-04-122015-04-17 by .pQd

“Error when reading form SSL socket connection” when accessing DRAC5

2015-02-192015-02-19 by .pQd

we still have bunch of servers with DRAC5 cards. after upgrade to java 8u31 java-based kvm console stopped working. it gives: “error when reading from SSL socket connection.” message box during startup and that’s it.