six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2016-12-17

Disable AVAHI Daemon on Debian

To prevent the AVAHI daemon on Debian systems from running without actually uninstalling the package avahi-daemon or touching the runlevels do this:

touch /var/run/avahi-daemon/disabled-for-unicast-local
sed -i 's/^#\?\(AVAHI_DAEMON_DETECT_LOCAL\)=.*/\1=1/' /etc/default/avahi-daemon
service restart avahi-daemon

I've seen people suggest putting a line exit 0 into /etc/default/avahi-daemon, but I wouldn't recommend that, because it would prevent not only starting the daemon, but also stopping it.

Posted 13:31 [permalink]

2016-09-01

Forwarding JVM Garbage Collector Logs

Recently I was tasked with forwarding logs to a central log server - in this case JVM garbage collector logs from Solr instances. Normally not a big deal. Configure log rotation (to avoid filling the disk), then have rsyslog read the active log file via an imfile input.

Sounds simple, right? Until you realize that JVM log rotation marks the active log with the extension .current and rotates that extension instead of actually rotating the logs.

See more ...

Posted 23:23 [permalink]

2016-04-12

Spark Workers Not Starting

If you're using Apache Spark and run into an issue where your workers fail to start, make sure that the workers use the same SPARK_MASTER_IP value that was used when starting the master. You can see it in the top left corner of the master's web interface:

URL field in Spark web interface

See more ...

Posted 21:37 [permalink]

2016-02-27

VBSdoc - A VBScript API Documentation Generator

API documentation is nice, and being able to generate it from the code is even nicer. However, unlike Perl, Python, Java, or several other languages, VBScript doesn't have a feature or tool that supports this. Which kinda sucks.

I tried VBDOX, but didn't find usability or results too convincing. I also tried doxygen by adapting Basti Grembowietz' Visual Basic doxygen filter. However, doxygen does a lot of things I don't actually need, and I didn't manage to make it do some of the things I do need. Thus I ended up writing my own VBScript documentation generator.

See more ...

Posted 16:31 [permalink]

2016-01-04

Cannot delete my own scheduled task

Recently I noticed that I was no longer able to delete scheduled tasks on my Windows 7 test box, even though I created them myself. Deletion attempts failed with the following error:

The user account does not have permission to delete this task.

Deleting my own tasks works fine in a vanilla install of Windows 7 SP1, so the issue must have been introduced by some update along the way. I had to modify the permissions on C:\Windows\System32\Tasks to get it to work again:

icacls "C:\Windows\System32\Tasks" /grant "Authenticated Users":(RD)

Granting "list folder/read data" on the folder itself was sufficient, since the task files are owned by the user creating them and the CREATOR OWNER principal has full access to subfolders and files.

Posted 19:51 [permalink]