six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2017-09-29

LXD upgrade fails on Ubuntu 16.04 without Systemd

Recently I tried to install LXD (Canonical's container manager) from backports on a Ubuntu 16.04 system (running without Systemd). The version shipping with the system (2.0) doesn't suffice, because I need the new storage API that was introduced with LXD 2.15. However, upgrading to the backports package failed post-install:

invoke-rc.d: initscript lxd, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing package lxd (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Processing triggers for ureadahead (0.100.0-19) ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 lxd
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Which was weird, since the upgrade had worked for me before.

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Posted 13:57 [permalink]

2017-08-07

Generate a Solr Password Hash

Recent versions of Solr allow restricting access via authentication and authorization plugins, for instance the basic authentication plugin. The documentation shows an example security.json that you can upload into Zookeeper (assuming that you're running SolrCloud).

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Posted 22:15 [permalink]

2017-08-04

Useful settings for grub on Debian

Boot a kernel just once

If you want to test a new kernel without having access to the console you need to make sure that the system comes back up with the old kernel if the new one panics. Add a setting panic=2 to the kernel commandline in /etc/default/grub to have the system automatically reboot in case of a kernel panic, and tell grub to boot a saved kernel by default:

GRUB_DEFAULT="saved"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="panic=2"

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Posted 01:45 [permalink]

IPMI interface network configuration from Linux

Load the relevant modules, either via modprobe or by entering them into /etc/modules (so they're loaded automatically on the next system startup).

modprobe ipmi_devintf
modprobe ipmi_si

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Posted 00:36 [permalink]

2017-04-01

Reset VSS Writers

VSS writers are application-specific components for Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Service, which ensure the consistency of application data when a shadow copy is created. That's quite useful for creating consistent backups of a system. However, some of these writers go into error states more or less frequently. And Microsoft did not deem it necessary to document how to reset writers without rebooting the entire system (or at least I didn't manage to find that piece of information).

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Posted 16:19 [permalink]

2017-03-21

Verifying checksums on Windows systems - correctly

Posted here, since the Fedora people apparently can't be bothered to fix their documentation.

In January 2016 I came across this question on StackOverflow, asking about an OutOfMemory error when validating the SHA256 checksum of a Fedora ISO image. The Fedora documentation suggested reading the full file and then calculating the checksum from the bytes:

$sha256.ComputeHash([System.IO.File]::ReadAllBytes("$PWD\$image"))

Why anyone would even want to read an entire ISO image into memory for a checksum calculation is beyond me. The recommended way of doing this is to open the file as a stream and calculate the checksum on that stream:

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Posted 00:24 [permalink]