Moved to Lucid !!

All this while since 2008 i was happily using Hardy on my laptop but since the official support is getting over soon i preferred reinstalling from fresh. I was thinking to install 10.10 but today only i came to know that my CD drive is nomore. Thanks to USB boot, i managed to have get Lucid working on my ACER 5920 laptop.

The only place where i was stuck at is the mic was not working after googling i came to know that my Codec: Realtek ALC1200 and solution to that is adding 2 lines in my alsa config file.

$sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

options snd-hda-intel probe_mask=1
options snd-hda-intel model=auto

Restarting ALSA (sudo alsa force-reload) and also checking alsamixture 2 confirm if mic in muted.

Python Local Enviornment setup on Ubutnu

I have never coded in my life so its time to learn and do sumthing !!
In my previous Job where i was supposed to code in Python and i was not quick enough to do that, i came to know about this Virtualenv funda.

We need a virtual environment so that we can install certain Python software which we need for specific application, like Python Django framework which has its on deps and which might break other current apps which uses older version of it.

sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv

Suppose you want to create a directory name “pywrk” and this to work on your python virtual environment simply map this directory to virtualenv

$pwd
/home/atul/pywrk
$which python
/usr/bin/python

Lets setup virtualenv now for this directory
$ virtualenv ~atul/pythonwrk/
$ source ~atul/pythonwrk/bin/activate

So we have our own python local environment setup. We can install modify add all packages inside this directory and it will be served for our local environment.

spellchecker in (OO) open-office on ubuntu !!

After 2 hrs of brain storming on weekend in my office finally got spell checker working for my open office 3.2 on ubuntu 10.04. i had to take expert help from Hobbes, nigleb and lastly Indranil dada and it worked.

sudo apt-get install hunspell  myspell-en-us openoffice.org-help-en-us

Once this is installed  open a open office document and TOOLS -> OPTIONS –> LANGUAGES

 

Once this is done check WRITING AIDS and do as screen shot does.

Restart your open-office and you will have spell checker working.

Setting up Monit (On Ubuntu) ..

Apart from playing with the Source Code Open Source Software has given us.

Installing Monit :–

 

sudo apt-get install monit

This command will install Monit on Ubuntu.

In order to Start the Monit we need to edit file  “/etc/default/monit” and set the  “startup= 1”

This will start the Monit, but we need to do the real work inside the “/etc/monit/monirc”  file, and mention what all services we want to be monitored.

I have simply added a script for monitoring my Nginx Server

check process nginx with pidfile /var/run/nginx.pid
start program = “/etc/init.d/nginx start”
stop program  = “/etc/init.d/nginx stop”
group www-data

But before that we need to enable few other services as well like:–

set daemon  20           # check services at 2-minute intervals

set logfile syslog facility log_daemon    #for log analysis

set httpd port 2812 and
use address localhost  # only accept connection from localhost
allow localhost        # allow localhost to connect to the server and
allow admin:monit      # require user ‘admin’ with password ‘monit’
#     allow @monit           # allow users of group ‘monit’ to connect (rw)
#     allow @users readonly  # allow users of group ‘users’ to connect readonly

 

Once am done with this i will restart monit and see the status on localhost:2812 , we will see the status saying nginx is running.

let kill or stop Nginx and see the same url, you will see a message saying Nginx is stopped.

 

As we have asked the monit to check and restart the service at 2 minutes, you will see the process up and running again.

 

 

Delhi days ..

Its been almost over 15 days i left Delhi and moved to Pune 2 work for a startup.

One thing i realized during these days is never compare Delhi with any other City of India.

I remember my days of cribbing autowallas in Delhi, trust me they are better than the ones across India. 😛

So am not going to compare anything now as it always ends up me favoring 4 Delhi.

I miss the food, PVR and crazy bunch of my friends with whom i had most awesome days of my life.

Am sure of making a trip soon in January and spend time all around.

Curious case of Redmine Upgrade

Well i call it curious cos i been just told to upgrade Redmine without giving any other details.

some strange situation :–

[php]

$ dpkg -l rails [/php]

gave me nothing (omg my redmine instance running without Rails)

After some googling and #redmine irc channel i figured out like python easy_install and ubuntu/debian ruby uses gem.

So on typing

[php]

$ gem list –local

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

actionmailer (2.3.5)
actionpack (2.3.5)
activerecord (2.3.5)
activeresource (2.3.5)
activesupport (2.3.5)
fastthread (1.0.7)
passenger (2.2.11)
rack (1.0.1)
rails (2.3.5)
rake (0.8.7)
rmagick (2.13.1)

[/php]

Told me these are the magical pkgs allready installed.

I also figured out with help of dpkg -l that i have mod_rails(http://www.modrails.com) and ruby 1.8 installed.

I had to spend some time to figure out what is current version of redmine installed on my server.there was a simple way to find that.

[php] $ elinks http://myredmine/admin/info[/php]

Redmine 0.9.6.stable (MySQL) <– this was my configuration.

Then i followed steps provided at http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/RedmineUpgrade

And yes,

I took mysql backup and filebkp too along with changing directory location in my virtualhost.

My 1$ Advice, please install additional plugins one by one from the repo which has latest release of it rather upgrading and moving the plugin from older version of Redmine else you will end up going in lot of shit. Most of the older plugin are still not supported in 1.0.X version of Redmine.

Recovering the deleted JPG files.

Its been some time i posted here, my apology.
It was great last evening as me Achet and Tanya wer out 4 dinner and at same time we been clicking our photos.

Tanya unknowingly deleted all the photographs we had taken that evening and she was feeling way to bad. I knew there must be some way to recover the data and hence i was relaxed.

After googling and speaking with Shastry i figured out the way to recover all the deleted images with a FOSS software name “Foremost”

Installing the software was 2 easy easy like always on ubuntu.

Checking the man of foremost i got basic idea about it.

steps i followed:–

1. installing foremost

[php]$ sudo apt-get install foremost
[/php]

2. Figuring out the device name and mount point

[php]$ mount
[/php]

it told me my drive is /dev/sdb1

3.final execution

[php]$ sudo foremost -t jpg -i /dev/sdb1
[/php]

4.output

I got a directory with name “output” in my current working directory with a subdirectory name “jpg” and i could see all my deleted images there.

I slept at 4 am and woke up at 9 and felt like sharing it with all of you so i wrote about it right away.

Cheers!!

Curious case of denyhost and ssh.

I been using denyhost on my own server and many other boxes i been taking care of.

I was getting error whenever i tried connecting to my server
“ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host”

After checking logfile i figured that its happening because of the denyhost. The documentation at the denyhost website explains how to remove the blacklisted Ip

Now i had to find real issue why is my legitimate IP getting blacklisted again and again?

My logfile gave me a Warning

Aug 25 16:39:34 vm27 sshd[13147]: reverse mapping checking getaddrinfo for server62.xyz.net.in [200.99.04.24] failed – POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT!

To get this error removed what i did was, I had to add UseDns no to /etc/ssh/ssd_config file.

This removed warning messages and also i was not getting anymore issue of getting IP blocked from denyhost.