Heating fixed
Cross-connection of the heating tubes
However, it’s fixed now and I expect the result noticable on my monthly statement for gas.
Gordon, the self-made cat
So during my work (menial labour, nothing too complicated) I was listening to this PodCastle episode about Gordon, the self-made cat. It’s actually quite nice, although a bit of a children’s story. No idea why I’m so into children’s stories lately, but I guess I do. So there it is.
The beauty about the story is that it depicts the crazy world of Grown-Ups in an easy to understand way. I liked it.
Tomcat 5.5: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space
I so hate anything Java. There’s absolutely no way a sysadmin can maintain Java apps without diving into Java as a developer. The whole VM is so different from anything else in a system that you keep getting stumped by problems that are not very clear at first glance.
Yes, of course it’s because of my lack of knowledge about Java, but newsflash: I don’t want to learn a language to be able to maintain the platform.
I ran into a Tomcat instance that was giving errors like “java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space”. My first inclination was to simply increase the -Xms and -Xmx options, since those were part of the config. Alas, it appears that “PermGen space” is not subject to these options. For that you need to add a -XX:MaxPermSize option. Aaargh!
Kudos to Wes Maldonado, Moazam Raja and the Apache/Tomcat FAQ for helpful hints. Also interesting is this link about how the memory usage of a JVM is built up.
Filled the bookcase
Colour of the light doesn't come out as well in the picture, but take it from me, the bookcase looks great!
Looking forward to buying a Expedit bookcase or two to setup along the large wall.
(The blur at the bottom is Aagje not wanting to be photographed but wagging her tail anyway.)
Debian Sarge: LVM2 snapshot (removal)
I had some troubles with removing an LVM snapshot from within a Debian Sarge domU. It would lock up the domU completely, without removing the snapshot. A bit of a problem, especially since this was a production machine. So I destroyed the domU and tried again, with the same results, unfortunately.
Bart found a description of the problem and the solution at Jürgen Kreileder’s blog. Jürgen apparantly still has the repos online, which helped us resolve the problem on our machine. Much appreciated!
Drupal: The requested URL /cgi-bin/install.php was not found
Ran into this at a customer’s site. You untar the Drupal stuff into it’s directory, but when you surf to the site, you get an error along the lines of:
Not Found The requested URL /cgi-bin/install.php was not found on this server.
Although there are a lot of results when you search the internet for this exact error, I thought I’d add it here, for my own reference.
The solution is setting $base_url in sites/default/settings.php. Very simple. Credits go to misterfancypants at the Drupal forum.
Nu.nl: Leer je termen eens!
Uit dit artikel:
“Muziek in Apples online winkel iTunes is niet langer voorzien van de omstreden kopieerbeveiliging DRM.”
Het is ofwel “kopieerbeveiliging”, ofwel “DRM”, maar niet allebei. Waarom lees ik die site eigenlijk nog? Is al de zoveelste keer dat blijkbaar één of andere stagiair stukjes schrijft over onderwerpen waar hij of zij duidelijk niks van begrijpt, maar zich niet de moeite neemt om de boel even te onderzoeken.
Redactie van NU.nl: lees eens over Digital Rights Management.
Wolf in the snow
Ok, so she’s not really a wolf. But she did have a lot of fun in the snow. Click the photo for more text (for some reason WordPress does this a bit strange).
Aagje with a white snout
Dungeons & Dragons: Return of the Weekend
When I was a student in Eindhoven, I had a bi-weekly play group. We played Dungeons & Dragons, with either Martijn or me as DM. Although we often had “outsiders” (who were no outsider at all, while playing, to be frank), there was this core group that was always there. Martijn, Wilko, Remko, Stefanie (Steef) and Joke. And me, of course. I have a lot of wonderful friends who I really like to spend time with, but those Wednesdays in Eindhoven with our D&D group were one of the best of my life.
Every year we went away with the group for a whole weekend. Somewhere to a camping, in a tent, and play all weekend long. The six of us. That was really a whole lot of fun.
After a while the group split up, due to circumstances. Time was becoming an issue, so was distance. I still lived in Puth, so I had to travel and make sleeping arrangement. Now the sleeping arrangements were never a problem, but I do not like sleeping in someone else’s room, honestly. Nothing to do with the person, I just sleep best in my own bed. But people also finished school and moved away and our nights were less frequent and eventually stopped altogether.
For each of them I still have a typical persona in my head with whom I associate them. Remko was the brute, the barbarian, unsofisticated but friendly. In real life he was normal sized, maybe a bit small and young, but he played the big guys. Wilko usually played the Aragorn-types, silent but deadly. Wilko is a large chap, in height that is, not so much in weight. But it suited him, playing the shadow. Steef was the feminine woman of the party, she tried to play the wise dryad-type, but in my memory she only half succeeded (sorry Steef), but that was okay, because it added a lot of flair to her playstyle. She also was very intuitive and I’m not fully sure, but I think she saw through most of the plots I threw in front of the party. Joke is Rowena. I actually mix up the names sometimes in my head. Rowena was a female barbarian, which she might have modeled a bit after Remko’s character, but she gave it her own twist. Rowena was fairly smart (for a barbarian) and I’m very sure that Joke sometimes had trouble “dumbing down” her character. Lastly Martijn. My fellow DM. He and I just played very well together. We made chars that complimented each other, gnomes that were silly together and we just played along.
Man, I had so much fun with that.
So last week Martijn emailed everyone that it was time for a reunion. Bi-weekly would not be possible (time, distance, etc.), but just for one weekend. With me as DM. So I kind of forced them to come here, since otherwise I wouldn’t know what to do with Aagje, but I’m sooo looking forward to it. It’s probably going to be the last weekend of April, but we’ll see. Everyone was very enthusiastic about it. Some of them I haven’t seen for years. Really, really looking forward to it.
Tags: apache22, coldfusion, coldfusionmx7, debian, etch, jrun, mod_jrun22, sarge
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Upgrade Debian Sarge to Etch: ColdFusionMX7 is a pain
So we’re finally getting around to upgrading an old Debian Sarge server which runs ColdFusionMX7 to Etch. The Debian part is easy, I simply edit the sources.list and do an apt-get dist-upgrade and some questions later, presto, the machine is a working Debian Etch machine.
Getting ColdFusionMX7 to run with the Etch supplied Apache 2.2 is a different matter. Took me about several weeks to find out (not full time, but still over 20 hours, I think). First of all, you need the modified wsconfig.jar that Adobe distributes via a knowledge base article about their hotfix. Don’t bother with their instructions, though, the mod_jrun22.so will not compile that way. Not because of missing apps or something, but because for some strange reason, the script thinks JRun is already up and running. I get an output like so:
Macromedia JRun 4.0 (Build 107948) os.name: Linux os.version: 2.6.18-6-xen-amd64 os.arch: i386 platform: intel-linux Found port 2920 on host localhost findServers(): found server coldfusion at 127.0.0.1:2920 Found JRun server coldfusion at 127.0.0.1:2920 this host is stage02:62.133.201.114 web server: Apache web server directory: /etc/apache2 verbose connector logging: false apialloc: false force resource extract from jar: true CFMX: true mappings: .jsp,.jws,.cfm,.cfml,.cfc,.cfr,.cfswf filter mapping prefix: false Apache binary: /usr/sbin/apache2 Apache control script: /usr/sbin/apache2ctl Apache apxs: true This web server is already configured for JRun.
Not very helpful. I tried removing all files related to Apache and JRun that I could think of, including the part in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf that loads the module, but it still told me that the web server was already configured. Time for some heavier work.
First, start with unzipping the wsconfig.zip. It’ll yield a wsconfig.jar. Unzip that one too in a temporary directory, let’s say in /tmp/wsconfig. Now go to /tmp/wsconfig/controller/src. There’s a text file in there that contains the steps to install it. However, I need to install a few packages:
apt-get install apache2-prefork-dev gcc
You might need apache2-worker-dev, if you use that Apache flavour. You can check that with dpkg -l | grep apache2. You’ll find either apache2-mpm-prefork or apache2-mpm-worker. That’s your clue!
Now, execute the following commands:
sudo apxs2 -c -n jrun22 mod_jrun22.c \ jrun_maptable_impl.c jrun_property.c jrun_session.c platform.c \ jrun_mutex.c jrun_proxy.c jrun_utils.c sudo apxs2 -i -n jrun22 mod_jrun22.la sudo strip /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_jrun22.so
This will install the Apache 2.2 JRun module at /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_jrun22.so. Now change your Apache config accordingly, and you’re ready to go.
One thing I found, but that was just me trying to be hasty, was that you need to use:
LoadModule jrun_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_jrun22.so
Hope this helps someone.
