Solution blog

Cifs mounting in Linux Kernel

2010-11-18T08:01:00.000-08:00

If an error 22 is returned by mounting with a DNS name, mount.cifs might be missing which does the dns resolution, which can under Debian be installed by the smbfs package. Also note that smbfs is deprecated and cifs should be used as filesystem driver.

Reboot after EDD probing message of Kernel

2010-11-18T06:49:00.000-08:00

Could NOT fix that with an update-initramfs or the creation of a new initramfs. However, the recompilation and reinstallation of the make-kpkg debain package of the kernel made it work for unknown reasons.

OpenLDAP Problems

2009-10-21T04:09:00.000-07:00

I was trying to add an existing backend db to a new OpenLDAP installation, basically by creating a new .LDIF file with the config base on the example at the end of http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin23/slapdconf2.html

However when adding it with:

ldapadd -c -f configMyDb.ldif -x -D "cn=admin,cn=config" -W

I got:

ldap_add: Invalid syntax (21)
additional info: olcSuffix: value #0 invalid per syntax

Reason being:
olcSuffix: "dc=example,dc=com"
instead of
olcSuffix: dc=example,dc=com

(Removing the quotes..)

DVD Drive problems

2009-09-08T03:40:00.001-07:00

My Pioneer DVD Drive was not visible in Windows Vista on a P965 chipset Asus board with a JMB363 Controller for the IDE connection. It worked perfectly under Linux. However changing the JMB BIOS setting from IDE to AHCI did the trick.

HP Deskjet F380 Problems

2008-10-27T14:18:00.000-07:00

Situation: HP F380 attached locally via USB to a Debian Etch machine with HPLIP for printing

Problem: Printing does not start due to "Device communication error" 5012 OR it prints an empty page!

Solution: Add the current user to the group lp with adduser USER lp

Idea taken from: Error 5012

Windows Activation (sucks ass)

2008-10-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

Setup: Windows XP SP2 fresh install
Problem: During Internet activation: Windows activation cannot be completed at this time.
Solution: Download and seperately install Windows XP SP 3

Tele2 Complete (Student) bandwidth problem

2008-08-15T13:18:00.000-07:00

Problem: Internet from Tele2 with Complete Student product and a vood Router working in a setup bridged mode. Somehow bandwidth seems capped at 20-30 KBps.

Reason: They seem to have changed the lines for VOIP and Internet

Solution: At the router switch to the other channel (pppoe2 instead of pppoe1) for bridged PPPoE.

Vista immediately rebooting at startup

2008-08-15T13:17:00.001-07:00

Reason: USB-Stick plugged in
Solution: Boot without it

Cygwin Emacs

2008-08-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

Problem: Using Cygwin under Windows Vista with emacs inside and C-x C-c is not working, because it is somehow mapped to C-x C-g

Reason: Unknown

Solution: Add 'export CYGWIN=binmode ntsec tty' to .bashrc in the home directory.

See: http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.help/browse_frm/thread/a180845843d43295?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&rnum=5&prev=/groups%3Fas_q%3D%27C-x%2520C-g%27%26safe%3Dimages%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26as_ugroup%3D*emacs*%26lr%3D%26as_scoring%3Dd%26hl%3Den

Emacs: XML Syntax highlighting / Font-lock-mode not working

2008-04-13T10:11:00.000-07:00

Problem: When editing XML Files in emacs on Debian, it won't do any syntax highlighting (named font-lock-mode in emacs) for anything in the file

Reason: psgml Package installed, which is a emacs SGML major mode that kicks in when editing XML Files (as XML is a subset of SGML iirc) instead of the normal XML-mode and doesn't seem to have syntax highlighting.

Solution: Remove the psgml package: aptitude remove psgml to get back normal XML mode

LaTeX and graphics

2008-04-11T16:30:00.000-07:00

Situation: Using latex with the graphicx package and the includegraphics command to include a png Image

Problem:
! LaTeX Error: Cannot determine size of graphic in Hysteresis_sharp_curve.png (

no BoundingBox).

Solution: Well, pdflatex doesn't complain, so I think the package only works with pdflatex

ispell with ngerman and Umlaute öäü

2008-03-12T11:55:00.000-07:00

Problem: My ispell with ngerman package recognizes words with an Umlaut like hinüber as two words hin and ber and doesn't even sense the Umlaut

Solution: Check the coding system of the checked file. Ngerman Ispell should work on Files with ISO-8859-15 encoding. (Emacs Command: C-x RET r or M-x revert-buffer-with-coding-system to change the current buffers encoding)

Thanks to: Gentoo Forums

CIFS/SMB mount problem on Debian

2008-02-22T05:49:00.000-08:00

Situation:

//10.0.0.1/share /mnt/sharemount cifs rw,noexec,nosuid,password=,username=someusername,nodev

in my /etc/fstab for mounting a CIFS network share.

Problem When trying to mount (with mount command)
Command lines output:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //10.0.0.1/share,

missing codepage or helper program, or other error

(for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might

need a /sbin/mount. helper program)

In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try

dmesg | tail or so

dmesg output:

CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -22

Reason:Seems like its missing the mount.cifs script/binary or somethine else that comes with the smbfs package.

Solution:

aptitude install smbfs

This installs mount.cifs and probably more. It resolved it in my case.

appletviewer does nothing / exits immediately

2008-02-11T03:12:00.000-08:00

Problem: When calling appletviewer file.html it exits immediately, does nothing, outputs nothing

Solution: Use verbose applet tag format:

< applet param=value > < /applet>

instead of

< applet param=value />

.

Furthermore this format doesn't even work with XHTML.

LaTeX tabular

2008-02-02T12:44:00.000-08:00

Problem:

! Missing # inserted in alignment preamble.

during LaTeX document compilation.

Reason: Missing alignment fields in a tabular environment:

before: \begin{tabular}{|||}
after: \begin{tabular}{|c|c|}

Auto luksOpen and lvm mounting

2008-01-06T09:14:00.000-08:00

It won't ask for the LUKS passphrase during startup and have some problems with mounting the LVM volumes afterwards correctly, though I had setup /etc/crypttab correctly.

Adding this:

/etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/cryptroot:
target=LUKSVOLUME,source=/dev/sda2,lvm=MYVOLGROUP-ROOT

with the correct UPPERCASE values and copying those scripts:

cp /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/cryptroot /etc/initramfs-tools/hooks/cryptroot
cp /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/cryptroot /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/cryptroot

and regenerating the initramfs with update-initramfs did the thing finally!

So my LVM on top of luks is now working on the laptop too, yeeha.

Thanks to this guide.

bash: ELF: command not found

2007-12-08T04:18:00.000-08:00

Problem:

 [methos@methos ../mjc/svn/trunk]$ . env 
bash: ELF: command not found

So source'ing a correct file (even with the #!/bin/sh shebang entry on top) doesn't work. Note the space between the dot and the env filename - thats equivalent to calling the file as argument to the source command.

Solution: explicitly specifying the current file to be in the current directory:

 [methos@methos ../mjc/svn/trunk]$ . ./env 
 [methos@methos ../mjc/svn/trunk]$

Real solution: Thou should know, that env is a programs name and thus name lookup rules resolve the env to the env binary file. Therefrom comes the ELF - the unix executable format - string in the error, as bash tries to "execute" the binary, but in a line-wise bash manner.

Thus: Don't use command names as file names or make sure to use the ./ prefix to securely refer to the current directory.

Grub Error 17

2007-11-18T07:14:00.000-08:00

Interestingly 0x17=23 hehe, but let's leave that aside. If you follow those guidelines, make sure to have at least backup copies of all changed files. Note that I use initramfs and a crypted partition with a containing lvm and therein root and swap.

Problem:
Even before the GRUB boot menu is displayed: Grub error 17
What I did was using the Windows built-in repartitioning tool to merge the second into the first partition, like here:

Previous Setup: 4 partitions:
1 - Vista
2 - Encrypted
3 - /boot
4 - encrypted lvm root and swap

Current Setup: (Changed with Vista) 3 partitions:
1 - Vista (merged purged Encrypted)
2 - /boot
3 - encrypted lvm root and swap

Okay, I booted from Debian Install/Rescue CD, mounted /boot and changed the device.map's root entry to match the now second instead of third partition. But that didn't do anything. (But should be done anyways)

My suspicion is that Windows Vista somehow messed up the MBR or the partition table. So I mounted all my partitions and chrooted into my system to have the grub command available. Then started grub and ran root (hd0,2) and setup (hd0) to reinstall grub into the MBR.

That gave me my boot menu back (and Windows Vista, but haven't tested it yet). Still I couldn't boot, due to other references to the previous partitions 3 and 4. So again in my chrooted system, I adapted the /etc/crypttab entry to refer to sda3 instead of sda4 and the fstab to refer to sda2 for /boot.

So the root system was setup to work, but the initrd files (I use initramfs) still contained the old settings. That was done with update-initramfs -k 2.6.23.1methos -u -t. I had to specify the kernel because I was still running from the rescue cd, so the version of the currently running kernel was not the one I wanted to create an initrd for (my normal current kernel). -u means update, change/replace the initrd. And -t means with force :) as it told me image altered, cannot update due to some reason.

So with the new initrd and reinstalled grub everything is working again. Wonderful!

2007-11-17T12:51:00.000-08:00

LaTeX can be quite nasty, yes it can. Todays feature:

! Package textcomp Error: Symbol \textcurrency not provided by
(textcomp) font family ptm in TS1 encoding.
(textcomp) Default family used instead.

l.16 ...ment --- wikipedia{,} die freie enzyklopä
die,

Basically boils down to using the German Umlaut ae=ä in the bibliography file. As soon as I'll find a better solution than removing it, I will post it here to. For now: remove it!

Windows share mounting fails

2007-11-06T15:14:00.000-08:00

After upgrading from kernel 2.6.22.9 to 2.6.23.1 without any config changes and CIFS support and all, suddenly when trying to mount the shares fails with (dmesg):

CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -22

I suspect some kernel changes, probably related to my fstab style, where I had to add password=, though it seemed senseless to make it work in the first place:

//host/share /mnt/mountpoint cifs rw,username=guest,password=,auto,user 0 0

Anyways, aptitude install smbfs solves the problem immediately. Thats weird, as I am sure, that it was previously working without that package..

SSHFS mysteries

2007-11-02T16:08:00.000-07:00

Problem:
'read: Connection reset by peer'
..when trying to establish an sshfs mount.

The solution becomes obvious when you try to manually connect with ssh:

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!

the fingerprint sent from the host is different from the stored one. In my case due to an reinstallation on the host. In your case probably due to an Man-in-the-middle attach.

So go check the fingerprint of the public key on the host with the ssh-keygen -l -f YOUR_KEY_FILE command, delete the wrong entry from your known_hosts file and reconnect with ssh, then compare the fringerprint sent by the host with the one on the host and accept it.

First! first!

2007-11-02T15:59:00.000-07:00

Not to confuse with the German First!

So what's this blog about? Getting the tech talk error-solution pair posts out of my main blog! The pedantic nature that I am, I can't help myself to document a personal problem solution, so if've outsourced that to here. Hopefully Google saves some guys some time by finding some solutions here.

So far, congratulations to myself :)