Tom's blog

  Since ubuntu 10.04, Sun JDK has been dropped and replaced by openjdk . Literally replaced, ie : Sun JDK remove, openjdk installed. This is performed during the upgrade without explicitly asking you for your consent... which is quite ugly... After the upgrade, my tomcat was not working anymore... Anyway, in order to install Sun JDK back you just have to : vi /etc/apt/sources.list and check if the following line is present : deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner if not, add it at the end of the file. then run sudo aptitude update to get the package list from the new repo. and then run : sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jdk but after that, if you run java -version, it's still the openjdk version. thomas@daisybox:/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun$ java -version java version "1.6.0_18" OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.8) (6b18-1.8-0ubuntu1) OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.0-b16, mixed mode) thomas@daisybox:/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun$ which java /usr/...

I've rent a new server by dedibox.fr and the ubuntu server version is tunned by the dedibox team... On the Ubuntu Server 9.04 64bit/english version, there's a locale configuration issue. whenever you do a aptitude update or run the 'locale' command you get a warning like this : thomas@sd1:~$ locale locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-15 LANGUAGE=en_US:en:en_GB:en LC_CTYPE="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_NUMERIC="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_TIME="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_COLLATE="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_MONETARY="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_PAPER="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_NAME="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_ADDRESS="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.ISO-8859-15" L...

first install the correct package : sudo aptitude install dhcp3-server then edit the configuration file : vim /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf ddns-update-style none; # option definitions common to all supported networks... option domain-name " domain.tld " option domain-name-servers 80.10.246.3, 80.10.246.1, 80.10.246.129 ; default-lease-time 600; max-lease-time 7200; # If this DHCP server is the official DHCP server for the local # network, the authoritative directive should be uncommented. #authoritative; # Use this to send dhcp log messages to a different log file (you also # have to hack syslog.conf to complete the redirection). log-facility local7; # No service will be given on this subnet, but declaring it helps the # DHCP server to understand the network topology. # eth0 subnet configuration subnet 192.168.2.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { range 192.168.2.100 192.168.2.200; option routers 192.168.2.254; option broadcast-address 192.168.2.255; } Replace domain.tld by your...

Well... I could have waited 15 more days to have the stable version of Ubuntu 9.04 available for upgrade... but no... It seems I wasn't aware i've so much time to loose. So I've upgraded my kubuntu 8.10 (64bit) to the 9.04 version. All went smoothly until I reboot where I get this nice message : no block devices found (4 times) Gave up waiting for root device. ALERT! /dev/md3 does not exist. dropping to a shell! Apparently the raid configuration has been dropped during the upgrade. I've filled a bug here : https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/358054 I don't know exactly what in my setup causes this, but it seems that it's a bug of the last kernel. Probably my raid setup. My computer is made of : P5N32-E Sli plus motherboard C2D 6250 4GB of RAM 2x 250GB SATA, RAID1 software for linux (sdc, sdd) 2x150GB Raptor SATA Raid0 for windows (fake raid from motherboard) (sda, sdb) To get my system back on line I just need to do this in the busybox shell : mdadm -As exit...

gmail, google docs and google calendar now offers offline support with google Gears ! Great... but... Gears is not available for x64 linux... I've ask the google support for a release date of an official x64 build... but meanwhile, I've found (yes... google is my friend) this blog : http://nielspeen.com/blog/2009/02/google-gears-64-bit/ that gives a x64 build of gears that actually works ;) Great ! Btw, I can understand that one loves Yahoo! webmail which is great, but Microsoft Live mail... seriously... it's ugly, slow, so poor in functionality... why use it when you have access to an awesome webmail like gmail?? ;) Update : new version of the x64 version is available on niespeen blog ( 0.5.18.0 version (instead of the 0.5.16.0 version proposed by the firefox updater))

When I run on Windows XP, I've my standart gmail address opened in firefox (and 3 other google apps gmail), and a developper gmail adress (which subscribe many mailling list). Now that I'm on kubuntu (at home), I needed an extra browser to do the same, and it's obviously Konqueror... but what's sad is that it's a poor plain html interface that you get with gmail. So I switched the user agent to Firefox, but I get a blank page. I've tryed with Safari (as it uses webkit, the render engine of Konqueror) and it works...except that I need to use a wheel click to make a regular clic. Everything else work fine (except you don't have rich text editing, but maybe you don't have it on safari as well...)

I'm installing several ubuntu servers for various purpose (home server, Secondary DNS server, new primary DNS server, web servers, development servers). For each one, I write the setup documentation (which are stored on a google apps premium account, which is by the way a must have for all the cooperative stuff). Here is what I do for all servers, no matter the final use : useful software sudo -s # switch to root account as at setup I do a lot of root stuff apt-get update # update the apt-get package list apt-get upgrade # upgrade all package that are installed by default apt-get install vim-full; # A lot of dependencies comes along, but vim is much better after (need some config modification) apt-get install sysstat; # To monitor Hard drive activities apt-get install whois; # contains the mkpasswd command apt-get install slocate; # slocate, to find...

I've bought a new server (build from parts) to replace the old one that has capacitor leak issues and died † And with it, I bought a new UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) to replace the old one that non longer work either... I've googled internet to setup this UPS with my linux server (ubuntu server 8.0.4.1) and here is the result of my search and work : When the UPS detect a power outage, it wait some times (configured depending on the capacity of the UPS and the power consumption of the server), and then send a mail with the UPS state just before the shutdown, and then shutdown the server. While waiting some time, if the power is back, the shutdown is cancelled. The UPS state is useful as it shows you the health of your UPS when it goes on battery. If the charge is really low when the server is shutdown, you might want to reduce the time it wait on battery before shutting down the server or replace the battery (or the UPS). If the charge is really close to 100, you might wa...

On my spare time, I manage the technical subjects of a small webagency i've created with a friend when I was in my second year of Engineer school. It's named 123monsite.com . Tonight I dig the secondary (slave) DNS server subject. Until now, we used a DNS server from our registar as DNS backup. But as we grow, we need more servers and a secondary DNS of our own is becomming handy. We've rent a dedibox from the free.fr ISP (a server for 30€/month : via 2Ghz, 2Go Ram, 160Go HDD, 5Go of monthly backup). I choosed ubunty feisty server (7) among all OS available (many linux flavour and some windows) So here is how I set up my secondary domain name server on my ubuntu server with bind9. Let's say the domain of the primary name server is ns0.primarydomain.com (80.1.1.1) The secondary will be : ns1.primarydomain.com (80.2.2.2) And the domaine we'll want to be handle by both servers is myDomain.com (90.9.9.9). Give your secondary server a domain name T...