Ubuntu – RFC 3092

Teams on Windows grey Overlay Foo

Posted on March 4, 2022 - March 4, 2022 by peter

After being forced to work with Windows for a while I finally was able to switch back to Linux. And one of the first things I needed for work was MS Teams. So I updated the already installed version and when I first had to do a screen share I had a flashback, why I switched to use Teams in a VM, rather than the native Linux version: a grey overlay.

It’s nice to have the red frame, so that I know which screen I am sharing, but the grey overlay makes things very hard to read. Especially when you share a dark themed window. But see for yourself. This is what I got:

Continue reading →

OpenVPN in Ubuntu 18.04 Foo within OpenVZ Container (Strato)

Posted on March 21, 2019 - March 21, 2019 by peter

It has been a while since my last blog post, but there was no real foo happening to me during that time. But this issue really gave me some heartburn.

Let’s start with the general setup. We have a Linux VM in an OpenVZ environment. The hoster is Strato in Germany, but I don’t think that really matters. There are some known issues with the TUN device not being accessible within the VM, but Strato did their homework and I could see the module:

# lsmod | grep tun
tun                     4242  -2
vznetstat               4242  -2 tun,ip_vznetstat,ip6_vznetstat

Continue reading →

Send Email from the Command Line using an External SMTP Server

Posted on June 14, 2017 - December 15, 2018 by peter

Sending email in Linux is pretty straight forward, once an email server is set up. Just use mutt or mail and all is good. But sometimes you actually want to test if SMTP is working correctly. And not only on your box, but on a remote box. That is of course easy using a MUA like Thunderbird or Sylpheed, but that is not always feasible on a remote server in a remote network.

Continue reading “Send Email from the Command Line using an External SMTP Server” →

MySQL max_connections limited to 214 on Ubuntu Foo

Posted on June 13, 2017 - December 15, 2018 by peter

After moving a server to a new machine with Ubuntu 16.10 I received some strange Postfix SMTP errors. Which turned out to be a connection issue to the MySQL server:
postfix/cleanup[30475]: warning: connect to mysql server 127.0.0.1: Too many connections

Oops, did I forgot to up max_connections during the migration:

Continue reading “MySQL max_connections limited to 214 on Ubuntu Foo” →

Nagios Enabling External Command on Debian based Distributions

Posted on December 4, 2015 - December 15, 2018 by peter

While debugging my check disk problem after the 15.10 upgrade, I saw that I forgot to enable external commands. That is handy, when you want to re-schedule a check to see, if your changes took effect. Again, something that is easily activated. So if you see something like this, then you might want to make some changes:

Error: Could not stat() command file ‘/var/lib/nagios3/rw/nagios.cmd’!

The external command file may be missing, Nagios may not be running, and/or Nagios may not be checking external commands. An error occurred while attempting to commit your command for processing. Continue reading “Nagios Enabling External Command on Debian based Distributions” →

Nagios check_disk Foo on Ubuntu 15.10

Posted on December 4, 2015 - December 15, 2018 by peter

Another day another foo, this time done to the check_disk plugin for Nagios on Ubuntu. After updating to 15.10 my disk space check all of a sudden failed with this one here:

DISK CRITICAL - /sys/kernel/debug/tracing is not accessible: Permission denied

Continue reading “Nagios check_disk Foo on Ubuntu 15.10” →

Automatic Ubuntu Kernel Clean Up Foo (Update)

Posted on June 27, 2014 - July 26, 2014 by peter

Cleaning up old kernel images on a Ubuntu machine is a quite annoying task. If you forget it and you have a separate /boot partition, then you will sooner or later run out of disk space. And then of course all your updates will fail.

Doing the clean up manually is, as mentioned, more than annoying and very tedious. But other smart people have spent some time and created a nice little one-liner that will get rid of old kernel versions. This command line will of course make sure that the currently running kernel is not removed. So it is very important to reboot after a kernel upgrade before you run this script!

And without further ado I present….
dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/$.*$-$[^0-9]\+$/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* $[^ ]*$.*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs apt-get -y purge

Update:
Not a big deal but a sudo snuck into the xargs call. It is now removed and shouldn’t cause any trouble anymore.

The Apache “Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName” Foo on Ubuntu

Posted on May 30, 2014 by peter

If you are using Apache on Ubuntu, then you most likely ran into the annoying warning about determining the fully qualified domain name of your server. Something like this will show up in your logs, on start of the server or on log rotation:

apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 10.10.0.40 for ServerName

Luckily there is an easy fix it. All you have to do is adding the ServerName directive to your Apache configuration and specify a good server name. Usually localhost will do fine, unless you are using the machine without virtual hosts, just as a base server.

A quick and dirty way would be adding the following line to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf or to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and restart your Apache service.

ServerName localhost

And then restart your Apache service with the following command:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Or on newer systems with:

service apache2 restart

Now, if you have a name in /etc/hostname, then you can use that instead. But you have to make sure that the name resolves to something real. If it is not in the DNS, then add it to your /etc/hosts and let it resolve to another loopback address. Here is a sample:

127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.1.1 myhostname

But as I said, this is quick and dirty and there are much better ways of doing it. So lets take a look at the preferred method. This one differs depending on the Ubuntu version, because the default Apache version changed from 2.2 to 2.4.

Ubuntu 13.04 and older (Apache 2.2)

Apache 2.2 loads additional configuration files from /etc/apache2/conf.d. Just add a file to that directory and add the above mentioned ServerName directive and restart Apache.

Create the file:
vi /etc/apache2/conf.d/servername

Add the directive:
ServerName localhost

Restart Apache:
service apache2 restart
or
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Ubuntu 13.10 and newer (Apache 2.4)

Apache 2.4 has the additional configuration organized similar to the modules and sites. All configuration files need to be added to the directory /etc/apache2/conf-available and need to have the extension .conf. Each configuration file can be enabled with a2enconf and disabled with a2disconf.

Create the file:
vi /etc/apache2/conf-available/servername.conf

Add the directive:
ServerName localhost

Activate the configuration:
a2enconf servername

Restart Apache:
service apache2 restart

Too Many Open Files Foo With Chrome On Ubuntu 13.10

Posted on May 19, 2014 by peter

The last Chrome update and one of the last Thunderbird updates caused some strange crashes of either on of them on my Ubuntu 13.10. All is fine, it runs great and all of a sudden *boom*, browser window gone, or email client gone.

Luckily .xsession-errors exists and there I could find some entries like this:
[3827:4038:0518/230904:ERROR:shared_memory_posix.cc(226)] Creating shared memory in /dev/shm/.com.google.Chrome.12UDei failed: Too many open files

Not good. But there is help. For MyEclipse I had the same issue in the past. But it didn’t seem necessary anymore since 13.10. But I also haven’t used it in a while. Anywhoo, here is what has to be done. And before I forget it, all these changes have to be done as root.

First check the setting for file-max with the following command
cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max

In my case this value seems fine, as it is well beyond the 200,000 that they recommend.
peter@majestix:~$ cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max 1627431

If that is below 200,000 you can set by adding the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf
fs.file-max=200000

The next is the ulimit setting for open files. You can check it with the following command
ulimit -n

This one was set to 1024 in my case and that can be a little bit low. At MyEclipse they recommend setting it to 65535 and that’s what I did. Just add the following lines to /etc/security/limits.conf
* hard nofile 65535 * soft nofile 65535

Afterwards restart your machine and all should be fine. If you only have to change the sysctl.conf setting then you can activate that change with the following command
service procps start

PS3 Media Server And Ubuntu Foo… Again

Posted on March 21, 2014 by peter

It feels like Groundhog Day all over again. After finding a relatively painless way of installing the PS3 Media Server on Ubuntu (PS3 Media Server And Ubuntu Foo), I found an easy way with a PPA (PS3 Media Server made easy) and I thought all will be good when I do the re-install of my server with Saucy. I couldn’t be more wrong. The latest Ubuntu version that is supported by the PPA is Raring and it seems it stopped at version 1.81.0 of the PS3 Media Server. A quick check of the home page and the current version is 1.90.1.

After some thought, I checked my old blog post and the configuration files from the PPA. So, this is a chimera of all these components and most importantly, it works. I can now feed media to my devices that don’t support the Plex Media Server.

So, lets get started. Oh, before I forget it. All these steps need to be done as root!

Dependencies/Repositories

The good thing is, that nowadays most of the media related packages are already part of Ubuntu. So, we can simply pull most dependencies directly from Ubuntu’s repository and don’t have to add tons of PPA’s.

First and foremost you need Java. I prefer for some unrelated reasons to use the Oracle JDK. I know JDK 8 was just released but 7 will do for the moment. And as far as I know PMS (yes, I use the abbreviation again) works fine with the OpenJDK. So this first step is kinda optional.

add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
apt-get update
apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

And if you want to try OpenJDK, you do the following

apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk

Now we need the media related dependencies. All the encoders, decoders, muxers, etc. Most of it is already in Ubuntu and you might not need all of it (like dcraw). But I think it is better to have it installed and ready use, then be surprised when a feature, you never used before, doesn’t work. So here we go.

apt-get install mplayer mencoder mediainfo ffmpeg imagemagick vlc flac dcraw

tsMuxeR is the only one missing in this list. Luckily Robert Tari created a PPA. Lets just add it:

add-apt-repository ppa:robert-tari/main
apt-get update
apt-get install tsmuxer

Get PS3 Media Server

The project switched from Google Code to SourceForge but has its source code at GitHub. Confused? Well, so am I, but they must have their reasons and I don’t question it. Anywhoo, you can download the latest version (currently 1.90.1) from here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ps3mediaserver/

Installation

After downloading you can install PMS into /opt or any other directory you think might be useful (/usr/local, etc.). I personally prefer /opt. Here we go:

tar xzvf pms-1.90.1-generic-linux-unix.tar.gz -C /opt/
ln -s /opt/pms-1.90.1/ /opt/pms

Creating the symlink in the second step makes life easier for later updates. All the configuration and start/stop scripts just look for /opt/pms. Updating should be as easy, as extracting the package into /opt and recreating the symlink.

Start Script

I based my scripts on the scripts from the PPA from Happy-Neko. Currently I did just some path corrections but I am planning on moving more configuration options to the configuration in /etc/default/.

Here are the steps to get the Upstart script, service configuration file and set the legacy link.

wget http://www.rfc3092.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ps3mediaserver.conf_.gz
gunzip ps3mediaserver.conf_.gz
mv ps3mediaserver.conf_ /etc/init

wget http://www.rfc3092.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ps3mediaserver.gz
gunzip ps3mediaserver.gz
mv ps3mediaserver /etc/default

cd /etc/init.d/
ln -s /lib/init/upstart-job ps3mediaserver

initctl reload-configuration

The last two steps set the legacy link, so that you can start the service using the old /etc/init.d mechanism. And the second is to tell Upstart, to scan for new services.

Please check /etc/default/ps3mediaserver, if it fits your needs. For instance, not everybody wants to run PMS as root. So take a minute and clean that up.

Configuration

The configuration for PMS with this setup in the configuration area for the user root.

/root/.config/ps3mediaserver

You can change this in /etc/default/ps3mediaserver. Here is how you get a basic configuration going.

wget http://www.rfc3092.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/PMS.conf_.gz
gunzip PMS.conf_.gz
mkdir -p /root/.config/ps3mediaserver
mv PMS.conf_ /root/.config/ps3mediaserver

The configuration file is already updated to reflect the paths for all external tools. It does not contain a UUID for the server, because that is created automatically when you fire up the server for the first time.

You should take a look at the following settings (see also my blog post PS3 Media Server And Ubuntu Foo for tips):

folders
name
network_interface
hostname

folders is the only one out of these that you definitely want to set to reflect your setup. The server is running as a service and therefor headless. Just put a comma separated list of directories in there. Something like

folders = /src/videos,/srv/music

name on the other hand is just a cosmetic thing and defines with which name the server shows up on the client.

Yet, the default for network_interfaces can sometimes cause some grieve. You might have to bind the server to a specific interface if some virtual interface seems to be more attractive to PMS.

hostname is similar to network_interfaces. Usually it should not be needed but if you have multiple IP’s on a device you might want to specify which IP it binds itself to.

Service Start

Now that everything is set up you can start the service.

service ps3mediaserver start

The service should fire up without any errors. And if you encounter errors you will find the logs in /var/log/ps3mediaserver/root/.

Happy Streaming!

Final Thoughts

I think it is pretty straight forward to get PMS to work on Ubuntu. If I find some time… did I just write that?! Well, if I find some time, I will create a PPA with the latest version and I will try to keep it up to date.