Notes about open source software, computers, other stuff.
Yesterday I created an SSH key for a new machine. Today I try to log in to a different machine, one that actually doesn’t use keys, and I got the error mentioned in the title. It turns out SSH offers all available keys by default, so I ran out of login attempts before I noticed it.
The solution is simple: Add
IdentitiesOnly yes
to your ~/.ssh/config file.
A more detailed explanation can be found here.
Last weekend I dragged an old JVC A-G90 amplifier from the attic to my study/work room. I was planning on putting it on sale, but while playing with it I decided to connect my computer to it and see whether it could replace my Logitech Z-680 (see below). A quick inventory of my computer use showed me that I didn’t really need 5.1 sound, so going to stereo wouldn’t be a big loss.
So, I hooked up the amplifier to the PC and a set of Klipsch RB-51 bookshelf speakers for a test. It was great! The only downside were the crackling noises I heard when turning the volume knob. These were one of the reasons why it ended up in the attic anyway. I seem to remember that, several years ago, I used a bit of contact spray to fix this issue. For a while. A bit of internet searching led me to the following hint: “Just turn the amplifier off and turn the knob for 20 to 100 times, this usually makes the crackling noise go away, since it is usually caused by dust in the pot meter”. And it worked!
So now I have a good-working amp and excellent sound (I found another set of Klipsch RB-51’s on sale), even at low volumes. Much better than with the Z-680. I also dug up the JVC KD-WR90 cassette player and the JVC T-E50L tuner, as well as the (not matching because too wide) JVC XL-V231 CD player, so now the old stereo set that I know from my childhood is restored in all its glory :-).
What I should do, of course, is compare this amp to the Marantz NR-1601 and SR-6006 I own as well. Just to see how they compare. Maybe something for a cold winter evening.
One note about speaker placement: the speakers are very close to me (i.e. less than 1 meter). At first I placed the right speaker at ear level and the left one 15 cm lower. It seemed that the left speaker had lost most of its high-frequency spectrum. Only after raising it to the same height did I get proper balanced sound. Maybe this specific to the Klipsch speakers with their horn tweeter, maybe not. Anyway, something to keep in mind!
The problem with the Z-680 was that it has a low level of hiss/noise coming from the speakers. The hiss wasn’t noticeable when playing games or listening to music, but when the speakers were idle the noise was very noticeable and distracting. Even when the set was muted it was present. This turns out to be an unfixable problem (there was a partial fix with a firmware update) and several discussion threads about it can be found on the internet.
When I used the set in a home theatre setup I never noticed the hiss, but ever since I used it as my computer speaker set (i.e. sitting closer to the speakers), it annoyed me greatly. Even more so since I started working from home, most of the time sitting behind the computer without music, but still with the speakers on in order to notice e.g. Skype calls coming in.
If you’re interested in a short (14 minute) talk on what Free Foftware is all about, have a look at Richard Stallman’s TEDx Geneva presentation. It’s an excellent introduction by the master himself!
Note: the video above is only half the size of the original because I wanted it to fit the width of this blog.
After an upgrade of one of my Ubuntu server that runs Nagios, I ran into the following error message (again…) when I tried to issue a command from the web interface:
Error: Could not stat() command file ‘/var/lib/nagios3/rw/nagios.cmd’!
This post by Barry O’Donovan shows very nicely how this problem can/should be fixed in Ubuntu. Much cleaner than chmod/chown-ing the directories myself. Thanks Barry!
Sun Grid Engine (SGE) is a bath queue system that can be used to distribute computation intensive tasks across one or more servers/CPUs. SGE has a graphical configuration utility called qmon, but when you start it on a remote machine (using SSH), you may end up with errors like this:
Warning: Cannot convert string "-adobe-courier-medium-r-*--14-*-*-*-m-*-*-*" to type FontStruct Warning: Cannot convert string "-adobe-courier-bold-r-*--14-*-*-*-m-*-*-*" to type FontStruct Warning: Cannot convert string "-adobe-courier-medium-r-*--12-*-*-*-m-*-*-*" to type FontStruct X Error of failed request: BadName (named color or font does not exist) Major opcode of failed request: 45 (X_OpenFont) Serial number of failed request: 329 Current serial number in output stream: 340
The warnings are not really a problem, but the error is. It can be solved by running the following on the client (i.e. your local) machine (assuming it runs Debian or Ubuntu):
sudo apt-get install xfonts-75dpi xset +fp /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi xset fp rehash |
I’m currently teaching at the Summmer School in Statistical Omics in Split, Croatia. A great experience!
Because of the computations involved in the project work, we have access to a server. However, since the machine is part of a university cluster, I haven’t been given full root permissions (in fact, I’m only allowed to use sudo to install packages).
Now, the problem I had to solve was that I needed to distribute a certain file (.Renviron) to each student’s home directory. Normally I’d use sudo to do that, but the admin hadn’t allowed me to use cp via sudo. Furtunately, I had a list of user names and passwords for the students (because I had to distribute those), so I thought I’d use su - to change to each student’s account and copy the file, something along the lines of
echo PASSWORD | su - |
and then loop over each account. Unfortunately, while testing the script I found out it wouldn’t work since su complained:
su: must be run from a terminal |
Then I remembered the expect tool, which executes commands based on what it ‘sees’ on the command line. In this case I wanted it to enter the password at su‘s prompt. This is the expect script I came up with, it accepts two command line arguments, the user name and the password:
#!/usr/bin/expect -f set user [lindex $argv 0] set pass [lindex $argv 1] spawn su - $user expect "Password: " send "$pass\r" expect "$ " send "cp -i /common/WORK/school/lennart/.Renviron .\r" expect "$ " send "ls -l .Renviron\r" expect "$ " send "exit\r" |
The script was wrapped in the Bash script that I had already written:
#!/bin/bash # # This script is used to copy files from this directory to the # home directories of the users listed in $USERFILE. USERFILE=accounts.txt SRCFILE=/common/WORK/school/lennart/.Renviron while read user passw; do ./copy_file_to_users.expect $user $passw done < $USERFILE |
After starting Emacs you end up in the *scratch* buffer (assuming you’ve disabled the startup message in your .emacs file). The *scratch* can be used for writing down notes and some Lisp experiments (since it uses the Emacs Lisp major mode by default).
Now, I’m not very much of a Lisp programmer, but I do use Org-mode a lot. Consequently, I found myself changing the buffer’s major mode to org-mode regularly. And Emacs wouldn’t be Emacs if you couldn’t change this to a default. So, thanks to Bozhidar Batsov over at Emacs Redux, I’ve added the following lines to my Emacs configuration file:
;; Set the default mode of the scratch buffer to Org (setq initial-major-mode 'org-mode) ;; and change the message accordingly (setq initial-scratch-message "\ # This buffer is for notes you don't want to save. You can use # org-mode markup (and all Org's goodness) to organise the notes. # If you want to create a file, visit that file with C-x C-f, # then enter the text in that file's own buffer. ") |
Some time ago I bought a ThinkPad T440s for work. It’s an amazing machine! Before that I used a ThinkPad X121, which served me very well on my daily commute. This machine was getting a bit old, and given that my new job (more about which in a later post) also requires me to have a better machine with more screen real estate, it was high time to upgrade.
Ubuntu (13.10 and 14.04) runs well on the T440s, only two things didn’t work as expected:
Fn-F5 and Fn-F6 keys, but only in a weird way: several key presses are needed for one unit of decrease/increase.This last bug can be fixed by booting with the following kernel argument:
acpi_backlight=vendor
Simply add this to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line in /etc/default/grub:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="acpi_backlight=vendor quiet splash"
and run sudo update-grub. Reboot and you will be able to change the backlight brightness in finer steps.
I found this solution somewhere on the internet a few weeks ago, wrote it down, but can’t remember anymore what the original URL was. My apologies.
After upgrading my Ubuntu 13.10 installation to 14.04, I noticed that the output of several git commands (e.g. git diff and git log) didn’t show colours as they used to, but showed ESC[ ANSI codes instead.
A quick internet search lead to this post on unix.stackexchange.com where the LESS environment variable was ‘blamed’. Indeed, I have my LESS variable (re-) defined in my .bashrc and .zshrc files.
The solution was to add -R to the environment variable, which allows raw control characters to be displayed. I now have the environment variable defined as:
LESS='--quiet -X -F -R' |
Note to self: if you want to be able to upgrade WordPress via the web interface using SSH, you need to have the libssh2-php package installed on Debian/Ubuntu Linux.
Don’t forget to restart Apache after installing the package. Reload the WordPress admin pages and you’ll see the SSH option added.
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