Solutions Log by Dan Reiland

21Mar/112

Unable to Browse Windows Network Shares in Ubuntu

Issue:
When attempting to browse Windows network shares from Gnome Nautilus, the window will become unresponsive and the operation will eventually timeout.

Affects:

  • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 10.10

Cause:
wins is not enabled as a host resolution mechanism in /etc/nsswitch.conf; winbind is not installed.

Resolution:
Open /etc/nsswitch.conf in your favorite editor and ensure the hosts line matches the precise order below (you are adding wins).

 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] wins dns mdns4

Install winbind

sudo apt-get install winbind

References:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1169149

21Mar/110

Empathy Reports Network Error When Connecting to MSN

Issue:
telepathy-butterfly

Affects:

  • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 10.10

Cause:
A bug is present in the telepathy-butterfly package.

Resolution:
An update is pending approval and will be available for both Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10. Informal patches are available, however, I prefer to stick to the mainline distribution as much as possible to avoid introducing tightly coupled dependencies.

Remove telepathy-butterfly and its dependencies.

sudo killall telepathy-butterfly
sudo dpkg --purge telepathy-butterfly
sudo apt-get install telepathy-haze

Reconfigure your MSN connections and attempt to activate them. You should experience no additional issues.

References:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/telepathy-butterfly/+bug/513346

Tagged as: No Comments
28Feb/110

Updating rubygems on Ubuntu

If you have ever tried to update rubygems on a base Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10 install you will have been greeted with:

# gem update --system
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (RuntimeError)
    gem update --system is disabled on Debian. RubyGems can be updated using the official Debian repositories by aptitude or apt-get.

You can work around this limitation:

# gem install rubygems-update
# /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/update_rubygems

You will now be able to update rubygems using the standard set of commands.

Reference:
http://www.tinymission.com/blog/blogengine.web/post/2010/11/03/Updating-to-Rails-30-on-Ubuntu-1004.aspx

Tagged as: No Comments
13Jan/110

rsyslog consumes excessive memory when forwarding logs with compression

Issue:
rsyslog consumed growing amounts of memory when forwarding over TCP with compression enabled.

*.* @@(z1)hostname.domain.tld

Cause:
The compression flag causes the rsyslog process to allocate, and never release, memory. I have not determined root cause but the likely culprits are zlib or TLS (both involved when compression is enabled in this situation).

Resolution:
Do not use compression when forwarding with rsyslog. With the compression flag dropped, I was unable to reproduce the errant behavior.

*.* @@hostname.domain.tld

References:
http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/rsyslog_conf_actions.html