Tag: Debian

Apache VirtualHost config gone after Wheezy to Jessie upgrade

~ flihp ~ 8 Comments

Here’s a fun one that had me running in circles for a while today:

I’ve been running deluge and the deluge-webui on Debian Wheezy for a while now. Pretty solid. I needed to download a torrent using a magnet URI today and deluge-webui on Wheezy won’t do it. This feature was added to the webui in 1.3.4 though so the version in Jessie should work.

I did the typical dist-upgrade song and dance per the usual but after the upgrade Apache was all hosed up. It was just showing the default example page. All of access logs that would normally go to my configured virtual host were landing in /var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log which is all wrong. I started out thinking it was the hostname of the system that got messed up but that was a dead end.

I started making progress when I found the command

apache2ctl -S

This dumps out a bunch of data about your configuration and it basically said that my VirtualHostM configuration was empty:

VirtualHost configuration:

Yeah it was basically an empty string. This seemed wrong but I wasn’t sure what to expect really. After banging around a bit longer and getting no where I finally decided to just disable and re-enable my site configuration. This was desperation because my site config was already linked into /etc/apache2/sites-enabled so it must have been enabled … right?

a2dissite mysite

But disabling it failed! It gave me some sort of “no such file” error. Whaaaaaa?. So I ran the commend through strace and it turns out that the new apache2 package on Jessie expects the site config file to have the suffix .conf. Changing the name of my site config fragment fixed this and I was then able to enable the config as expected.

That was unbelievably annoying. Hopefully this will save someone else a few minutes.

Debian Squeeze Bluetooth Headset

~ flihp ~ Leave a comment

Working out of my “home office” these past two weeks I’ve found a few short comings in my setup. While on my first teleconference last week I spent an hour holding my cellphone to my head. Miserable. I never thought I’d miss a land line / speaker phone. Easy problem to solve though, just get a bluetooth headset on ebay. Top of the line will cost you $80 new.

Getting this to work with my cellphone was just a matter of pushing buttons. Nothing interesting. Getting it to work on my laptop (EliteBook 2560p running Debian Squeeze) was a bit of a trick. I’m a hopeless minimalist and I just want a simple GUI to manage my bluetooth devices and a new audio device to show up in alsamixer (1). The GUI can be either blueman or gnome-bluetooth. For the first time in a while I actually liked the gnome app better so that’s what I went with. Both worked fine for pairing the device.

Getting the Linux sound system to pick up the new devices was beyond me. The worst part was that all resources unearthed through web searches always pointed to stuff that didn’t work, or was a reference to the bluez wiki which has been down for 2 years. I tried a few times to hack a .asoundrc and just ended up feeling stupid. Unless you’ve got a day to burn don’t bother with this approach.

The solution I found was actually very simple once I found it. Turns out if you install pulseaudio it will do all the hard stuff for you (which I like). I only came to this solution after stumbling across a post on ask.debian.net: http://ask.debian.net/questions/how-to-make-bluetooth-headset-working-with-ekiga-in-squeeze. Nice fix that works perfectly. I had my bluetooth headset working on Squeeze in a matter of minutes after installing PulseAudio.

EliteBook 2560p Intel 82579LM Debian Squeeze Install

~ flihp ~ 3 Comments

Started with a new employer (Citrix) today. Naturally my first task of setting up a development system was more work than I wanted it to be. Turns out the EliteBook 2560p has Intel 83579LM network hardware and the Debian Squeeze e1000 driver predates it. Using ‘testing’ is always an option but not a very stable / appealing one.

The 2.6.38 kernel and drivers have been backported to squeeze so all that’s really needed is an installer with this kernel / drivers. I didn’t know until I’d burned a good half hour searching around the web that there are unofficial Squeeze installers complete with backports: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/backports/squeeze/. One of those images is all you’ll need to get Squeeze running on a system with Intel 82579LM network hardware.

Exim + Sieve issues

~ flihp ~ Leave a comment

I spent much longer than I’d like to admit moving my mail server today. The Debian exim4 package is very easy to configure and setting up TLS and authentication is a snap with the help of a very good Debian Administration article. Also I’ve had to tweak the address_file transport to support Sieve and the fileinto action.

What I’m writing now is mostly for my own benefit so I don’t have to look this same crap up in a few years when I move my mail server again:

TLS and Auth

The howto above uses the standard exim auth from /etc/exim4/passwd but if you want to use something like the courier-authdaemon all you need to do is go further down in /etc/exim4/conf.d/auth/30_exim4-config_examples to uncomment a later section:

plain_courier_authdaemon:
login_courier_authdaemon:

All authentication should be done over TLS and enabling this only requires a private key, a certificate and adding this file: /etc/exim4/main/000_localmacros:

MAIN_TLS_ENABLE = yes
MAIN_TLS_CERTIFICATE = /etc/ssl/certs/example.org.cert
MAIN_TLS_PRIVATEKEY  = /etc/exim4/example.org.key

The Debian exim daemon is running as the user Debian-exim so it won’t be able to access files in /etc/ssl/private. You can either keep your secret key in /etc/exim4 as I’ve done above or add the Debian-exim user to the daemon group and make the group for /etc/ssl/private daemon. Either is reasonable but you’ll have to add Debian-exim to the daemon group anyway so it can use the authdaemon socket.

At this point you should check to be sure your mail isn’t an open relay and there are a number of tools available to test this. Some are websites that you can simply enter the IP/domain name of your mail server. Others are tools like swaks where you can test this for yourself. A good example of using swaks for testing exim4 can be found here.

Exim4 and Sieve

Finally it seems like the Exim4 package on Debian Squeeze may have a bug when it comes to delivering mail to users with Sieve filters in their .forward file. I kept getting an error stating:

R=userforward T=address_file defer (-21): appendfile: file or directory name "inbox" is not absolute

To debug this a cheetsheet for getting Exim to do your bidding essential. The best one I could find is here.

There are a number of mailing list posts out there discussing similar errors but none seemed to fix my problem. Basically the error message means that the appendfile transport isn’t able to figure out what the “inbox” from a sieve filter should be when converted to a file/directory name. I’m using maildir in a users home directory so I spent a few hours poking around that part of the configuration to no avail.

Eventually, in my old configuration, I found a patch to the address_file transport to help it figure out what “inbox” is:

--- a/conf.d/transport/30_exim4-config_address_file	2005-02-19 05:25:59.000000000 -0500
+++ b/conf.d/transport/30_exim4-config_address_file	2011-07-24 21:52:33.270494409 -0400
@@ -8,4 +8,8 @@
   delivery_date_add
   envelope_to_add
   return_path_add
+  directory = ${if eq{$address_file}{inbox} 
+                            {$home/Maildir/new} 
+                            {$home/Maildir/.${sg{$address_file}{^inbox[.]}{}}/new}
+                        }

Here comes the disclaimer: I’m no Exim hacker and I can barely figure out what this does. I found it two years ago when I was setting up my mail server and had to get Sieve filters working. When I moved this mail server today I upgraded from Lenny to Squeeze and figured this may have been fixed. It wasn’t though so I had to dig through my old configs to find it again.

Debian Squeeze power management and SELinux

~ flihp ~ Leave a comment

Most of the work that’s gone into the Debian SELinux policy seems to have has been done on servers. After taking a serious look at the AVCs on my laptop it seems that most of the power management stuff isn’t quite working. It was close though so the patch I had to whip up wasn’t too serious. It basically came down to:

  • get policykit started properly by dbus (I guess it used to be started by init)
  • differences between file paths on Fedora and Debian
  • allow upowerd to execute anacron properly(pm-utils script executing the anacron init scrip)
  • allow upowerd to talk to the unconfined users dbus session (started by X login scripts)

The Debian SELinux mailing list is pretty much defunct so I’ve been sending these patches directly to the package maintainer. We’ll see if he picks it up. The patch (against the current unstable package) is here if anyone is interested. Just copy the patch file to the root of the current policy from unstable (get it via apt-get source) and then apply it:

patch -p2 < 2011-01-26_devicekit.patch

Comparison of Catalyst Logo

~ flihp ~ 5 Comments

It’s been four months since I posted on the striking symilarity between the Debian logo and that currently being used by the Catalyst Career Group. At the recommendation of MJ Ray on the debian-legal mailing list I’m following up (a bit late) with a reasonably thorough comparison of the two logos. So here they are side by side:
Debian LogoCatalyst Career Group Logo

Hmmm well they’re not identical … so is this a case of mistaken identity? Well no. The Debian logo is still there, but it has been transformed a bit. Actually if we just reflect the standard Debian logo across the X axis we come pretty close:
Debian Logo transformedCatalyst Career Group Logo

Close is good but this is legal stuff so being exact is probably important or something. I’m a complete n00b with the GIMP but even I can take 20 minutes and figure out how to rotate an image another 45 degrees:
Catalyst Career Group Logo

So I’m no expert here but that’s pretty damn close. Change the color a little and I’ve transformed the Debian logo into that of the Catalyst Career Group in 3 or so moves. I’m convinced. Looks to me like the Debian logo is being misused. Let’s see what the debian-legal list says … to be continued.

Debian Logo Rights and Misuse

~ flihp ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been traveling a whole bunch for work lately. A month or two ago I was on the road the hotel I was staying in was hosting a job fair that was put on by a company called the Catalyst Career Group. I couldn’t help but notice their logo looked familiar.

So after standing on my head in the middle of the lobby I realized that it’s just the Debian logo upside down. The Debian project is pretty explicit about the license they distribute their logo under [1] and this doesn’t follow the license by my reading of it.

Now what to do about it? The Debian legal mailing list [2] looks like the right place. I’ll update on the results of this one. Interesting stuff.

[1] http://www.debian.org/logos/
[2] http://www.debian.org/legal/

Debian Lenny make-kpkg broken with new kernel

~ flihp ~ 1 Comment

If you use make-kpkg to build your kernels and you’re running Lenny you may have had problems building 2.6.34 when it came out. With kernel-package version 11.015 I’m getting the following error:

The UTS Release version in include/linux/version.h
""
does not match current version:
"2.6.34"
Please correct this

I’m sure more recent packages have this bug squashed but on Lenny it’s still a problem. What’s happening is make-kpkg is looking for a version string in $(KERN_ROOT)/include/linux/version.h and it’s not there. Every once in a while the kernel maintainers move stuff around and that’s exactly what happened. The UTS_RELEASE definition was moved from $(KERN_ROOT)/include/linux/utsrelease.h to $(KERN_ROOT)/include/generated/utsrelease.h

I found it confusing that the error message lists the version.h file. Turns out this definition has been moved before and when make-kpkg can’t find it in $(KERN_ROOT)/include/linux/utsrelease.h it falls back to version.h in the same directory. So we fix it with a quick patch.

--- ./version_vars.mk	2008-11-24 12:01:32.000000000 -0500
+++ ./version_vars.mk.new	2010-06-29 21:51:50.000000000 -0400
@@ -138,10 +138,10 @@
 EXTRAV_ARG :=
 endif
 
-UTS_RELEASE_HEADER=$(call doit,if [ -f include/linux/utsrelease.h ]; then  
-	                       echo include/linux/utsrelease.h;            
+UTS_RELEASE_HEADER=$(call doit,if [ -f include/generated/utsrelease.h ]; then  
+	                       echo include/generated/utsrelease.h;            
 	                   else                                            
-                               echo include/linux/version.h ;              
+                               echo include/linux/utsrelease.h ;              
 	                   fi)
 UTS_RELEASE_VERSION=$(call doit,if [ -f $(UTS_RELEASE_HEADER) ]; then                    
                  grep 'define UTS_RELEASE' $(UTS_RELEASE_HEADER) |

Down load version_vars.mk.patch. Copy this patch to /usr/share/kernel-package/ruleset/misc/ and apply it:

zcat version_vars.mk.patch.gz | sudo patch -p1

If you’ve already tried to build your kernel and had it fail because of this bug you should copy the version_vars.mk we just patched to $(KERN_ROOT)/debian/ruleset/misc/ and run make-kpkg again. This should keep you from having to rebuild the whole kernel … which takes an age on my laptop.

Can’t wait for Squeeze to go stable but that always comes with a whole set of new problems 🙂