Software

Since I moved to Antwerp, in a high building apparently made out of the thickest steel they could find (> My wifi signal barely passes the internal walls, and I’m pretty much unable to make a decent cell phone call) my Galaxy Nexus has been behaving oddly.

It started during the night of the press conf when I was catching up on my mails when I got home of a whiskey tasting evening/“apps for whiskey” event.

On 4.1 (yes, I’m lagging behind with my blog posts) something rather funky happened. And it took my 7 days to notice.

My phone was running hotter and battery life was suddenly crappier than usual. But not really paying attention, until my cell provider (Proximus) texted me I was over my data consumption limit…

As it was the beginning of the month, so that was unusual. I checked data usage in settings, and noticed ~7Gb of traffic by mail app over WiFi and ~3Gb over mobile data.

Okay. This one took a long time to solve.

At some random point after upgrading from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion was unable to add new printers.

As I don’t really add new printers on a daily base, I have no idea when it actually happened or what might have caused it.

• If I deleted an existing printer, and tried to readd it, it would throw errors at me.
• Plugging in (known) printers would pop up the dialog "click here to install/download/search for the printer driver", even though it was installed. Clicking install would give me an error no drivers could be found.
• Dymo Labelwriter shizzle stopped working.
• The driver list (system pref > printers > add > select printer software) would be empty, while on another Mac it was fully populated.
• Mac would never find the printer driver for the printer, requiring manual intervention (but, yea, as the list was empty, there wasn't much to select).

This is, as you might guess, quite annoying. Unable to print any new labels or print out any papers (and invoices ! -.-) ) I had to use another Mac just for printing.

I reinstalled my Mountain Lion, and since then Adium keeps asking for passwords on every Adium restart/startup. Understandably, this is quite annoying.

I’ve tried the following:

• readd the accounts
• reinstall adium
• run keychain first aid
• check this
• reboot
• pray to the gods, old and new
• check console (which is spawning a thousand million errors about read access denied, but Google told me it's a known Mountain Lion bug)
• update to Mountain Lion 10.8.2

What I did to solve it (I believe):

• Uninstall Adium completely (tada)
• install 10.8.2 (well, I happen to reboot just after uninstalling and reinstall Adium, so I'm unsure whether the first or 2nd point was most useful).

And it's now working correctly. So far.

Downside: have to readd all accounts (Google 2-step verification fun, and time to delete those old accounts (xmpp/icq) where I forgot the passwords), and reset all your settings.

I recently dared to upgrade from Snow Leopard (10.6) to Mountain Lion (10.8), skipping Lion (10.7) altogether.

One of the mayor disturbances I had, was when I was using my Macbook Pro at my home office. I use an external display (some Samsung SyncMaster) as well as my MBP’s main display.

I put my MBP to sleep by simply closing the lid, keeping the power source and external display attached.

I recently took a server from for maintenance (PSU burned down) and quickly noticed it hung at boot (hangs at Samba starting).

I went into interactive boot mode and skipped Samba.

Thinking it was a networking issue (server has static IP & routing set up) which didn’t match my home network.

Set up dhcp, changed the gateway, and started restarting samba from command line.

It always resulted in something like this:

(Source).

2012/06/18-16:30:03 [28214] Error output from bind9_rndc:
2012/06/18-16:30:03 [28214] rndc: error: none:0: open: /etc/bind/rndc.key: permission denied
2012/06/18-16:30:03 [28214] rndc: could not load rndc configuration

However, via command line (and user root) it works:

/etc/munin/plugins # ./bind9_rndc 
query_recursion.value 0
query_success.value 80
query_nxrrset.value 17
query_requests.value 104
query_failure.value 0
query_duplicates.value 0
query_nonauth_answer.value 0
query_nxdomain.value 4
query_auth_answer.value 101
query_responses.value 104

Solution:

add this to /etc/munin/plugin-conf.d/munin-node:

[bind_rndc]
user bind

and be sure the key has the right ownership: