My free tip of the week

Have been playing with some CGI scripts, to make it a more useful alarm clock

Anyway mine arrived safely about 3 weeks after the original order, and it’s an awesome bit of gear.

The mini9 does a great job as a netbook, which is what it’s designed to be funny enough

it’s far more useful than trying to view web sites on a Nokia smart phone where the browser crashes constantly after loading a few sites and the screen res is so low.

First thing I did was put a 2gb stick of RAM in and at this stage I’ve left XP Home installed. Pretty much the main thing I need is a browser and occasionally  few other tools. If I did change the OS I’d probably try the latest Ubuntu on it, apparently it works well.

I also bought a Belkin sleeve for some protection, as I’ve already had the mini9 out and about all over the place

Things I like.

1. It’s super portable, I just grab it off the desk when I leave home.
2. It’s quiet, no hard drive or fan noise!
3. Decent battery life for what I do.
4. Good construction and feel.

Things that could be improved.

1. 3G card inbuilt, saves having to bluetooth pair with my phone or use the 3G dongle.
2. Get rid of the glossy LCD, it can be pretty annoying.
3. On screen feedback when changing brightness / volume etc via the function keys.
4. Maybe a better keyboard layout, it’s a bit squished

In my in-laws back yard, keeping an eye on Luca running riot!

Out taking night photos, sitting in the car waiting for a rain shower to pass.

At the park with the kids, had to quickly do some work

rtr1(config)#int dot11radio0
rtr1(config-if)#ipv6 ?
% Unrecognized command
rtr1(config-if)#

Despite what you might read on the interwebs, you can’t actually apply an IPv6 address to either the dot11radio interface or sub interfaces.

In my current config I use a single vlan for ethernet & wireless, IPv6 works perfectly on the LAN but not on the wireless side.

rtr1#p ipv6.google.com so vl1

Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 2001:4860:0:2001::68, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 408/411/424 ms
rtr1#

On the LAN side hosts get an address and have full connectivity, however epic fail awaits if you try when connected to the wireless. According to what I’ve read Cisco TAC say “Integrated Routing and Bridging (IRB) does not support IPV6 at all.”

Bah, so now I’ll have to be tethered to the desk to use IPv6 or maybe I should get that Airport Extreme fired up and doing something useful instead of collecting dust

Permission denied: /path/to/web/data/html/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable

Think permissions, permissions, permissions. If you have chmod’ed your .htaccess 644 or even 777 and it’s still not working, start traversing up your directory tree and make sure apache can access everything at each level.

Permissions required will depend on the exact server and software setup, but generally something like 755 (drwxr-xr-x) is probably a good start.

* JInstaller::install: SQL Error. DB function failed with error
number 2006
MySQL server has gone away SQL=CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS
`jos_comprofiler` ( `id` int(11) NOT NULL default ‘0′, `user_id` int(11) NOT

Other modules and components would install fine, the only one failing to install was comprofiler, part of the Community Builder module for Joomla/Mambo. Other parts of the same module were also installing fine.

The full error was a bunch of MySQL inserts headed by the message above.

I had a bit of a look around and couldn’t locate any particular permission or other issues, the server was running fine with just this single module being a pain.

The Apache error log was showing line after line of errors when you tried to install the module.

PHP Notice: Only variable references should be returned by reference in /***.com/html/libraries/joomla/application/module/helper.php on line 288, referer: http://***.com/administrator/index.php

PHP Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in /***.com/html/libraries/joomla/application/module/helper.php on line 93, referer: http://***.com/administrator/index.php

Having a look through the referenced code didn’t point out anything at all and Google wasn’t much help either So I started having a look elsewhere.

When I set the php debug errors for this domain to go to syslog I noticed in the logs that just before the error showed up each time in the logs, there was an FTP connection from 127.0.0.1

I looked into this a bit further and discovered hundreds of lines in the FTP log containing the name of the module/component that was being installed.

Breaking this down it seems to go like this, using the Joomla admin interface you select to install a module, choose a zip file from you local disk and hit install, this is uploaded to the server in the browser, straight after this we see:

Fri Jun 6 06:26:03 2008 0 127.0.0.1 563483 /***.com/html/tmp/com_comprofiler.zip b _ i r username ftp 0 * c

The web server connects to itself via FTP and uploads the zip file to a tmp folder, this is the file that you just uploaded via the web browser, huh? Next we see:

Fri Jun 6 06:26:04 2008 0 127.0.0.1 133024 /***.com/html/tmp/install_4848d87b323b5/com_comprofiler/admin.comprofiler.controller.php b _ i r username ftp 0 * c

It looks like the files have now been expanded from the zip and are being uploaded to a randomly named install directory under tmp. Next up we see more FTP action:

Fri Jun 6 06:26:19 2008 0 127.0.0.1 133024 /***.com/html/administrator/components/com_comprofiler/admin.comprofiler.controller.php b _ i r username ftp 0 * c

The exact same files that were ftp’ed into the tmp/random install directory are coming in again, this time being uploaded into the components folder.

Mean time back at the ranch, PHP has given up waiting. In /etc/php.ini this particular web server has max_execution_time = 30, so after 30 seconds of the script running it dies with an error. I assume this feeds back into the main install script which doesn’t do a great job of catching it and triggers the random errors noted above, error messages that don’t exactly lead you to the right thing

Working around this was simple enough, I uploaded the zip file to the server, unzipped it to a location inside the customer folder and pointed the Joomla admin install module at the location on disk.

The module installed successfully with no issues, but interestingly enough the admin script grabbed it from the disk location on the drive and uploaded it via FTP to the components folder.

So how many files came in over FTP in 30 seconds before the PHP execution limit was reached?

[root@server ~]# grep “06:26″ /var/log/xferlog | grep -c 127.0.0.1
821
[root@server ~]#

Not nice.

And how many files were FTP’ed from the server to itself when doing the install from a directory location on disk, inside the same webspace even.

[root@server ~]# grep “06:37″ /var/log/xferlog | grep -c 127.0.0.1
206
[root@server ~]#

It still took 8 seconds or so to do this, but at least it was inside the PHP execution limit.

I’m no Joomla guru, today was the first time I’ve even looked at it, however it seems rather a broken and inefficient way to go about trying to get module or component files into the right spot.

You could also increase the PHP max execution time to work around this problem, I didn’t bother trying but somewhere around 60 seconds might work.

So if your Joomla module/component installs are randomly failing with error messages that are clearly wrong, you might be hitting this issue, especially for a larger module or component with a lot of files.

UPDATE: 30/06/2008

The other reason you will get this error is if your MYSQL timeout limit is too low. I’ve been using the following settings and haven’t run into any more problems installing Joomla modules.

php.ini

max_execution_time = 60

max_input_time = 60

my.cnf

wait_timeout = 60

connect_timeout = 60