All to common of a conversation.

Came across a nasty little bug when I installed the latest Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS) into a virtual machine using VMWare Fusion 3.02 on my OSX box. This was a fresh install and the install itself went smooth, the problem occured when the initial login screen appeared. Although my mouse worked just fine and I was able to click on the user to log in, I wasn’t able to type anything. My keyboard was completely unusable within the virtual machine. I was not able to type any input via the keyboard.

After doing some Googling I discovered that once you got past the login screen the keyboard would work fine. The only way to login was to initiate the on-screen keyboard and type in your password. You can bring up the on-screen keyboard by clicking on the Universal Access icon on the lower right hand side of the screen and choosing “Use on-screen keyboard”. One side note here, when I first checked the box to use the on-screen keyboard, the keyboard would flash and disappear. What I needed to do was keep the box check and reboot the machine, when the login screen returned, the keyboard was there.

Once I logged in the physical keyboard worked fine. I was able to use it in all the applications and didn’t notice any problems, but once I logged out and returned to the login screen, again no input from the physical keyboard. Now I needed to fix this.

What didn’t work

At this point I go into basic trouble resolution mode and decided to start by reinstalling and upgrading the VMWare tools. Not going to get into a step by step here how to do that but the short of it is after reinstalling the VMWare tools and rebooting I was stuck in the same situation and needed to use the on-screen keyboard to log in. Next obvious step, apply all patches to the Ubuntu desktop, did this, rebooted, still no go.

What did work

Clearly, you are not reading this article to learn how not to fix it. Trust me after doing enough searches there are plenty discussion threads out there with “This doesn’t work for me either, anyone fix this yet?” to keep you reading for hours. I found a couple good links that I will post at the end of this article that got things resolved. The short answer is I logged into the machine, fired up and console window, type in the command

sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

For keyboard I selected “Apple” and then just selected the defaults for everything else. Once I exited the configuration wizard, I restarted the machine and all was right with the Ubuntu world again. Did a couple reboots to make sure and everything seems to be working fine now.

One more side note

This issue  occurred on a clean install of the current Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release. I had been previously running the beta version of the 10.04 release which worked fine and never had a problem with the keyboard input. However, after patching that box today, same issue occurred.

The Links

Two links basically lead me to my resolution

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1466482 – A great thread discussion on the issue in general. There were a couple of “fixes” in there including the one I implemented. A couple of post go off track but for the most paart a good thread.
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/548891 – The bug report on the issue which also includes the work around.

System: Ubuntu 9.10 | Nagios 3.x

This is another post that is more of a note to myself than anything else. Been doing a lot of Nagios configuring and decided to implement the ability to push commands from the web interface. I followed the basic instructions to configure “External Commands” but after doing and going to the web interface to test it, I got the following error message;

Error: Could not stat() command file ‘/var/lib/nagios3/rw/nagios.cmd’!

The external command file may be missing, Nagios may not be running, and/or Nagios may not be checking external commands. An error occurred while attempting to commit your command for processing.

The file was there so I did what any good geek should do, I did a quick google search. The closet thing I could find was some commands to fix the issue on Debian systems. Since I was running Ubuntu, which is for all intensive purposes Debian, I figured I would try it.  So I ran the following set of command;

sudo /etc/init.d/nagios3 stop
sudo dpkg-statoverride –update –add nagios www-data 2710 /var/lib/nagios3/rw
sudo dpkg-statoverride –update –add nagios nagios 751 /var/lib/nagios3
sudo /etc/init.d/nagios3 start

This worked like a charm and the web interface began accepting commands.

Last week Sony open the doors to a new web site, as well as a new approach for the organization, called Sony Developer . Sony Developer is meant to become a hub for Open Source development efforts for Sony Electronic products.

Currently, Sony has enabled the community for “SNAP” which is an application framework for consumer electronic devices. From the SNAP site;

“SNAP stands for Sony’s Networked Application Platform and is part of an emerging new ecosystem for making downloadable applications available to networked devices like TV’s, Blu-ray Disk players and other Consumer Electronic products. SNAP is in the very early stages of development and has a lot of room to grow”

This will open an avenue that will allow developers to get their applications onto SNAP enabled devices such as televisions. SNAP is based on the GNUstep community, whose origin dates back to the OpenStep standard developed by NeXT Computer Inc (now Apple Computer Inc.) which also implements the extensions added by Apple in the form of Cocoa. The main language on GNUstep for SNAP is ObjectiveC and the SNAP development web site points a lot of great resources on ObjectC from beginners guide to optimization.

Sony offers a guides and a SDK for download to start with your development efforts. It’s mentioned on the SNAP web site that some good examples of applications would be “Games, Widgets (weather, news, traffic, etc), remote controls, social apps, media sharing apps, media players, home automation”. Also according to the web site Sony will be hosting contest in the future for SNAP developers with prizes ranging from Sony televisions to Sony Walkman.

Another section of the Sony Developer Web site will be the dash section, which is currently unavailable but from what I’ve heard should be opened in the coming weeks. dash is the Sony new Personal Internet Viewer. Developed with Flex, Sony is hoping to encourage and foster application developed on the dash product.

I just love this concept. I can imagine homes of the future being built with this technology built into it. The thought of just laying down your phone or MP3 player on the table and it getting charged while there is just cool.

There have been some pretty famous spokesmen in the past who’ve made huge impacts to the companies they were representing. OJ Simpson and Hertz, before the whole legal issues of course. Michael Jackson and Pepsi, hum again before the legal problems and hair catching of fire stuff. Micheal Jordon and Nike, he hasn’t done anything too bad yet right?

Well now lump Eric Van Johnson in this category, hopefully minus the legal issues for awhile. In what will most certainly send this companies revenues through the roof, I have done my first video “endorsement” of a product. Now this is not my first brush with Internet stardom, a few years back I got my picture taken with Irina Slutsky of GETV but that was different she was more stalking me than anything else, this time it was business.

Oddly enough it’s not an Open Source product and I don’t even particularly care for it’s licensing model but with that aside, the product itself is very solid. Splunk on the most basic level is a indexing and search service for system log files. But its extendability really expands the product much further than just that.

Check out my video endorsement and then go and buy stock in this company. Mind you they are not publicly traded at this time but you shouldn’t let that stop you as they are obviously going to go main stream now that they have me doing commercials for them

Splunk> Eric Van Johnson

http://www.splunk.com/article/2741

I’ve stated before how I am fortunate to be in a position where I typically work on a Linux, OSX, and Windows desktops on regular basis. Depending on what I am doing and my location I might spend a good amount of time on any of these systems. For the most part, my life style makes this pretty easy. I live in “the cloud” a lot for things like email and even documents. I keep things standard complaint and use tools that are typically cross-platformed or have counterparts on other platforms. This has afforded me some great freedoms and have allowed me to unchain myself and not be too dependent on any one solution. Instead my life has become one of preference and knowledge.

However, with everything there has always been pain points, one for me has been IM. While yes, it no longer matters which platform I am on at any given time I am still able to access my Yahoo, AIM, MSN, Gtalk accounts, the issue comes into play when I move from one machine to another and forget to sign out of IM on the previous machine. Some of the IM services alert you when you are logged onto one accounts from multiple systems and allows you to decide what to do, like AIM which gives you an option to send it a command to log you out of your previous session. Some just don’t care, like Gtalk which doesn’t seem to be concerned with how many times and from how many locations you are logged in, I don’t particularly like this approach. Then there are services like Yahoo that just get upset and decides to log you out from one of your accounts, couple that with IM clients that battle to keep their connection like Trillian and you can end up in a situation where you can’t log into your account because another is already logged in and wont let go.

I’ve come up with a few approaches that have made this situation somewhat manageable. On my Linux and OSX box this is pretty simple, there is a command line command called ‘killall‘ that comes to the rescue. With the line ‘killall pidgin’ or ‘killall Adium’ my IM clients on Linux and OSX respectively, end. Add the ability to ssh into these systems and if I forget to log out I simple do a quick ssh connection to these boxes, run my command and I am done. Furthermore, I typically have a good idea when I wont be at those computers, so with that information and the killall command, I am able to add crontab entries to automatically run my command. So for example, I know at 3AM I don’t want to be up IM’ing with anyone so I run that command at that time in case I left my IM client running before going to bed. I also know Monday through Friday I am typically at work and in my office around 8AM so I run that command on my home systems at that time too in case I left the house without logging out. The command ends up looking like this in crontab, 00 03,08 * * * /usr/bin/killall Adium > /dev/null 2>&1 Worse case scenario, I ssh back to the system and manually run the command. Its a great system and works like a charm.

At work the story is a little different. First off, the system I run IM on is a Windows machine which doesn’t have the cool ability to just SSH to and even if I did install an SSH server on the machine it is located behind a corporate firewall so I wouldn’t be able to get it anyways from the outside. I do have the ability to log in via VPN but that is a lot of work to log into the corporate VPN and RDP to my desktop just to turn off an IM client. Windows also doesn’t really have crontab, it does have a “scheduler” which acts kind of acts like crontab but that coupled with the fact that Windows doesn’t really have the same powerful command line tools that Linux and OSX have makes this simple task a little tougher to accomplish.

I have come up with a solution however, there’s a command on my Windows XP called ‘taskkill‘, I am not sure if this command is available on all Windows platform but it is on mine so I use it. Now with this command, I am able to write a small batch file that has the one line in it like this taskkill /f /im trillan.exe. When ran this behaves very much like killall on my other machines. I then use the Windows built in scheduler to run this batch file every day, Monday through Friday, at 6:30 PM because if I am still at work at this time, I am done talking to people and need to finish up work and get home. Now for whatever reason, this doesn’t always work or maybe I leave work early and need to get on IM at home. Because of the before mention firewall issue, its not as easy as just SSH to the box and running the command manually. So I had to come up with a solution to reach into my computer at work from outside to kill my IM if needed. To do this I created an Outlook rule. Since I almost always run Outlook 100% of the time when my work laptop is on, so Outlook seemed like the best vehicle for this effort.

To accomplish this, in Outlook I’ve defined a rule that looks for emails from specific senders (for example my personal email address), looks for a specific subject line (like “Turn off IM”), and checks for something special in the body (example “Trillian”). If all these conditions are meant, then it runs my aforementioned batch job and kills Trillian.

That’s about it, that’s how I manage my IM needs that run of various different OS in various different environment during various different times and allows me to stay unchained, mobile, and free. Hope you found some of this information helpful.

Firefox 3 browser, 3 millions plus downloads worldwide and growing. Wonder what its like being the only dude in Eritrea to have downloaded it. That guy (or gal lets be fair) deserves a some Firefox swag.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

This is taking Online Roll Playing to the next level allowing you to play a character playing a character in a game. I think it might be time to start playing games online.

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’