you're looking good, opensource!

opensource gets another breakthrough today, as canonical launches launchpad personal package archive (PPA), an ubuntu linux developers service intended to extend collaboration in software development and give the community equal opportunity to build and package code for ubuntu on the desktop, server, and for mobile applications.

great news for those itching to modify packages and contribute to the furtherance of opensource! users can make changes on packages of their choice, and these will be published in the PPA system, somewhat like a special repository.

aptly, users get the updates from the system whenever new versions of the packages become available.

more agua

just how much water can your body take? doing a little experiment while i'm on treatment. one freakin' mug-full an hour. bloated.

on work and blogging

i haven't been updating for several important, albeit lousy reasons.

work has been keeping me up at nights and i feel that if i were to write entries, i wouldn't be making much sense.

technobabble is fun, but i've long outgrown this preference for writing. call it a maturing of sorts, and i'm now ready to take things (read: blogging) to higher levels

i've almost completely forgotten about deepest sender, a cool firefox extension for blogging, and it's great to be using it again

plesk won't start after tweaking mysql

i've had this happen to me again the other week and as always, felt like kicking myself for not remembering.

we do a lot of performance tuning on mysql, and as a result, we almost always manage to get plesk mangled. not its fault, it just can't run without mysql, doh.

not of preference, but plesk happens to be there to make handling domains easier, as a single editing point when you want to change something and not worry about missing something out.

so there's a custom /etc/my.cnf that we use, and with changes to limits done (both on mysql and via ulimit), you'd think that a reload of mysqld would do. (we use InnoDB btw)

normally, that's all you need to have mysqld read off the new settings. if you've grown so dependent on plesk (like i have), you would not notice that mysqld didn't actually start, and you will get an error when you load plesk, thinking that it's a plesk error:


ERROR: PleskMainDBException
MySQL query failed: Incorrect information in file: './psa/misc.frm'

0: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/common_func.php3:218
db_query(string 'select param, val from misc')
1: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/common_func.php3:497
get_param(string 'mysql41_compatible')
2: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/common_func.php3:394
db_set_names()
3: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/common_func.php3:373
db_connect_real(string 'localhost', string 'admin', string '********', string 'psa')
4: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/common_func.php3:353
db_connect()
5: /usr/local/psa/admin/auto_prepend/auth.php3:82


even a restart of the plesk service will not work:


[root@jedi]# /etc/init.d/psa restart
Unable to query parameter by query select val from misc where param='mysql41_compatible': Incorrect information in file: './psa/misc.frm'
Unable to query parameter by query select val from misc where param='mysql41_compatible': Incorrect information in file: './psa/misc.frm'
Mysql error: Incorrect information in file: './psa/key_history.frm'
Processing config directory: /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/httpsd.*.include
Syntax OK
/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/httpsdctl restart: httpd restarted
ERROR 1033 (HY000) at line 1: Incorrect information in file: './psa/sessions.frm'


so this is a mysqld failing to start properly problem. to fix this, go to your mysql datadir and see if the sizes of your innodb log files match those in your .cnf. we usually set innodb_log_file_size = 256M and innodb_log_buffer_size = 256M in /etc/my.cnf.

if they don't match, stop mysqld, remove the ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 files, and start mysqld. be careful not to delete the ibdata1 or ibdata2 files or you lose your data. avoid using rm -r ib* (yea, wildcards and fast fingers give sysads their most stupefying moments)

innodb will recreate the log files to match your .cnf and mysqld now becomes available for plesk.

apt-get install kicker-kblogger

i don't know with you, but i sometimes get the big push to update, if and when there's something new (relatively, for me) to try.

up for this week is my dabbling with stuff around kicker, and using kblogger to do some much needed updates.

Pushing on

I recently got Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Beta running on my HP Pavilion dv2001tu notebook, and I'm very happy with the way it's running. Here's what I've done and have been doing the past month. Nothing out of the ordinary for me, but some of the activities mentioned here could have been keeping you up late at nights, coveting much of the understated successes of
running Ubuntu on HP laptops. If this is indeed so, do let me know your woes and I'll see what I can do to help.

1. Started a clan network. Okay, so most of them are really old and have no appreciation whatsoever for the internet, much less understand what emails are, and personalized email addresses at that. So I'll leave this up to the younger ones, who will help me teach the older ones the basics. They are yet to be informed of this new responsibility. LOL.

2. Upgraded desktop computer to Feisty Fawn Beta, and dual-booted Feisty and XP on my Pavilion dv2001tu lappy. So far, I have not had any hair-tearing frustrations with Feisty. Devices seem to work off-the-box, and the quick keys also seem to work fine (except of course for HP QuickPlay, which doesn't do anything). Touchpad, wireless, pcm+pcm2 with muting, and built-in mic all work. I've managed to get the built-in webcam to run with Ekiga (more details in a future post).

3. Started on my own list of what works and what doesn't for the HP Pavilion dv2001tu. Will try to make this as authoritative and as non-biased as possible. I love them Acer, Lenovo, and of course, Compaq notebooks too, but since I exclusively use my dv2000, I won't be able to vouch that the hacks I apply are going to work with the others.

4. Worked on more and more domains and hostings. I eat hostings for affiliate sites and stuff, day in and day out. I've optimized apache and mysql for several half-a-million traffic/day sites. Log analyzers are your best friends. I recommend Splunk for those who want to dig through files like search engines. But there's always the basic awk, grep, and myriad of other commands you can script together for the job.

5. Promised myself I'd start updating more often. 'Nuff said. =)