Maybe I’ll send this off to Apple as a suggestion…

I’d really love to be able to annotate Time Machine backups so I can better refer back to when I made a certain change to my system that I’d like to restore from. For example, I upgraded an application yesterday at noon. Let’s say it starts acting up on me now. Unless I remember I made the change around noon yesterday, I have to hunt around for it. Instead, it would be great if a user can manually add a note to certain backups for restore points. Like “installed new such-and-such application”. Then you know to restore from the backup just previous to that one.

This seems like such an easy and handy feature. Where the hell is it?

I guess we’ll need to wait just a little bit longer to throw HD-DVD on the cart.

UPDATE: “He’s dead now!”

It’s time again for another Techie Time post. I will sometimes use these to post notes about technical issues I’ve run into that had nary a single hit on Google for help. So, in the event someone else has the same issue, welcome!

For anyone uninterested in the subject, you can look away now. You were warned.

For the past few weeks I’d been keeping my work system completely updated with Fedora 8. Suddenly, at some point, I noted that ‘rpcbind’ wasn’t updating, failing with an RPM script error. Here’s that error:

error: %pre(rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8.x86_64) scriptlet failed, exit status 4
error:   install: %pre scriptlet failed (2), skipping rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8

Eventually, this error caught up with me and NFS started not working and was wreaking havoc on our network. Here’s what I had to do to get the latest rpcbind installed:

rpm -q --scripts -p rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8.x86_64.rpm > /tmp/scripts

Within that new file I took out just what I needed and edited it a bit. In particular, note the ‘-o’ with useradd and groupadd:

/usr/sbin/userdel  rpc
/usr/sbin/groupdel rpc

# Now re-add the rpc uid/gid
/usr/sbin/groupadd -o -g 32 rpc
/usr/sbin/useradd -o -l -c "Rpcbind Daemon" -d /var/lib/rpcbind -g 32 \
-M -s /sbin/nologin -u 32 rpc

The ‘-o’ is necessary because this RPM kept failing because “32″ was not a unique userid. Thing is, it’s not in /etc/passwd (note that it removes it first!), so why it’s complaining I can only guess has to do with LDAP, though I haven’t had time to test yet.

Next, I forced the RPM to install without scripts, then ran the script:

rpm -U --force --noscripts rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8.x86_64.rpm
sh /tmp/scripts

Anyway, I hope that helps someone else.

It’s time again for techie talk. Yes, this is because I was unable to easily locate this information using Google, so doing some digging of my own lead to this discovery.

If you’re creating your own custom LiveCD for Ubuntu (we’re doing this at my FTJ in order to allow customers to boot a LiveCD with a demo/training version of our product right from a CD), you’ll probably want to get rid of that annoying ‘Install’ icon that sits on the default user’s (”ubuntu”) desktop. Deleting it from the desktop and saving that configuration aside doesn’t get rid of it. Instead, you need to alter some scripts.

First, if you’re following the Ubuntu LiveCD customization wiki page instructions, you’ll have an ‘edit’ directory with the contents of the CD available for editing. Comment out lines 49-54 in the file ‘edit/usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/casper-bottom/10adduser’ that read:

for file in /usr/share/applications/ubiquity-gtkui.desktop /usr/share/applications/kde/ubiquity-kdeui.desktop; do
    if [ -f "/root/$file" ]; then
        chroot /root install -D -o $USERNAME -g $USERNAME $file /home/$USERNAME/Desktop/$(basename “$file”)
        break
    fi
done

You will then need to ‘chroot’ back into the ‘edit’ directory and remake initrd:

mkinitramfs -o /initrd.gz 2.6.15-23-386

Replace the final arg in that line with the applicable kernel version (look in /lib/modules).

Exit from the chroot jail and move this file to extract-cd/casper:

mv edit/initrd.gz extract-cd/casper/

Continue with the rest of the instructions on that wiki page. Done! Hope this helps someone.

OK kids, it’s Techie Time again. This is where I post something that I found out for myself, since using Google and searching forums got me nowhere. The hope is that search crawlers pick this up and help someone else out.

I was running into a problem using VMWare Server version 1.0.1 on a RHEL 4 system. On that system I had RHEL 4 virtual machine that we kept the kernel updated to the bleeding edge (but not the one RedHat officially releases). When I did the update to version 2.6.22.6, the virtual machine would not boot. An excerpt from the error messages on boot:

mkrootdev label / not found

Apparently there’s something wonky going on with the emulated hardware in the slightly older version of VMWare Server, causing the new kernel not to see the virtual disk. Updating VMWare Server to 1.0.4 fixed the issue (no need to rebuild the new kernel on the VM).

Hope that helps!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program of nothing…

OK, I know I said I’d have updates to most of my Wordpress plugins once 2.0 was released, but it’s going to take a little time. I’m currently swamped with a ton of other stuff at the moment, so getting back to coding these might take me a little time. I’ll keep it on my to-do list for this month, though.

If you’ve seen the inside of a Mazda RX-8, you’ve surely seen the audio system. You’ve also likely realized there’s no way you can replace the radio with something else. So really, if you own an 8 (we owners of these cars call them “eights”), you’re stuck with what you get.

My car didn’t come with a tape deck, which I figured was OK because, really, what the hell would I need a tape deck for? It was when I tried to find a way to play my iPod in my car that I realized I was screwed. I had no place to plug it in, whereas in the past I would use one of those tape-deck converter thingies. So I shelled out the coin for an iTrip radio transmitter, which worked but sounded like shit.

I lurked around the RX-8 Club message boards hoping for an answer, and as it turned out I wasn’t alone. Then came along one guy who decided to take matters into his own hands and make a device to allow for an aux-in audio jack for the RX-8 radio. I was lucky enough to get myself on the waiting list for it early, only after waiting for over a year for it to be developed.

It’s called the AuxMod, and it attaches where a tape deck or mini-disc player would attach on the stock radio. It’s a pretty simple looking device, but it really works like a champ. Taking the head-unit out of the car for installation wasn’t as bad as I thought, and installation was even easier. I was able to put the whole thing back together with my five-month-old sitting on my lap.

I won’t bore you with too many other installation details — you can read about plenty of them on those message boards. If you’re desperate for the same thing in your RX-8 radio and don’t want to spring for the more expensive PIE or IceLink adapters, go for the $50 (as priced now) AuxMod. Or, if you want to wait longer for the advanced version, the next step up will cost $100 when it comes out and will allow you to attach a PC or iPod directly to the unit, allowing you to control music through your radio and steering wheel controls.

I can’t guarantee this tip will work for everyone, but it just worked for me. I now have two Tivo units at home and since one of them can be used with Basic service, I decided to call and cancel Tivo+ service on it and leave the Tivo+ service on the other. The customer service dude said if I wanted, he’d drop the price of each to $6.95/mo. if I didn’t cancel. So instead of paying $12.95/mo. for one box, it’s $13.95 for two? Um, OK.

Give it a try. Call them and say you want to cancel service on one of the boxes and maybe tell them you’d keep it if the cost was lower, but don’t let them get away with more than $6.95/mo. on each, since it’s obvious they’ll do it.

Most peope won’t care about this, but I’ll mention it anyway. I use a free web-based trouble ticketing system at work called “wreq,” and for some reason I decided to check out it’s website. To my astonishment, Mr. Yu has actually provided the first upgrade to the software in over four years! It’s not much, but it’s something.

A while back I registered a project over at SourceForge called phpWreq, which is my attempt at rewriting the wreq code to use PHP and MySQL (vs. the DBM files it currently uses). I realize there are other projects out there like Bugzilla, but that’s more for bug reporting than sysadmin-like tasks. I’ve already written the code for importing current wreq databases into MySQL tables, but that’s as far as time has allowed me to get. If you happen upon this page and have interest in helping move this puppy along, Send me a note.

I was using an old Wordpress hack called Show Categories to get around the problem of my not wanting all posts of certain categories showing up on the front/main page. It worked…somewhat. But there were things it didn’t work on, such as feeds and sometimes searches and archive links. There are additional hacks I could do to fix that, but I thought instead that perhaps a new plugin was in order.

This plugin, which is very much in beta, only works in WordPress 1.5+. It adds a new menu link under the “Manage” admin menu titled “Category Visibility”. Once you activate the plugin, go to this menu and you’ll see the visibility settings for all categories. So far I’ve listed options for “Front”, “List”, “Search”, “Feed” and “Archives”, defined as:

• Front: All posts in the category will not show up on the main page
• List: The category will not show on the list of categories on the home page (i.e., the list in the sidebar here)
• Search: The category’s posts will not show up in search results
• Feed: The category’s posts will not show up in the main RSS/Atom feed
• Archive: The category’s posts will not show up in archive links (i.e., clicking on the calendar links)

I did not get a chance to test with inherited categories, so if that breaks let me know. I may get around to testing that sometime.

You can grab the latest version here (Version: 0.31)

NOTE: If you’re using the default download of Wordpress version 1.5 (i.e., NOT 1.5.1 or above) download the version here. There’s a database change made in the nightlies that made this necessary for now.

IMPORTANT: As of version 0.28, these versions will create a new table and not use your existing one, so write down the current values if you’re using an older version of this plugin before installing and running this version!

To Do:

• Put this plugin on WP-Plugins.org (in progress)
• Allow per-post visibility option. Should be as simple as adding a custom field for posts.
• Fix issue with number of posts on front page when some are marked to not show up (i.e., you specify 10 posts per page, two of those are marked not to show on the front page, so you instead only see eight posts)