Shuron's Letters

The Queen and 11 Presidents!

shuron — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:16:40 +0000

Queen Elizabeth II head of the Commonwealth and daugher of George VI. She was born on 21 April 1926 and have seen lot of politics and historical acts in her life, because now she is 84! As her father dies in 1952, she become the Queen regnant an met 11 Presidents of United States till now:

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Sending Mails with own Exim: Google account example.

shuron — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 23:22:52 +0000

Today I’ll describe short, how to configure sending of emails with your Debian or other Linux distribution. The ability of sending mails is very useful feature for every long-running server machine, it’s easy and common way to notify the administrator on problems.

Here are configurationsteps for mail-sending with Exim and Googlemail account (google Apps accounts work the same way too).

first of all we need working Exim. If not installed – install exim4.
```
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install exim4
```
Configuration should start after the installation. However you can start configuration of exim every-time with
```
$ dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config
```
Answer the questions of configuration wizard. The important one is. a general type of mail configuration. Choose “sent by smarthost” if you wanna use the ability of e.g. Googlemail account. Then SMTP with dynamic IP would be difficult
answer other questions
- Provide a System Mail Name: e.g. mycompany.com
- Provide IP addresses to listen on for incoming SMTP connections User 127.0.0.1 if you don’t want only send mail from local machine and nothing for all IP’s.
- Provide Machine handling outgoing mail for this host (smarthost): smtp.gmail.com::587
Other parameter are not so important for a start. However read more about debconf questions and other configuration if you like.
Now it’s time to provide credentials information of your gmail account. Therefore you need edit /etc/exim4/passwd.client file with your favorite editor. Insert that for Standard or google app account but replace with valid mail and password.
```
gmail-smtp.l.google.com:yourYourMail@googlemail.com:yourPass
*.google.com:yourYourMail@googlemail.com:yourPass
smtp.gmail.com:yourYourMail@googlemail.com:yourPass
```
Make sure /etc/exim4/passwd.client belongs to user root and group Debian-exim which is normal so on my Debian. If not, run that command:
```
$ chown root:Debian-exim /etc/exim4/passwd.client
```
Actualize the whole configuration with:
```
$ update-exim4.conf
```
Your ‘re done!

Now it’s test it with.

echo "Server Mail Test Message " | mail -s "Just Test" SomeMail@someDomain.org

Watch logs:

$ tail -1000f /var/log/exim4/mainlog

When you see something like this. Everything should vent perfect.

2010-02-14 23:00:26 1NgmVu-0007v8-Kt < = root@mail-server1.mycompany.com U=root P=local S=424
2010-02-14 23:00:28 1NgmVu-0007v8-Kt => testMail@mycompany.org R=smarthost T=remote_smtp_smarthost H=gmail-smtp-msa.l.google.com [72.14.221.109] X=TLS1.0:RSA_ARCFOUR_MD5:16 DN="C=US,ST=California,L=Mountain View,O=Google Inc,CN=smtp.gmail.com"

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Winter amusement – the Russian way

shuron — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:32:11 +0000

What should young people do at a long, cold, rich of snow and boring winter. A winter like in Magadan town. Here the answer

Never heard of Magadan? Magadan is associated with far far east of Russia. It is associated with cold and people-less places, taiga, beautiful nature and interesting people. Of course this Region is famous for former Soviet GULAGs too.

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SSH tunnel without password

shuron — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:16:40 +0000

SSH (Secure Shell) allows simple establishment of encrypted and authenticated connection between computers. Today i describe how easy it is do establish such SSH tunnels without using a password. You may need such connections when they have to be opened by daemons (e.g. Cron) without user interaction.

Two words on theory. Password-less connections have to be authenticated at least so strong like the password enabled one, so asymmetric cryptography which enables certificates comes into play. The clue is to have private and public keys and share your public key with domains which should be able identify you.

So therefore let’s start by generation a needed key-pair.

Generating Keys

It is possible to create key with pass-phrase and without (or empty pass-phrases). I prefer to not use pass phrase because it is asked every-time on later usage of a ssh. Even there are ways to gives the pass-phrase to ssh command, but it is more work, with no significant security benefits. So i do the following statement and do not enter any pass-phrase (just hit enter on question).

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa

This will create RSA key-pair as following files in ~/.ssh directory:

id_rsa
id_rsa.pub

Now public key need to be copied to remote host and has to be added to end of ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.

Transfer Public keys

The best way to do it is to use ssh-copy-id program which is inside of many linux distributions.

$ ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub remote-user@remote-server.org

In that case everything is done automatically and you are ready after that. But if ssh-copy-id is not available, you can copy keys manually e.g. like that.

$ cat ~/.ssh/*.pub | ssh remote-user@remote-server.org 'umask 077; cat >>.ssh/authorized_keys'

Attention! On some linux distrs SSH2 searches for keys in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 . Not so in actual Debian (Lenny), but seems to be so in SuSe linux.

Test

Now remote login, scp and sftp can be used without password. Test it:

# establish connection
$ ssh remote-user@remote-server.org
#or copy files secure and password-less.
$ scp /home/user/some-file remote-user@remote-server.org:/some-path/dir/

More information on SSH related man pages. Share and Enjoy:

JBoss 5 GA on Debian linux

shuron — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:50:05 +0000

This short tutorial describes how to configure JBoss Application Server (Jboss GA 5.1.0) on a debian linux (Debian GNU/Linux 5.x “Lenny” ). Article starts with installation of java JDK and continues with JBoss installation and basic configuration according to standard file system hierarchy. Also init.d. scripts configuration is given here.

Installing Java SDK

Nowadays installing Java environment on Debian is an easy task. I used JDK 1.6. Don’t confound JDK with JRE, because bare Java Runtime Environment is not enough for running JBoss. Debian Wiki maintains (hope) a list of available java .deb packages, which are easily can be installed with your preferred way. I prefer aptitude, but apt-get of course works too.

$ aptitude install sun-java6-jdk
#or by good old apt-get.
$ apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Installation is done after seconds. Now test your java installation with

$ java -version
# Here example result on my configuration:

java version "1.6.0_12"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_12-b04)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 11.2-b01, mixed mode)

If you get something like this, you’re done and your java should be already in the PATH.

Installing JBoss AS

Now let’s install JBoss Application Server.

Preparing

Normally you are not willing to start services (especially when they are accessed from outher machines) with root privileges. Therefore we have to define new user and group which will be used to manage JBoss. So next line will create new group and new user with this group.

 $ groupadd jboss
 $ useradd -s /bin/bash -d /home/jboss -m -g jboss jboss

This jboss user has no password, so nobody can login with this username. If you consider to login with jboss user, password has to be set. Use passwd jboss command for that.

Download, Installation, filesystem layout

Now download desired Jboss version. I started with JBoss 5.1.0 GA, which can be download with:

$ cd /tmp # swithch to temp dir
$ wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/jboss/files/JBoss/JBoss-5.1.0.GA/jboss-5.1.0.GA.zip/download

Check also the whole list of verisons if interested. As you may noticed JBoss binaries are packaged with ZIP. So it is comfortable to use unzip tool. Maybe you have to install it first. But before you extract downloaded file, we have to decide, where exactly should JBoss files be placed on a file-system. Unfortunately JBoss is not quite conform to Linux File System Hierarchy Standard per default, so there are many possibilities for a location configuration. Some of you may want to place JBoss into /opt directory. But I prefer to split the installation a little bit and want to start by putting JBoss core files in /usr/local/, where local, unchangeable and read-only files usually placed. E.g. I use /usr/local/jboss/510 as JBoss 5.1.0 GA root. So let’s create that location and extract files into it.

mkdir /usr/local/jboss #create new jboss directroy
chown jboss:jboss /usr/local/jboss #now its belongs touser jboss and group jboss
su jboss
mkdir /usr/local/jboss/510
cd /usr/local/jboss/510
unzip /tmp/jboss-5.1.0.GA.zip

At this moment you should have new working JBoss. If you want, test it with

bin/run.sh -b 0.0.0.0

Where -b 0.0.0.0 means that JBoss is listening for every ip address of current machine. However at this stage the installed Jboss still brakes the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, so let’s improve this situation. After the first start of the server used configuration will have new directories /tmp and /work . The /tmp directory contain the temporarily state of the deployed applications and /work is contains compiled jsp pages of deployed applications. Therefore both directories are of temporal character and should be on more appropriate place according to Linux standards. I use only a default JBoss configuration, which is defined under /server/default, so I need to do further changes only for this configuration. My decision is to put both directories to /var /tmp/jboss.:

$ mkdir /var/tmp/jboss
$ chown jboss:jboss /var/tmp/jboss/
$ su jboss
$ mkdir /var/tmp/jboss/510
$ mkdir /var/tmp/jboss/510/tmp # creating alternavtive location for tmp
$ mkdir /var/tmp/jboss/510/work # creating alternavtive location for work
$ cd /usr/local/jboss/510/server/default # switch to configuration directory if not allready here.
$ rm -R tmp # delete existing tmp directory (server should not run at this moment)
$ rm -R work # delete existing work directory
$ ln -s /var/tmp/jboss/510/tmp ./tmp # Finaly create symbolic link to new place$
$ ln -s /var/tmp/jboss/510/work ./work # Finaly create symbolic link to new place

repeat the same for /log directory. It is common to have logs at one place in /var/log create a log directory tree e.g. /var/log/jboss/510/ and let log link to it as was shown for tmp and work directories. After that your configuration directory should look like:

$ ls -l /usr/local/jboss/510/server/default
drwxr-xr-x  6 jboss jboss 4096 22. Mai 2009  conf
drwxr-xr-x  6 jboss jboss 4096 23. Jan 00:10 data
drwxr-xr-x 15 jboss jboss 4096 22. Mai 2009  deploy
drwxr-xr-x 12 jboss jboss 4096 22. Mai 2009  deployers
drwxr-xr-x  2 jboss jboss 4096 22. Mai 2009  lib
lrwxrwxrwx  1 jboss jboss   19 23. Jan 01:07 log -> /var/log/jboss/510/
lrwxrwxrwx  1 jboss jboss   23 23. Jan 01:13 tmp -> /var/tmp/jboss/510/tmp/
lrwxrwxrwx  1 jboss jboss   24 23. Jan 01:13 work -> /var/tmp/jboss/510/work/

And your logs are of course accessible directly at new location e.g.

tail -1000f /var/log/jboss/510/server.log

Furthermore you should deploy your applications to /srv/jboss/510 to enable this location for automatically scan and deployment,just create a link from /default/deploy/. Call it e.g. applications.:

$ ln -s /srv/jboss/510 ./usr/local/jboss/510/server/default/deploy/applications #

So applications which are placed to /srv/jboss/510 will be automatically deployed on the server.

Start JBoss on boot

First of all you need a life-cycle management script used by init. Jboss already provides some of then. Let’s use one of Red Hat default script by adopting it a little bit. First of all copy the script to common place (feel free to ad version ti scriptname if you need or like)

$ cp /usr/local/jboss/bin/jboss_init_redhat.sh /etc/init.d/jboss

If you want to access you fresh JBoss also from other IP addresses you need to change JBOSS_HOST line according to:

JBOSS_BIND_ADDR=${JBOSS_HOST:-"-b 0.0.0.0"}.

0.0.0.0. binds it on all IP addresses. Consider to change also other param this file to mach your personal needs. Now you can automatically create all the symbolic links used by init service.


$ update-rc.d jboss defaults

Now your Jboss will start automatically after reboot…

Additional configuration

/bin/run.conf file configures the start parameters of the server. Maybe default limits are not suitable for your applications. So check it.
Under /server/default/conf you will find some configuration files of the default server configuration. One of the interesting is of course jboss-lo4j.xml, where you can precisely define logging processing.

Questions & Suggestions

Thank you for reading this. Please feel free to provide any suggestions to the topic of JBoss installation on Linux and specially on Debian. Of course your questions are welcome too! Share and Enjoy:

Software RAID on Debian Linux

shuron — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:57:11 +0000

Wow, my last post here is month ago. But don’t worry I did not forget about my blog. There are just many thing happened in my life, all of them are time consuming So there no reason to remove me from your RSS reader. Today i will share some thought on software RAID under linux with you.

RAID 1

Sometimes you need to store data relative save and high available. That is where RAID solutions come in to play. Especially RAID 1 (mirroring) based solutions provide better availability of your data. But don’t forget to use backs anyway Some days ago i installed RAID 1 on Debian Lenny (amd64 arch) without any troubles for now. I just was following Jerry’s description which is enough detailed to make no mistakes except maybe one thing. The Partitions used in the RAID /dev/md0/ should both enable boot flag if you want to boot from RAID. This is worked for me.

Configuration

My configuration is the same as Jerry’s except partition sizes and chosed LVM. So boot is done form RAID partition /dev/md0. And SWAP is on RAID too, which is controversy solution but it the best one for me, of course availability of a system is primary goal. So how to check the state of raid after installation. The simplest is to look on /proc file-system with $cat /proc/mdstat. Here is my configuration.

$cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md1 : active raid1 sda2[0] sdb2[1]
476560128 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md0 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdb1[1]
497856 blocks [2/2] [UU]

unused devices:

Here you see two RAID arrays md0 and md1. Also information about used devices and state are peresent. [UU] stand for “used” for every disc is used in a raid. On diskfailure you wold see something like [U_] and sdb2(F). Next example utilizes mdadm which is used by kernel in latest kernel versions. My is 2.6.26-2-amd64 (lenny default) Use of –detail or -D option with a device name gives more information. Here my example.

# mdadm --detail /dev/md1
/dev/md1:
Version : 00.90
Creation Time : Wed Jan  6 00:51:37 2010
Raid Level : raid1
Array Size : 476560128 (454.48 GiB 488.00 GB)
Used Dev Size : 476560128 (454.48 GiB 488.00 GB)
Raid Devices : 2
Total Devices : 2
Preferred Minor : 1
Persistence : Superblock is persistent

Update Time : Mon Jan 11 02:18:01 2010
State : clean
Active Devices : 2
Working Devices : 2
Failed Devices : 0
Spare Devices : 0

UUID : fe3bbbfd:2c6963e7:9785a408:be715448
Events : 0.8

Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
0       8        2        0      active sync   /dev/sda2
1       8       18        1      active sync   /dev/sdb2

GRUB Config

If you wish that your system is able to boot even if one of disks fails completely. You need to write GRUB loader on every hard disk separately. Here the example for hd0 ( fist hard disk)

$ grub
grub> root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0xfd
grub> setup (hd0)
setup (hd0)
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no
Checking if "/grub/stage1" exists... yes
Checking if "/grub/stage2" exists... yes
Checking if "/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
Running "embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"...  17 sectors are embedded.
succeeded
Running "install /grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+17 p (hd0,0)/grub/stage2 /grub/menu.lst"... succeeded
Done.

Run the same also for second disk.

grub> root (hd1,0)
...
grub> setup (hd1)

Also your GRUB configuration should enabe loading form the first and alternatively the second disk.

default 0
fallback  1
# is there after installation
title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.18-6-686 Raid (hd0)
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-6-686 root=/dev/md0 ro
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-6-686

# manually created
title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.18-6-686 Raid (hd1)
root            (hd1,0)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-6-686 root=/dev/md0 ro
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-6-686

The default option declares the first configuration to run on default. fallback option forces grub to load fallback configuration (here hd1) when the firt one could not start. You’r done.

Monitoring

Once you run your “high”-available RAID you’re probably very interested to be informed about problems with it. E.g. on a failure of one (hope only one) HD device. Yet i know only two most common solutions for monitoring Software RAID. First of it bases on Nagios tool, but is not described here, because not tired yet. The second is to involve mdadm again. The option –monitor causes mdadm periodically poll a your md arrays and to inform you on every events that occurs. mdadm should never exit process, so it should normally be run in the background. Here is example of sending a mail on event. Of course sendmail must be configured.

mdadm --monitor --mail=admin@yourcompany.com --scan --delay=1800 -ft

It would run a monitor deamon which scanns all of RAID arrays with delay. The option f starts it as deamon process and t option generates test messages on a startup. When you want to run mdadm through crone job so use option -1

mdadm --monitor--scan -1

Also this would send your mail or run program which are specified in /etc/mdadm.conf file. Please see manual of mdadm for more details.

Test Performance

You can test our physical drives with hdparm utility e.g.

hdparm -tT /dev/hda

But hdparm would not correct work on your mdX RAID arrays. So one of the simplest methods is to try time utility.

time dd if=/dev/md0 of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=1000

This test reads 1 GB data file from you RAID Array but reports to copy only something like “509804544 Bytes (510 MB) in 5,73989 s, 88,8 MB/s” by me. So why only half of the Gigabyte? Just be cause it utilizes two devices, as i think, and indeed it copies 500MB two times parallel = 1 Gig. And this only in the half of time as it needed to red 1 Gigabyte from physical /dev/sda directly.

time dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k count=1000 of=/home/1Gb.file

This test writes 1 Gb file on RAID partition /home . Therefore you can compare write performance with RAID and non raid partitions but don’t expect any considerable advantages on Mirroring systems The last one more professional but also complex tools is iozone. It can perform a various of tests,which can’t be explained here detailed. Please read manual if you really need to test your raid that way. Alternatively you can start iozone in automatic mode, which performs various of tests (relative long-running) and prints on console.

iozone -a

See on Strided Read column which should consider software RAID bonus.

Failure and Recovery

RAID 1 should preserve you from data loose and improve your scalability. So it is very good idea to has relative good knowledge of what to do on Failure. Best way to get this knowledge is to simulate failure. Take try to remove one disk and put it again into array. Share and Enjoy:

Eclipse Ganymede and WSCompile incompatibility?

shuron — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:34:34 +0000

I found strange problem with WSCompile-1.6 task in Ganymede release of Eclipse (Version 3.4.1). The problem lies in WSCompile-Ant-Task. Buildscript execution freezes on the wscompile task. I describe that problem more detailed on techjava.de Please feel free to comment here or there if you know what died changed in Ganymede in ant scripts handling since Europe release and how to fix it. Share and Enjoy:

Extracting tar, gzip, bzip2, z

shuron — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:02:16 +0000

Sometimes you need to extract some files on Linux console. Here some examples how to do that.

tar

Tar archives are the most common way of distributing bundles of files under Linux or UNIX. A .tar file is simply a bundle of files packaged with GNU tar program. To extract such files use following:

tar xf somearchive.tar
tar xvf somearchive.tar

Provide option f if you want to extract content of files. Tar (from tape archive) has long history and was intended to work with tape media, so when you omit f tar tries to work with tape device.
v- stands for verbose. List all the files by extract process.
x- Extract command

Before extracting you may be interested in Looking inside of tar. Do it with option “t” :

tar tf archive.tar

For more tar parameters see Man pages.

gzip

Often tar-files are also compressed. One of the most known compressed formats is GNU Zip (gzip). Tar bundeld and zipped file would normally have extension .tar.gz. To extract such files you can use tar with “z” option, which causes tar to automatically invoke gzip. Modify abow example and you get able to extract tar.gz files too.

tar -xzf somearchive.tar.gz

In old tar version the “z” option is may be not available. In that case just use UNIX pipes:

gzip -dc target.tar.gz | tar xf -

Meaning of gzip options

d – Do decompress!
c – write to console (So that tar can take it from there )
t – Tests file integrity
l – lists archive file information

You will find more on Man pages.

bzip2

Sometimes you can find files ending with .tar.bz2. That are files packaged with bzip (a block-sorting file compressor). Use it like gzip

tar xjvf filename.tar.bz2

Options d,c,t have the same meaning. More on Man pages.

zcat

Some files have .tar.Z endings. They can be extracted by

zcat somearchive.tar.Z | tar xf -

Look in Man pages for more. Any questions? You are welcome to comment! Share and Enjoy:

How to duplicate magento installation

shuron — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:06:37 +0000

In this article I explain how to create a copy of running Magento online shop . One of purposes of having duplicates is e.g. the need of developing or test environment. Test are very inmportant in magento. Many people do official Magento upgrades on productive environments and suffer form it. You don’t need to do so, use always test environment first! However the copy procces of Magento shop has following main steps

duplication of database schema
duplication of core sources
duplication of downloader sources

Database

First, let me say say, that it is good idea to not install two Magento instances to the same database. Magento in version 1.1.8 s has 198 database tables. Most of them are of type InnoDB and they are related with each other by checked foreign key constraints. That is background information. So new database for every Magento instance save you from having headaches and this not only because having just two magento installation i one DB leads too approx. 400 tables in one database but more to avoid possible problems or side effects with constraints and Co. (e.g. ) . . The easiest way to export the database is to use phpMyAdmin. Go to export dialog of original database, select “zipped” option, select tabbles, let other options on their defaults (See screen 1) and get zipped download. Switch to new database and upload the downloaded there in the import dialog. Sound as a piece of cake, but sometimes the import of the SQL files will not work. I have already seen many different exceptions bu trying. Beginning with “SQL Syntax..” and ending with “constraint violation…”. In my opinion the purpose of problems is size of some tables and therefore of whole backup. There are few MyISAM tables that are full with (useless) log data. And the amount of this data makes problems to the import routine. Don’t export them first at time! they don’t have any constraint to other tables so you can import them on second or third turn. Alternative you can export only the DDL-Statement of this table not the data itself. Here are tables you can omit in first step:

log_url
log_url_info
log_visitor
log_visitor_info

Don’t forget to change configured URL of origin shop to the URLs of new shop in the table core_config_data. You can also use Search-Tool of phpMyAdmin and identify every record where old URL is used – but outside of core_config_data table they are not so important and could be changed later in the Shop interface.

Core Sources

That is most easiest part. Just copy the source of magento to the new location, but don’t copy the following:

downloader dir
any content of dirs inside of var but .htacces file.
media/tmp dir

If you use another DB for new Magento installation don’t forget to change DB setting in app/etc/local.xml file. Var directory hold any temporary content like sessions, caches and error-logs. Downloader is used by Magento connect module, before copy must do some preparations.

Magento Downloader

Warning! do not copy unchanged downloader to new location on the same server it may break your origin magento installation! Now I got your attention The problem is that downloder stores serverpath in many many configuration files. And if you don’t change the serverpath and starts updates on new shop copy, you will update the origin shop and not the new copy of it! The server path of origin magento shop is stored in many many files in the downloader directory, you can’t change all of them manually. But you can do it automatically. If you have SSH access to your web-space following command will help you:


//shows all files with OLD_PATH element

find  . -type f -exec grep -q "OLD_PATH" '{}' \; -print

//Replaces OLD_PATH string in all occurrences in every file to NEW_PATH

find . -type f -print | xargs sed -i -e ’s/OLD_PATH/NEW_PATH/g’

If you have only ftp access, then you can use [Alt+F7]-search in Total Commander. Then open each file with Notepad++ and then use “Search and Replace” functionality of Notepad++ on each file. Whole replacement willtake you max. 5 minutes.

After replacing old path you can upload downloader to the new instance of Magento. Now everything including “Magento Connect” should work properly and independent form each othen on thow instances. The last thing my be useful is to clear all caches in admin back-end of new instance. Good luck!

Open Question

This article describes how to double the Magento instance once. The next question which i didn’t answered for me yet is how to make permanent mirroring of data from production environment to the test installation. Maybe someone has cool ideas?

Disclaimer

Please consider that I can’t guarantee that everything described here will work in your environment as it worked for me. Please use this tutorial as incitement and adopt my methods to your own situation. Be sure that you don’t peril origin Magento installation or other data. Do regular backup befor you begin! Share and Enjoy:

Best related post plugin

shuron — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:14:39 +0000

Today I found very cool related post Plug-in which I want to share with you – dear Wordpress Blogger! The name of that plug-in is Microkid’s Related posts and I already like it much! It differs from other “Related posts”-plug-ins, which are based on automatic content analysis. What ever the content analysis algorithms are and how ever the configuration options used, resulting related post lists are mostly just a bullsh$%. That’s is understandably, then these plug-ins have same problem like search engines and other content analysis tools . In the reality of our age (It is 2009 A.D.) – computers cannnot understand any semantic of human written articles. So what is the solution for an good Related Post Plugin? Of cause simple to do it manually! You say it much work? No!, with Micrkid’s Related posts Plugin, which provides very comfortable AJAX driven interface, it becomes fun! It’s becomes so easy and quick as providing tags. You decide what is related to the actual post by creating meaningful related post list. Try it out! Share and Enjoy:

About Russians

shuron — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 12:25:41 +0000

Vyacheslav Nikonov

If you live somewhere in the “West”, you may often hear or read something bad about Russians. What you hear and read is mostly “something like truth”. Mostly these “news” are presented in a way, so that they cause bad opinnion about Russia. I personally don’t like it. Therefore I found the following citation interesting, funny and truth. Vyacheslav Nikonov, a prominent Russian commentator, has quoted his Canadian friend, who came up with the following explanation of Russophobia: The main problem is that these Russians have white skin. If they had been green, or pink, or came from Mars…or had flowers sticking out of their ears, then everybody would have said – well, these people are different, like Turks, or Chinese, or Japanese. We have no questions about the Japanese. They are different, their civilisation is different. But these Russians … they are white but they have totally different brains … which is thoroughly suspicious. Share and Enjoy:

Polja switched too.

shuron — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:06:13 +0000

Now Polja’s blog has also completely moved from holbreich.de to holbreich.org. I mean of cause I did it for her, like I . Enjoy her blog! Share and Enjoy:

Cool Picture on Ice

shuron — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:13:59 +0000

Isn’t it? I took it with my Canon 450D on the frozen sea near my home. The whole set for interested in photography. Share and Enjoy:

New Theme!

shuron — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 07:00:58 +0000

Shuron's Letters

Hello everybody! I’d like to present you my new theme for that Blog! The old theme was not good readable in my opinion. Please tell me if you encounter any bugs. Have a nice day! Share and Enjoy:

Worth of the Website

shuron — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 15:33:03 +0000

It is interesting to know how much (own) Website is worth. There are several tools on the Internet which can help you to estimate the worth of your page in money ($) but also some tools which does provide some sort of score are interesting to. I’ll will share some interesting tools that can measure the potential of your site or a blog.

Glurk.com

Interesting Web-page worth calculation witch is based on basic SEO-parameters like: Google page-rank, count of back-links, listing in Yahoo directory and so on. You can also say provide some additional or even subjective information, so e.g. count of competitors. If you like, see saved result for my site.

Snscoop.com

Here you only need to provide your domain name. And other information will be collected and present to you automatically. Nice and handy but do not work well with sub-domains

Websitevalued.com

This Service is truly nice one. Good Information Presentation and the possibility to provide some data (not to much) manually, which leads to more realistic results. Definitely is worth to try it out!

Seitwert.de

Seitwert is an very cool German service. You have to understand basic German to make the information they provide about your site make useful for you. There are six Rating: Google Rating, Alexa rating, Social bookmarks presence, technical details, Yahoo rating, an other factors. It show you the problems of your site.

Seomoz.org

Seomoz seemed to be fine SEO company, at least they have very nice free SEO tools. One of them – Trifecta measures so called “Page strength” of your site. You have to be registered user.

Technorrati based -Blog worth

And of cause the known Blog worth. This rank is based on technorati rank. So you can only apply it on blogs listed on technorati.

Mywebsiteworth.com

Just enter your URL and you will get worth in $ with not much expression. However the worth is realistic one. Where Blog Worth (See above) gets 1000$ here could be worth 50$.

Seekbot.de

Another useful site is german Seekbot. Its not ranking and rating service . But I like to listing it here because it something useful it check your page on the fly like Seitwert.de and gives you hint, how bots do see on your site, what is bad and what is good. Share and Enjoy:

My Pagerank is back!

shuron — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 09:23:35 +0000

My google page-rank is back today. Some days ago I that blog to the new domain. I’ve placed a .htaccess redirect Rewrite Rule ^(.*)$ http://alexander.holbreich.org/$1 [R=301,L] to the old domain to preserve some humble SEO result of this page. But for some weeks new Blog had no page-rank. Now he is here and the effect of Permanent redirect on google is proved! Share and Enjoy:

Folder Monitr a Flickr Upload tool

shuron — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:26:16 +0000

Folder Monitr allows automatically upload of Pictures to the Flickr. This tool is very useful to me because it can work automatically in the background and therefore reduce one manual step in my picture processing. So basically i can now use only Lightroom end export my developed pictures to the “watched” folder and they will automatically upload to flickr in the background. All tags are taken and even Set can be specified by subfoldering, which is also cool.. There is just one drawback of this method. Uploaded images become automatically description, which say that that picture where uploaded by Folder Monitr (with a link) and a tag “FolderMonitr”. So I don’t like stuff like this. Unfortunately mass edit (or delete i my case) of tags and description is not so comfortable in flickr as it could be. However I will use FolderMonitr further maybe the description and tag problem cannot outbalance the use of that tool. P.S. If anybody knows the working way haw too upload pictures to flickr direct out of Lightroom in the version 2.0 is welcome to give me a hint thanks! Share and Enjoy:

Found solution for Magento – “SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error” on installation

shuron — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:29:30 +0000

I wrote already in the past about eCommerce System. I play with Magento till now from time to time. Unfortunately I had some problems with the installation and I could not find help in the web. Therefore maybe this post can be useful for some of you how is dealing whis Magento too.

The Problem

Every time on the installation of Magento i saw following exception.


Error in file: ".... app/code/core/Mage/Core/sql/core_setup/mysql4-install-0.8.0.php" - SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1005 Can't create table './db203484_1/#sql-1dd4_17baf.frm' (errno: 121)
Trace:
#0 .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Resource/Setup.php(286): Mage::exception('Mage_Core', 'Error in file: ...')
#1 ...app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Resource/Setup.php(166): Mage_Core_Model_Resource_Setup->_modifyResourceDb('install', '', '0.8.11')
#2 .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Resource/Setup.php(154): Mage_Core_Model_Resource_Setup->_installResourceDb('0.8.11')
#3 .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Resource/Setup.php(120): Mage_Core_Model_Resource_Setup->applyUpdates()
#4 .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Config.php(215): Mage_Core_Model_Resource_Setup::applyAllUpdates()
#5 .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/App.php(236): Mage_Core_Model_Config->init(Array)
#6 .../app/Mage.php(424): Mage_Core_Model_App->init('', 'store', Array)
#7 .../app/Mage.php(443): Mage::app('', 'store', Array)
#8 .../index.php(52): Mage::run()
#9 {main}

I tried installation with version 1.1.3, 1.1.4, 1.1.6 and 1.1.8 nothing helped… You can find many threads on Magentocommere Forum to this issue. Some hints may help you once but do not solve the problem. I guess I don’t have solved problem globally. But I found the cause of the problem so everybody can solve it on his own way.

Cause of the exception

During the installation routine many DB-Tables should be created in your Database. We talk here about MySQL Database. So Magento begins with SQL-Statement that are holded in the mysql4-install-0.8.0.php. This file is also pintet in the Exception message as the causes of the problem. I analysed the Statement and this came out.. Before any CREATE-Statement – Magento executes this:

SET SQL_MODE=''
SET @OLD_FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=@@
FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS, FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0
SET @OLD_SQL_MODE=@@SQL_MODE, SQL_MODE='NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO'

Then, after all tables and indexes defined in mysql4-install-0.8.0.php are created, magento executes following Statement.:

SET SQL_MODE=IFNULL(@OLD_SQL_MODE,'')
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=IFNULL(@OLD_FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS,0)

An the last row causes #1231 – Variable ‘foreign_key_checks’ can’t be set to the value of ‘0’ Exception which is finely identified by me as the cause of such installation problems!

Solution

I did’n spend much time to find out why the Varibale SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS can’t be set to ‘0′, because it looks like MySQL bug. However, it’s maybe not the finest solution but it helps. If you can drop the whole the database and create new one, then the installation works. It seems to set all the before settings back and installtion works fine on “vergin-Databases”. If you feel experienced in MYSQL and has an Idea how to overcome this problem without creating new Databases please make your comment ! Share and Enjoy:

2009: Happy new Year!

shuron — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 13:49:03 +0000

New Year

I wish all of you happy new year! May all your wishes come true in 2009! I wish to learn a perfect time management to made all of the thing that I have to do, and spend enough time with my family. Also I wish to achieve new level in project management and maybe new career level! Why not? I feel ready! Good luck! Share and Enjoy:

Pictures are lost

shuron — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:29:34 +0000

As Simon mentioned before, all pictures are lost on the blog. That is because their URL are stored as absolute path by WP which are currently refer to old domain. Can anyone write an SQL (MySQL) procedure that looks through all post, searching for some URL lieke http://holbreich.de and then changes them to http://alexander.holbreich.org? Can anyone of the readers do somethng like this? Is there maybeeven some kind of plug-In which doe simmilar job? Share and Enjoy: