Ubuntu

On a new Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) LTS server, I ran into the following:

$ su -c /bin/bash foo
bash: cannot set terminal process group (3987): Inappropriate ioctl for device
bash: no job control in this shell

However, the su procedure worked and I was logged in as user foo.

I ran into the following error (or something like it) while setting up Drupal's xmlsitemap module:

public://xmlsitemap/lOtsOfgoBBlDegOOk not found or not writable

This is as expected some kind of permissions issue. Why the module can't sort this on its own, I do not know. As with everything Drupal, clear the cache first to see if that fixes things. It sometimes does. If not, you will need to get your hands dirty on the commandline (if linux):

Here are some postfix queue management commands that I find myself using regularly (on an Ubuntu server):

Fresh install of Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS: After installed SSHD, I found that logging in remotely was a time-consuming process as the password prompt took ages to pop up after the username prompt. Binging about, I found that this was due to SSHD performing a reverse DNS lookup of my IP to potentially check if all is kosher. Turning this check off fixes the issue:

Installing Aegir 2 on a fresh install of Ubuntu Saucy in a Virtualbox, I ran into the following message:

The drush command '@hostmaster pm-enable hosting_queued' could not be found.

To fix this run, sudo mysql_secure_installation and ensure that you remove anonymous users. This should do the trick.

Using Virtualbox (4.3.6) on an XP64 machine, I ran into the following error while trying to install a 64-bit version of Ubuntu:

this kernel requires an x86-64 CPU, but only detects an i686 CPU, unable to boot

This happens even if the host machine is a 64-bit machine. To fix this, reboot the box and enter the BIOS. Look around for a virtualisation setting and enable it. Save and exit the BIOS configuration screen.

I recently had trouble with a MySQL installation in Ubuntu. For some reason or the other, during an upgrade to a newer version of mysql-server, the upgrade script had issues stopping the server and the script failed. This meant that apt could no longer function as it kept raising a red flag over the broken upgrade with the following instructions:

dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.

While trying to edit a menu on a Drupal site, I found that none of my changes were being saved. Looking at the logs led me to the following error message:

PDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 144 Table 'cache_menu' is marked as crashed and last (automatic?) repair failed: DELETE FROM {cache_menu};

Simply restarting MySQL did not fix things and it looked like I had to get my hands a li'l dirty.

Attempting to update flashplugin on Ubuntu Precise resulted in an error. Removing the package and reinstalling it resulted in the following:

This is my week of playing around with mail servers and I have been keeping an eye on the logs on a regular basis. I noticed that the auth.log was riddled with millions of these pointless (from my POV anyhow) log entries:
CRON: pam_unix(cron:session): session opened for user root by (uid=0)
CRON: pam_unix(cron:session): session closed for user root