I recently upgraded a Motorola Defy to use CyanogenMod 7.2 as Motorola was not going to upgrade the phone from Froyo to Gingerbread. While the upgrade went reasonably smoothly and the phone is working well albeit with a few quirks, there was a major issue that I ran into recently. The phone loses its signal when it's roaming. Fixing this basically involves installing an (unsigned) app named Baseband Switcher, and setting the correct baseband for the phone.

I ran into a Neatorama article the other day which listed authors who like(d) to work naked. One of them was apparently Victor Hugo:

Today, I'm trying to root one of my Android phones in order to install Cyanogen Mod 7.2! First issue: while attempting to root the phone (a Motorola Defy running Android 2.2.2 Froyo), I ran into the following error message while following this guide:
C:\Users\foo>adb push rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin /data/local/tmp/
cannot stat 'rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin': No such file or directory

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


While trying to debug a postfix authentication issue in Debian 6, I had to use testsaslauthd to test things out:
testsaslauthd -s smtp -u foo@example.com -p test

only to get the following error:
connect() : No such file or directory 0

This is apparently because a lot of people (and authors) follow the same guide for configuring postfix and saslauthd. One of the steps missing is to symlink and saslauthd directory to a location within postfix. To fix:

I've been trying to .. empower .. the Nagios 3 web interface in Ubuntu/Debian to allow me to turn off service checking at will. I do this when I am checking logs etc. to debug some issue and all the spam from Nagios' polling is getting in the way. Nagios comes with an option to "disable active checks of this service" which when click should, well, disable active checks of the service. Clicking it, however, resulted in the following message:

Nagios is currently not checking for external commands.

While setting up Drupal on a friend's Ubuntu server, I ran into the following error message:

PHP Fatal error: Undefined class constant 'MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY' in /var/www/mysite/includes/database/mysql/database.inc on line 42

This basically simply means that the PHP PDO extension has not been installed. It can be installed via something along the lines of:
sudo aptitude install php5-mysql

While you are at it, make sure that all the other PHP extensions that Drupal requires are also installed.

Good luck :)

The following are some tools I'd like to note down that are handy when it comes to checking server configurations and security:

I just finished setting up postfix on a Debian 6 machine. All is peachy. However, when I checked my mail logs to see how things were going I noticed a number of entries for messages being sent from smmsp@example.com to root. Checking root's mail led to messages with the following content:
/usr/share/sendmail/sendmail: line 880: /usr/sbin/sendmail-msp: No such file or directory

mIRC is by far the most popular IRC client in the world. However, it's a bit of a pain to use if you connect to different networks with different nicks and so on, as mIRC only supports one user profile. One of the ways to get around this is to have multiple mIRC installations for each profile. But as you can well imagine, this is a pain. However, salvation is here as a friend on IRC put me on to this nifty trick to get his happening without all the brute-forcing. Here's how it is done.