When newer versions of Firefox come out, there are always a few add-ons that fail to update quickly enough. After about a week of waiting, I’ve become tired of waiting for some of my add-ons to update themselves. These add-ons are ColorZilla (white reports 3.6.* compatibility, but it won’t install/update on 3.6), CSSViewer, and Live HTTP Headers.

Fortunately, updating is a simple matter. Just do the following:

• Download the xpi file for the add-on
• Open up the downloaded xpi file as a zip file
• Open the install.rdf file inside the xpi file
• Search for the targetApplication section with an id of {ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}
• Change that section’s maxVersion to the version number to whatever Firefox version you want to be supported
• Update the xpi file with the modified install.rdf file
• Install the add-on by dragging the xpi file onto the Firefox window and clicking the Install button (this works for upgrades as well)

Here are the modified xpi files for each of the add-ons:

• ColorZilla
• CSSViewer
• Live HTTP Headers

Note: All of these add-ons were updated to work with 3.6.*. Of course, they may not be compatible with future versions of 3.6, so use at your own risk.

Keep in mind that if you manually upgrade an older add-on, you do so at your own risk. I tested these add-ons, and they all work properly with 3.6.

One of my all-time most popular posts was how to upgrade to Firefox 3.5 in Ubuntu 9.04. Now it’s Firefox 3.6’s turn to be installed on my system that is now running Ubuntu 9.10.

The team working on Firefox have put a ton of effort into this release and, in order to make our browsing lives safer and faster, rolled a number of features scheduled for 3.7 into this release. Thanks for all the hard work guys.

Read the 3.6 release announcement for details about what is new with this release.

So now onto the installation. Here are the commands that I ran in terminal to install 3.6.

[chris@rommie ~]$ cd /tmp/
[chris@rommie /tmp]$ wget "http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.6&os=linux〈=en-US"
--2010-01-21 11:41:08--  http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.6&os=linux〈=en-US
Resolving download.mozilla.org... 63.245.209.58
Connecting to download.mozilla.org|63.245.209.58|:80... connected.
...

100%[=============================>] 10,161,471   924K/s   in 11s     

2010-01-21 11:41:20 (899 KB/s) - `firefox-3.6.tar.bz2' saved [10161471/10161471]

[chris@rommie /tmp]$ tar xvjf firefox-*.bz2
tar: Record size = 8 blocks
firefox/
firefox/update.locale
firefox/plugins/
firefox/plugins/libnullplugin.so
...
firefox/defaults/autoconfig/platform.js
firefox/defaults/autoconfig/prefcalls.js
firefox/libmozjs.so
[chris@rommie /tmp]$ sudo cp -r firefox /usr/lib/firefox-3.6
[sudo] password for chris:
[chris@rommie /tmp]$ sudo mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox.old
[chris@rommie /tmp]$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-3.6/firefox /usr/bin/firefox-3.6
[chris@rommie /tmp]$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/firefox-3.6 /usr/bin/firefox

Simply run each command listed in white in your terminal to upgrade your system with the latest release version of Firefox.

After running these commands, close out Firefox, wait a few seconds to let everything shut down properly, and run Firefox again. If all the steps were executed properly and without error, you should be running 3.6. You can click Help > About Mozilla Firefox to confirm.

Happy browsing.

One of the functions of Git that I still struggle with is merging. Recently, I found a post that shows a number of very helpful merging examples. If you work with Git and don’t fully understand merging, I recommend that you check it out.

Git merging by example

My thanks to Jonathan Rockway on providing this great guide.

UPDATE (28 Apr 2008): So apparently this article made it to the front page of delicious, reddit, and hacker news. It’s always the ones I least expect Anyway, I’ve updated the branch names to be less confusing, and I’ve added an explanation of why I say git ci instead of git commit; I have the following section in my .gitconfig file:

[alias]
st = status
di = diff
co = checkout
ci = commit
br = branch
sta = stash

This lets you type git [the left side] and allows git to interpret it as git [the right side]. A very useful feature.

We now bring you the actual article:

I’ve always liked git’s merging algorithm, so I thought I’d show an example where it works exactly like I’d expect.

Let’s get started by creating a new git repository and project:

$ mkdir git-test
$ cd git-test
$ git init

Then we’ll create a file to play with, test.pl:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

print “Hello, world.\n”;

__END__

And commit that:

$ git add test.pl
$ git ci -m ‘initial import’
Created initial commit 219c5b3: initial import
1 files changed, 6 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 test.pl

At this point, we want to create a branch so we can refactor this mess without ruining the working code.

$ git co -b refactor
Switched to a new branch “refactor”

Now that we’re on the refactor branch, let’s sequester the print statement into a subroutine.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

say_hello();

sub say_hello {
print “Hello, world.\n”;
}

__END__

And commit:

$ git ci -a -m ‘factor print into a subroutine’;
Created commit 518dec1: factor print into a subroutine
1 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

I have an idea for a new UI feature, so I’m going to make a branch here, but not switch to it, since I want to add another feature on this refactor branch first.

$ git branch new-ui

While we’re still on refactor, let’s get rid of that ugly \n:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use 5.010;

say_hello();

sub say_hello {
say “Hello, world.”;
}

__END__

(Note to the non-perl-users; we added use 5.010 to pull in the new say feature. Unfortunately the program now depends on perl 5.10 instead of perl 5.anything.)

Much cleaner. Commit.

$ git ci -a -m ‘use say instead of print’
Created commit 518dec1: use say instead of print
1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

OK, with that braindump saved, let’s go over to the new-ui branch:

$ git co new-ui
Switched to branch “new-ui”

Now let’s add that super cool feature, namely printing “Hello, world” three times instead of just once. You think the boss will go for this change before converting all the servers to Perl 5.10, so you add it on this branch that doesn’t require 5.10.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

say_hello();
say_hello();
say_hello();

sub say_hello {
print “Hello, world.\n”;
}

__END__

Let’s commit that.

$ git ci -a -m ’say hello three times’
Created commit affad78: say hello three times
1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

The unfortunate part is that management hasn’t approved that UI change, and they haven’t let you upgrade your production server to 5.10 yet. So you switch back to master to work on a task that needs to be done immediately — adding some documentation.

$ git co master
Switched to branch “master”

And then edit the file:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

print “Hello, world.\n”;

__END__

=head1 NAME

test.pl – say hello to the world

=head1 SYNOPSIS

perl test.pl

And commit:

$ git ci -a -m ‘add docs’
Created commit 80d2bba: add docs
1 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

With all that productivity, you feel you’ve earned a sugary cup of coffee, so you head over to Caribou, buy one, and come back. You check your e-mail and find that the UI team loves your “say hello 3 times” change. So, let’s merge that into master:

$ git pull . new-ui
Auto-merged test.pl
Merge made by recursive.
test.pl | 8 +++++++-
1 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

Your file looks like this now:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

say_hello();
say_hello();
say_hello();

sub say_hello {
print “Hello, world.\n”;
}

__END__

=head1 NAME

test.pl – say hello to the world

=head1 SYNOPSIS

perl test.pl

If you do a git log, you’ll see that git adds each change you merged in into the history:

commit a6d16af596b2d122f4348ded85ca14a74b6adaae
Merge: 80d2bba… affad78…
Author: Jonathan Rockway
Date: Sun Apr 27 05:35:16 2008 -0500

Merge branch ‘new-ui’

commit 80d2bba051c525257aa4930b362dbe01d6c280fe
Author: Jonathan Rockway
Date: Sun Apr 27 05:34:03 2008 -0500

add docs

commit affad78861d53900199860e60b44fb5c500791f5
Author: Jonathan Rockway
Date: Sun Apr 27 05:28:02 2008 -0500

say hello three times

commit 518dec18167d36f6f7813b3affc0e76ad9baf2d9
Author: Jonathan Rockway
Date: Sun Apr 27 05:20:52 2008 -0500

factor print into a subroutine

commit 219c5b3a580c0d5d4453e118b7a9c40efb6cd13b
Author: Jonathan Rockway
Date: Sun Apr 27 05:15:39 2008 -0500

initial import

Now you’ve found out that every copy of Perl 5.8 has been destroyed (blame the sunspots), and you’ll have to upgrade to 5.10. Because of that, you can merge in your 5.10 branch. Lucky break! One thing to lose hair over, though, is that the new-ui branch that you just merged in has some commits in common with the refactor branch you’re about to merge in. Will git try to apply that change twice? (No.)

Let’s try it:

$ git pull . refactor
Auto-merged test.pl
Merge made by recursive.
test.pl | 3 ++-
1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

As expected, it worked perfectly. Here’s the final file:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use 5.010;

say_hello();
say_hello();
say_hello();

sub say_hello {
say “Hello, world.”;
}

__END__

=head1 NAME

test.pl – say hello to the world

=head1 SYNOPSIS

perl test.pl

If you look at the log, you’ll see that git knows exactly what changes were included by the merge:

commit 1d4a7814c29678d8ce69d7e241dcb21c4e5d1b88
Merge: a6d16af… d35db62…
Author: Jonathan Rockway
Date: Sun Apr 27 05:44:20 2008 -0500

Merge branch ‘refactor’

commit a6d16af596b2d122f4348ded85ca14a74b6adaae
Merge: 80d2bba… affad78…
Author: Jonathan Rockway
Date: Sun Apr 27 05:35:16 2008 -0500

Merge branch ‘new-ui’

commit 80d2bba051c525257aa4930b362dbe01d6c280fe
Author: Jonathan Rockway
Date: Sun Apr 27 05:34:03 2008 -0500

add docs

commit affad78861d53900199860e60b44fb5c500791f5
Author: Jonathan Rockway
Date: Sun Apr 27 05:28:02 2008 -0500

say hello three times

commit d35db62f2a628687db8ab2e5759cae35cffb5ab0
Author: Jonathan Rockway
Date: Sun Apr 27 05:23:45 2008 -0500

use say instead of print

commit 518dec18167d36f6f7813b3affc0e76ad9baf2d9
Author: Jonathan Rockway
Date: Sun Apr 27 05:20:52 2008 -0500

factor print into a subroutine

commit 219c5b3a580c0d5d4453e118b7a9c40efb6cd13b
Author: Jonathan Rockway
Date: Sun Apr 27 05:15:39 2008 -0500

initial import

Even though you’ve merged these branches into trunk, you can still work on them:

$ git co new-ui
$ git rebase master

rebase will merge master into the current branch, but it works by deleting your commits, bringing in master’s commits, and then replaying yours on top. This avoids the useless “merge branch ‘foo’” commit, but at the cost of being unable to share your changes with another repository (since the commit ids will change; commit ids are dependant on history, and rebase rewrites history).

The usual use case for rebase is when you’re working on a feature that takes a few days to write and want to bring in upstream every day. Instead of polluting your feature branch with merges, you can rebase and nobody will ever know that your changes weren’t originally made against today’s upstream branch. (If there are conflicts, git will allow you to resolve them for each of your patches, and it will remember how you resolved them in case the same thing comes up when you rebase again tomorrow. See git rerere –help for details.)

Anyway, after the rebase, our new-ui branch is now up to date with respect to master. If you made some changes here, you could merge them into master without issue.

Let’s do one more example; we’ll see how to merge two branches at once. We’ll switch back to master, and make a doc-refactor branch, since your app really needs more docs.

$ git co master
Switched to branch “master”
$ git co -b doc-refactor
Switched to a new branch “doc-refactor”

Here, we’ll add some POD to the end of the file:

__END__

=head1 NAME

test.pl – say hello to the world

=head1 SYNOPSIS

perl test.pl

=head1 HISTORY

As of version 0.01, C now prints “Hello, world.” three
times, for maximum enjoyment.

This isn’t quite perfect yet, but let’s commit it.

$ git ci -a -m ‘explain the 3x feature’
Created commit 80920ac: explain the 3x feature
1 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

Meanwhile, a critical bug was just discovered — a user paused too long while reading the comma in “Hello, world.”, so you need to remove it. We’ll branch off master, since this complicated fix may take a few days of testing to fully implement:

$ git branch comma-bug-fix master
$ git co comma-bug-fix
# fix it
$ git ci -a -m ‘fix the comma bug’
Created commit 053413e: fix the comma bug
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

That was easier than expected. Since the bugfix was pretty simple and your docs are done, you’re ready to share both of those changes with your coworkers by merging them into master:

$ git co master
$ git pull . comma-bug-fix doc-refactor
Trying simple merge with 053413e7fc2935cfe54de74178f493b7965081b3
Trying simple merge with 80920ac16ad72d8714b4e767a09e1f8ce974fe5a
Simple merge did not work, trying automatic merge.
Auto-merging test.pl
Merge made by octopus.
test.pl | 7 ++++++-
1 files changed, 6 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

I love the “Merge made by octopus” message; I am seriously going to have a t-shirt made that says that. I like it when sea creatures help maintain my code.

Finally, if you don’t need those branches anymore, you can blow them away:

$ git branch -d refactor new-ui comma-bug-fix doc-refactor
Deleted branch refactor.
Deleted branch new-ui.
Deleted branch comma-bug-fix.
Deleted branch doc-refactor.

Git will only delete branches that are completely merged into the current branch, so you don’t need to worry about losing data.

In conclusion, git makes non-linear development easy. It’s smart, so merges Just Work; worrying about branches is not something you need to do anymore. Additionally, if you are the visual type, try running gitk –all. It will draw an interactive graph of all your merge and branch points, so you can see where your branches are at-a-glance. It’s awesome.

I recently installed Windows 7 in VirtualBox, and unlike other OSes I’ve installed in VirtualBox, the sound driver wasn’t automatically recognized. I found a driver that works with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

VirtualBox Windows 7 Driver

I installed this both before and after installing the Guest Additions, but it didn’t matter what order the driver and Guest Additions were installed in.

Enjoy.

Earlier tonight I had to work on a friends new Sony VAIO system. The model is VGN-NS330J, but the information I found seems to apply to all Sony VAIO laptops.

Anyways, this machine was seriously messed up, and he just bought it. Since the system doesn’t ship with disks for recovering the Windows installation, I figured that there had to be a hotkey combination that brought up the appropriate menu. Interestingly, this was put into the F8 Advanced Boot Options screen that is built into Windows.

If you want to recover the system back to factory defaults, reboot the system, wait for the VAIO logo to appear, and then start pressing F8. The Advanced Boot Options screen will appear shortly. Use the arrow keys to highlight the “Repair Your Computer” option and press Enter. From here, follow the instructions to accomplish what you want.

I did this, but it seems that even the recovery partition was hosed. This meant that his system was essentially worthless at this point. Fortunately, I had some Vista installation disks that could be used to reinstall the OS with the Windows serial key found on the bottom of the laptop.

When I rebooted with the installation disk, the disk didn’t boot. Come to find out, the primary boot option was the harddrive, which, frankly, is the worst boot option to be set as the primary boot method since there’s no way to bypass the hard disk boot without modifying the BIOS. How many computer users would know how to modify the boot priorities in BIOS? A better question: How many computer users even know what the BIOS is?

Unfortunately, Sony decided that having a pretty boot splash screen was more important than providing information on how to access the BIOS. Pressing the usual suspects of Esc and Del did nothing. At least they could have the courtesy of removing the splash screen when I hit a button so that I could see the options, but no.

After much too much searching around, I found out that F2 is the magic key. As soon as you boot, start pressing F2 about once a second until the BIOS screen shows.

I hope this helps you, the random person who found this information, and I hope that system developers see this and realize the following:

1. Here’s the smart boot order to set up in the BIOS defaults of new systems: optical drive, external media, internal hard drive(s). This way, any bootable media works as expected without requiring users to go through BIOS first.
2. Sacrificing screens that instruct users on how to use basic functionality of the machine for aesthetics is not the right decision, it simply makes your hardware a pain to use. If you must have the pretty splash screens, have them go away when a key is pressed so that the user can see valuable information, such as keys to access BIOS and the POST information. Having a splash screen that requires a change in the BIOS to make it go away in order to see the information on how to access the BIOS is self-defeating.
3. Please bring back installation media or make a way for people to easily and cheaply acquire it. It would be fantastic if OEM system manufacturers would offer the ability to download the appropriate installation media directly from the manufacturer website. You could require a registered system complete with the serial information of the system in order to authenticate the download. This way there isn’t the increased cost of disk inventory and shipping. It would also allow customers to have quick resolution of problems since the customer could go to any location with internet access to quickly and easily get the necessary disk to use for recovery.

   This has the added benefit of ending the ridiculous permanent waste of space on computers in order to have a long-term storage of data that may never be used and may be corrupt by the time it is needed.

My dual monitor setup didn’t work properly in Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope. Fortunately, it does work properly in 9.10, Karmic Kaola. However, this newfound dual monitor setup has given me a new problem: how do I move my panels to the secondary monitor?

My office machine is a laptop. When I get in the office, I hook it up to a 24″ LCD. I’d like to use this external monitor as the primary, which means that I definitely want to have my panels display on it. However, as much as I tried to drag the panels around or play around with settings, there just didn’t seem to be a way to get them over there. However, I just figured it out.

By default, panels are set to expand. This means that the panels will span the entire width or height of the section of the window they occupy. If the expand option is disabled, they turn into self-sizing bar that can be dragged to different edges or centered.

Having the expand option disabled also allows you to grab and edge of the panel and drag it to another screen. Once on the screen you want it on, simply re-enable the expand option and you now have the panel on another screen.

Here’s a step-by-step way of moving a panel to another screen:

1. Right-click the panel you wish to move and select “Properties”.
2. Uncheck the “Expand” option under the “General” tab.
3. Grab one of the edges of the panel by clicking on the left or right end (top or bottom end for vertical panels).
4. Drag the bar to the desired screen and position.
5. Check the “Expand” option in the “Panel Properties” window and click “Close”.

PEAR is PHP’s equivalent of Perl’s CPAN. It offers hundreds of ready-to-use code modules that can make projects go much more quickly than having to hand code everything. However, it never seems like PEAR is easy to get running.

Installing the Needed Software

In Ubuntu, installing the following packages will quickly get you started with PEAR: php5-cli, php5-dev, and php-pear.

Make sure that you read the next section about problems with using PEAR to install PEAR packages if you are running 9.10, Karmic Kaola.

Here’s an example of how to quickly install those packages from the terminal.

[chris@rommie ~]$ sudo apt-get install php5-cli php5-dev php-pear
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
autoconf autoconf2.13 automake automake1.4 autotools-dev libltdl-dev libssl-dev libtool m4 php5-common shtool zlib1g-dev
Suggested packages:
autobook autoconf-archive gnu-standards autoconf-doc gettext libtool-doc automaken gfortran fortran95-compiler gcj php5-suhosin
The following NEW packages will be installed:
autoconf autoconf2.13 automake automake1.4 autotools-dev libltdl-dev libssl-dev libtool m4 php-pear php5-cli php5-common php5-dev shtool zlib1g-dev
0 upgraded, 15 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/8,690kB of archives.
After this operation, 27.7MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
Selecting previously deselected package m4.
(Reading database ... 127272 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking m4 (from .../archives/m4_1.4.13-2_i386.deb) ...
...

With these packages, you are ready to roll with PHP and PEAR in Ubuntu.

Problem with Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Kaola

A great thing about PEAR is that you can quickly install packages with a simple command. For example, “sudo pear install PHP_Parser-0.2.1″ will install the PHP_Parser package. However, this doesn’t work properly in Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Kaola.

Output of the standard PEAR install command can be seen below:

[chris@rommie ~]$ sudo pear install PHP_Parser-0.2.1
downloading PHP_Parser-0.2.1.tgz ...
Starting to download PHP_Parser-0.2.1.tgz (70,782 bytes)
.................done: 70,782 bytes

While this doesn’t look wrong, it has actually failed. Rather than installing the package, it has simply downloaded the archive, encountered an unchecked error, and crashed. A successful installation has a message saying that the installation is successful.

This problem can be easily fixed by giving the install command the “-Z” option. For example:

[chris@rommie ~]$ sudo pear install -Z PHP_Parser-0.2.1
downloading PHP_Parser-0.2.1.tar ...
Starting to download PHP_Parser-0.2.1.tar (Unknown size)
.............................................................................done: 533,504 bytes
install ok: channel://pear.php.net/PHP_Parser-0.2.1

Notice the “install ok: …” portion of the message. That’s what you should see at the end of a successful installation.

For more details on this bug, please check out Bug #451314 on the Ubuntu bug tracker.

I just encountered an odd issue with Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Kaola. I had music playing in the background, I adjusted the volume, and I noticed that there wasn’t any change in the volume level. Even maxing out the volume and muting it had no effect.

After wondering if the problem was that I went insane, I looked in Sound Preferences (right-click the volume icon and select Sound Preferences) and found that “RV635 Audio device [Radeon HD 3600 Series] Digital Stereo (HDMI)” was selected under the device output. This means that Ubuntu was trying to send audio over my HDMI connection rather than through my headphone jacks.

This wasn’t a problem last night, so it might be due to the fact that my external monitor at the office runs over the HDMI connection, so it automatically switched to the HDMI audio output. In one way, this is nice, in another way, it will frustrate me to no end if it does this every time I’m at the office. If I’m right that it automatically switched upon detecting an active HDMI connection, then wouldn’t it be better to make it easier to provide a notification on where to switch the audio output rather than just switching it and causing confusion?

Switching the option to “Internal Audio Analog Stereo” instantly fixed the problem.

Oddly enough, when I manually selected the HDMI output again, it muted the analog output. So, it seems that it may not be a complete switchover or possibly just a bug. I’ll continue to see how the situation plays out and make a Ubuntu bug report if necessary.

Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Kaola, launched earlier this week. One of the key new features in this release is Ubuntu One. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen, this new feature/product launch has been anything but smooth.

Ubuntu One is one of the new ways that Canonical, the creators of Ubuntu, is trying to generate some revenue based on their distro. Ubuntu One is a hosted file storage solution that allows users to keep a folder and all of its content synced between multiple computers. All users get 2GB of storage for free with the option of increasing the store to 50GB for $10/month.

Since this new offering has many Ubuntu users very excited, I thought I’d give it a try as soon as I installed the new release. However, I was instantly met with a very big message telling me that something was wrong.

Launch Day: Problem 1

When I first started Ubuntu One, the following notification appeared:

Capabilities Mismatch
There was a capabilities mismatch while attempting to connect to the Ubuntu One server. You may have installed a newer version of the client, for which the server does not yet provide support. A new version of the server should be accessible soon. Please be patient while we update.

Ubuntu is supposed to be a Linux distro designed for the average computer user. Since this large message appears for a short period of time and it isn’t easily understood, I think that this message could very easily give users a very bad first experience. I believe it would be much more simple to simply say the following:

Server Connection Failed
Please ensure that you have installed all software updates and try again at a later time.

The reason why I believe the software update portion should be included is because the problem wasn’t the server, it was the client. This morning my system told me some updates were available, and a few of these updates got rid of the “Capabilities Mismatch” problem and allowed the software to connect properly.

The packages that fixed this are the following:

• python-ubuntuone-client
• ubuntuone-client
• ubuntuone-client-gnome

Each of these were updated to version 1.0.2-0ubuntu2. After the update, I closed the Ubuntu One software, restarted it, and the folder sync worked as expected. However, this is when another problem became clear.

Houston, We Have a Problem… Again

There are two parts to the Ubuntu One system. The first is the server/client connection that actively syncs the Ubuntu One folder between the computer and the Ubuntu One server. The second is an online system you can access through the browser. This online system allows you to manage folders and files from inside your browser.

When I first started to play with Ubuntu One, even though the folder sync didn’t function, the web access system did. Using this method allowed me to get a feel for what Canonical was aiming to offer its users. As soon as the server/client issue was fixed, I decided to play around with syncing files and then looking at them on the online system. This is when I found Ubuntu One’s second problem.

Disappointingly, as soon as Ubuntu One’s client started to work properly, their online system failed. So, is this out of the kettle and into the fire?

Again, this failed in a manner that is difficult to understand. You set up a Ubuntu One account by using a Launchpad account. I went to one.ubuntu.com, the Ubuntu One site, clicked “Sign In”, input my login details, and was redirected to the home page again with no feedback message. So, I clicked “Sign In” again, and I was once again redirected back to the homepage. Seems like some authentication issues were going on between the Ubuntu One and Launchpad systems.

As with the previous issue, my problem isn’t how the system failed — I’m a programmer, I know how things can go wrong — it’s with the fact that no feedback was given to the user. It simply didn’t work.

Conclusion

As I finish up this post, I see that Ubuntu One’s online system is functional again. However, as I’ve tested this throughout the day, it seems like it was down for at least a few hours. Overall, this is not a bad downtime, but it does tarnish the launch.

To be frank, I feel a bit bad being so harsh to software and services that I am getting access to for free; however, as per Canonical’s own press release, they are extremely-focused on the user experience. As a user, I have to say that my experience with the new Ubuntu One service was less than good.

I know that Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, believes that Ubuntu can take on Microsoft’s Windows head on. I also believe that Ubuntu has this potential; however, launch experiences like this aren’t going to win any new fans. One of the biggest disappointments that many people have with Microsoft is that many of their products, Windows included, feel like they were rushed out of development just to get a release.

Considering that Ubuntu One and Ubuntu are both Canonical creations, it looks really bad when Canonical can’t even get their own products to work together properly.

One of my company’s servers is hosted with Liquid Web. Yesterday one of my co-workers tries to log into WHM and sees the following message:

Brute Force Protection

This account is currently locked out because a brute force attempt was detected. Please wait 10 minutes and try again. Attempting to login again will only increase this delay. If you frequently experience this problem, we recommend having your username changed to something less generic.

He tries to log in a bit later and receives the message again. He contacts Liquid Web’s Heroic Support, and the support person “helpfully” recommend a server reboot to fix the problem. My co-worker asked for another solution, and support said that it was the only way.

My co-worker tells me about the situation, and I tell him that the support guy is an idiot. It takes all of about ten seconds to quickly find a solution to the problem on google. I then tell my co-worker that I’ll fix the problem, so he “thanks” the support guy and closes the chat.

I logged into the box via SSH and had the problem fixed in a couple of minutes.

Information Gathering

Since access to the box wasn’t urgent, I did what I recommend that everyone does in situations like this: gather information first. I wanted to know what caused the lock out first. In other words, who or what was brute forcing the box and caused this issue.

It was quite possible that my box was still under attack. If I simply turned off brute force protection to bypass the block, I could have opened up my box to being compromised.

cPHulk stores all of its information in a database called cphulkd. There are two tables of interest: logins and brutes. The logins table stores login authentication failures. The brutes table stores excessive authentication failures indicative of a brute force attack.

Here is what I saw on the server:

[chris@office ~]$ ssh server
Last login: Wed Oct 14 11:02:14 2009 from host
[user@server ~]$ mysql -u user -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is id
Server version: version

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input
statement.

mysql> connect cphulkd
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Connection id:    id
Current database: cphulkd

mysql> select IP, BRUTETIME from brutes order by BRUTETIME;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select IP, LOGINTIME FROM logins order by LOGINTIME;
+---------------------------------+---------------------+
| IP                              | LOGINTIME           |
+---------------------------------+---------------------+
| 220.199.6.48                    | 2009-10-14 11:23:10 |
| 220.199.6.48                    | 2009-10-14 11:23:10 |
| 220.199.6.48                    | 2009-10-14 11:23:10 |
| 118.212.186.59                  | 2009-10-14 11:23:40 |
| 118.212.186.59                  | 2009-10-14 11:23:40 |
| 118.212.186.59                  | 2009-10-14 11:23:40 |
| djdeatheater.liquidweb.com      | 2009-10-14 11:24:03 |
| 221.7.58.37                     | 2009-10-14 11:24:07 |
| 221.7.58.37                     | 2009-10-14 11:24:07 |
| 221.7.58.37                     | 2009-10-14 11:24:07 |
| djdeatheater.liquidweb.com      | 2009-10-14 11:24:09 |
| djdeatheater.liquidweb.com      | 2009-10-14 11:24:15 |
| mail.ingener.com                | 2009-10-14 11:24:53 |
| mail.ingener.com                | 2009-10-14 11:24:57 |
| 123.147.144.45                  | 2009-10-14 11:25:16 |
| 123.147.144.45                  | 2009-10-14 11:25:16 |
| 123.147.144.45                  | 2009-10-14 11:25:16 |
| 119.62.128.42                   | 2009-10-14 11:25:41 |
| 119.62.128.42                   | 2009-10-14 11:25:41 |
| 119.62.128.42                   | 2009-10-14 11:25:41 |
| pomme.sai.msu.ru                | 2009-10-14 11:26:13 |
| pomme.sai.msu.ru                | 2009-10-14 11:26:13 |
| pomme.sai.msu.ru                | 2009-10-14 11:26:13 |
| 84-74-21-119.dclient.hispeed.ch | 2009-10-14 11:26:48 |
| 84-74-21-119.dclient.hispeed.ch | 2009-10-14 11:26:48 |
| 84-74-21-119.dclient.hispeed.ch | 2009-10-14 11:26:48 |
| 114.143.242.51                  | 2009-10-14 11:27:23 |
| 114.143.242.51                  | 2009-10-14 11:27:23 |
| 114.143.242.51                  | 2009-10-14 11:27:23 |
| 222.179.116.53                  | 2009-10-14 11:27:47 |
| 222.179.116.53                  | 2009-10-14 11:27:47 |
| 222.179.116.53                  | 2009-10-14 11:27:47 |
+---------------------------------+---------------------+
32 rows in set (0.00 sec)

As you can see, a distributed brute force login attempt was launched starting at 11:23am. Fortunately, cPHulk quickly recognized the attack and had completely shut down login access for the user account.

Thus, when we tried to log in, it of course didn’t work.

Regaining Access

Since I now knew the problem, and now felt good about how cPHulk protected our box, I decided to open up access again so we could go about our work. There are two different ways that I could have done this.

The first way would be to disable cPHulk to regain access, log into WHM, clear out the the block by using the “Flush DB” option in the cPHulk settings page, and then re-enable cPHulk. A number of people recommended this method, but I didn’t like it. I certainly don’t want to disable a security measure that successfully protected the box just to be able to regain access. What would happen if a huge wave of brute force authentication attempts hit the box in the time between disabling and re-enabling cPHulk? The answer is that the box wouldn’t protest and would tell the attacking program whether each attempt was successful or not.

If you need to use this method, the two commands you will want to use are: /usr/local/cpanel/bin/cphulk_pam_ctl --disable and /usr/local/cpanel/bin/cphulk_pam_ctl --enable. These two commands will disable and enable cPHulk, respectively.

I decided to use another method. This method didn’t require disabling cPHulk, and thus, didn’t require reducing protection to regain access. Essentially, I cleared the tables manually, so that I could log in once again. Since this opens up the login process again, a brute force could still proceed but would be quickly shut down again.

While still connected to the database through the MySQL monitor, I ran a couple more queries.

Note: Before I ran these queries. I stored the details of these attacks in a file on the server in case I needed to refer to the information later. Never delete attack data without keeping a record of it somewhere. You never know when you may need it.

mysql> delete from brutes;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> delete from logins;
Query OK, 32 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Now, we can log back into the box.

Finishing Up

I’m sure that many people encountering this situation would just pat themselves on the back and go about their day, but I wasn’t satisfied.

I wanted to ensure that the office wouldn’t be blocked in the event that another brute force attack happens, so I added our office to the whitelist. The whitelist supports both IP numbers and hostnames. So, if you have a dynamic IP, you can use a DDNS (Dynamic DNS) service to get your own hostname to use. Both DynDNS and No-IP offer reliable free solutions that provide you with a hostname to use. In addition, EveryDNS is a free DNS service provider that also offers the ability to create subdomains of your personal domain that can link to dynamic IPs. Many current routers support either DynDNS, No-IP, or both so that the router can handle updating the hostname automatically. Some router firmwares, such as Tomato support a much larger variety of DDNS services.

Another nice feature about using the DDNS services and whitelisting a hostname is that you can update that DNS pointer remotely. This means that if you get locked out of WHM when you are away from the location that is whitelisted, you can update the IP on the DDNS system, wait a few minutes for the IP to update, and then log into WHM via the whitelist.

One final thing I did was to change the account’s password. To an even more complicated and much longer one. Good luck cracking that in 32 tries.

Final Thoughts

I have to say that I was very pleased with the performance of cPHulk, a piece of software that I didn’t configure and which did its job admirably with no intervention by us. I wasn’t as pleased with the performance of the Liquid Web support person that “helped” us. Maybe I’ve just been pampered with the amazing support quality that I’ve experience at Host Gator, but I don’t think that “reboot the server” is an appropriate response to “the security software locked us out”. In fact, I’m not even sure if a reboot would have done anything other than just piss us off.

I sent a tweet about this yesterday and was pleased to get a response from Nick Campbell, a manager at Liquid Web, who wanted to know who recommended the reboot solution so that he could “thwack them if needed”. Thanks Nick.

The terminal output styling is new. I worked on it last night, and I’m quite pleased with the results. I think it makes the output much easier to scan and understand. I’d love to know what you think about it.