Sometimes with Gentoo you’ll run across some weird ‘blocker’ issues. Meaning that certain older packages/libraries/etc are blocked in order to do the update. Sometimes these are super easy to fix, usually by unmerging the blocked packages and emerging the new update package. Sometimes, it’s a pain. The e2fsprogs and e2fsprogs-lib blocker problem is an example… Continue reading Quick fix for e2fsprogs, com_err, and ss blockers

Over the last couple of years, I had two cisco/linksys gigabit switches die on me. I’ve been around networking and computers for a long, long time, and I’ve never seen switches go out. They’ve always been rock solid and always reliable. I have seen a switch port go out, but that’s about it. About two… Continue reading Dell PowerConnect 2708/2716 Gigabit Switches

Working on a server with a different timezone that my current location, I ran into a problem when a date check was causing problems with users in my zone. I needed to update timezone within the query to handle this problem. I quickly found the CONVERT_TZ() function in MySQL, but during my tests I would… Continue reading Updating MySQL’s timezone table

One of the popular posts here is the cursor reset for MySQL. I originally wrote that so I could refer to that easily, since I don’t use it enough to have it memorized. Well, I came across another MySQL command not often used by me. Yesterday I was working on a PHP application where I… Continue reading Shifting Columns in a MySQL database

Holy Cow! Talk about a bargain price. I came across this switch the other day. I need to set up a gigabit network where I’m able to use VLANs. That limits me to managed switch at least. You definitely can lay down some dough on a 24-port managed gigabit switch. We checked NewEgg and few… Continue reading DELL PowerConnect 2724 24-Port Gigabit Ethernet Web-Managed Switch

In case you didn’t know, I’m a backup FREAK. Nothing gives me that warm fuzzy feeling knowing that I have backups and everything is ‘safe’. I’ve discussed Dirvish in the past, which is definitely my backup solution of choice. Simple, robust and super reliable. I was working on a web development project with a friend… Continue reading Backing up FTP directories using CurlFtpFs

I’m currently using a virtual MTA system, including amavisd-new, spamassassin, clamav, postfix and using quotas on a per mailbox basis. When I upgraded to 2.4.5, I started seeing quota limits exceeding on accounts that have quota limits of ‘0’. Zero quota use to mean no-limit. Nov 25 07:55:41 comp postfix/virtual[2800]: DF03FA38D: to=<user@domain.com>, orig_to=<user2@domain.com>, relay=virtual, delay=0.18,… Continue reading Upgrading Postfix to 2.4.5 has some VDA issues

I’m managing a few Gentoo boxes for a client. This environment is sort of a nightmare (initially set up by someone else.. who I’ve never met and currently hate now). Basically, it’s a xen environment running several Gentoo images. On one of the images today, I was unable to start postfix after the upgrade to… Continue reading Postfix Startup Problem – fatal: epoll_create: Function not implemented

Today, I had to import a CSV file into a MySQL database. I thought, this would be a quick snap with phpMyAdmin and was surprised to NOT see a file import, only SQL style imports are supported with phpMyAdmin. Okay, so off we go to CLI MySQL commands (or SQL execution, but since the file… Continue reading Import CSV file into MySQL

So after upgrading from 3.0.24-r3 to net-fs/samba-3.0.27, I immediately ran into problems with my mapped drives. Clicking on the drives from Windows, I received the following: ————————— Local Disk (C:) ————————— X:\ refers to a location that is unavailable. It could be on a hard drive on this computer, or on a network. Check to… Continue reading Upgrade from Samba 3.0.24-r3 to 3.0.27 causes problems with Windows.