Archives

GNUPanel on Debian Squeeze

I was recently playing around with the “GNUPanel” Hosting control panel software. While trying to install the dependencies (with the install-dep.sh file), I encountered the error:

Debian version not supported

Even though the GNUPanel site seemed to say that Debian Squeeze was supported.

A quick look at the install-dep.sh file showed that it relied on the mawk unix utility.

By running apt-get install mawk, we can solve this problem and continue with the installation.

UPDATE:

I’ve now had a chance to play around with GNUPanel a bit more, and unfortunately, I don’t think it’s fully up to scratch. The installation process was pretty clunky – the automated installed script forced me to manually confirm the installation of at least 10 groups of packages. Once the software was installed, I had to guess at the username – and the web interface was also pretty…. “ropey”. These are mainly minor issues, and I’m sure that with some TLC, the project can progress, and become much more useable.

iTunes and DTrace

Earlier today, I was using iotop to check the disk activity for the processes on my machine, and immediately started seeing the following error (or variations on this error):

dtrace: error on enabled probe ID 5 (ID 992: io:mach_kernel:buf_strategy:start): invalid user access in action #3 at DIF offset 0

I thought my SSD was dying (it’s something I fear!) – however, after some messing around I discovered iotop doesn’t work when iTunes is running, because Apple have disabled dtrace while iTunes is running. Quitting iTunes sorted the problem for me. There is more about this “quirk” here: http://www.securitypronews.com/insiderreports/insider/spn-49-20080124AppleAlteredDTraceToolSaysLeventhal.html

Bizzare Error

For some reason, the category links on the right (as well as tag links) aren’t working – at all. I think this has something to do with either my server setup, (fCGI and SUEXEC), the Theme i’m using (Portfolio Press), a combination of the two or something totally different. This might be a good opportunity to start using Jekyll, so if you could hang on in there for now (all 0 of you), I’ll hopefully have it sorted in a week or so’s time.

Munin Error

When I first installed munin on my machine, I was getting errors like:[cc lang='text' line_numbers='false']Terminating process. at /usr/share/perl5/Munin/Master/UpdateWorker.pm line 139[/cc]After some searching online, I found out that this was because it doesn’t like capital letters in the hostname. So, to fix this error, you need to make your hostname ALL LOWERCASE in both the munin-node.conf file of your client, and the host structure tree of your munin.conf file.

A side-effect of this problem was getting 403 forbidden errors when trying to access my munin directory – this is because the apache.conf file that munin comes with on (for debian, at least) does not have indexes enabled, and because as a result of the hostname capitalisation issue, no html files are being generated by munin. A combination of these two things results in the aforementioned 403 errors.

I hope that this has helped someone – I know that I could have done with reading this post three days ago :) .