Keith's Personal Blog

OK, So i've been forced to have to set up an eggdrop -- what a ball ache!

Both ubuntu and Debian are now shipping a threaded version of TCL, unfortunately this mean eggdrop doesn't work, as for some reason it fails to detect properly if tcl is compiled as threaded.

It appears to start, but won't connect to a server properly, and won't allow you to telnet to it either.

Appears the easiest solution (from http://eggwiki.org/Threaded_Tcl) is after running ./configure. edit config.h and find #undef HAVE_TCL_THREADS, and change it to #define HAVE_TCL_THREADS 1

If you have allready compiled the eggdrop once, run make clean to clean out the compiled stuff, and then compile as normal (make && make install), and that should fix it, at least it has for me!

Not sure if/when the configure script is going to be fixed tho.

Keith

If you've ever wanted to clear the contents of a file quickly, without breaking anything hooked into a file (useful for large files), look no further than the truncate command provided by the coreutils package.
Instantly Shrinks the file to 0 bytes, and maintains anything associated with it.

Just be careful you don't accidently clear a file by accident, as theres no way to reverse, and it doesn't prompt you to confirm your selection

Keith

OK, so for anyone who uses OSX , and admins Linux machines, this can be a real headache.

For some reason the default settings for your Home and End keys that come with Terminal.App for OSX don't do what you expect - theyre Actually Swapped with Shift Home , and Shift End, but thats not all, as the escape sequence for Shift Home for example, is set to "\033[H". This seems to work fine on OSX, but unfortunately you try logging into a Linux Box with that, and on the command line it works, but try loading vi and using the Home key - and you get nothing. The same applies to the End key as well, OSX has it defined it as \033[F, however vim remotely does not like this either. (I Believe this applies to all termcap applications, allthough i can't be sure).

The Solution for both of these is to change the definitions of these keys, so theyre mapped as you expect, and get it to send the right escape sequence at the same time, I don't believe mapping OSX's [H and [F mappings in vim on the remote host, because well , when you admin 10 machines or more, it well doesn't make sense to put it mildly, so this is the only viable solution.

Before we can do this however we need to create a file, open up a Terminal window, and type the following: sudo nano /private/etc/inputrc, then enter your password (you need to be an admin user for this). Now paste in the following code: followed by Pressing CTRL and X, then typing y, and hitting enter.
(Note: If you don't want to do this change system wide, change the command to nano ~/.inputrc, and add export INPUTRC="~/.inputrc" to your .profile)

Now we've done that we shall deal with Home/End, hit CMD I in terminal, and click Settings, followed by double clicking whichever entry is selected. In the window that appears click on the "Keyboard" tab, and find the entry for Home, click on it , and click edit. Change the action to "send string to shell:", now in the box below that, hit the following keys: "[1~" ( as in the escape key, and without the quotes) and click OK. Now do the same for End, except you type "[4~" (without the quotes).
Next find Shift Home, and edit that to change its action to: "scroll to start of buffer" then do the same for Shift End, editing that and changing its action to: "scroll to end of buffer".

Right, now Restart Terminal.

Try your home and end keys, they should work, both on command line and inside vim. Both locally and remotely. If they don't try hitting CTRL V .. it should reply with ^[[1~ .. and CTRL V should reply with ^[[4~. If it doesn't, you've gone wrong somewhere!.

Comments welcome.

Keith

OK, so this is just a heads up for anyone who knows me, due in part to my poor health these days i've withdrew from a few projects i was participating on.

Unfortunately this seems the only way I can maintain working on other things.

Apologies to anyone who may have been waiting for me to develop something, and I have not provided. I also apologise for my lack of activity, unfortunately at the moment it cant be helped.

Just so people are aware, I have also chosen to drop ircu (undernet-ircu) development, with the current release of ircux-2.10.11.08. Instead i'll be concentrating development efforts towards gnuworld, and creating a port of it that supports more than just postgresql, (Mysql Support is allready complete), and supports connecting to TS6 networks (namely inspircd). Along with modularising some of the features gnuworld provides, so further expansion will be possible.

As some of you are aware, I am the primary developer of the Netgamers Gallery, development on Version 2 of the site (The one Currently online) is limited to bug fixes only, and the receipt of feature requests is welcome for the next version (v3) , I hope to get this completed and released as soon as possible, but cannot give a release date due to my afformentioned health problems.

Planning on Marvin (A Modular IRC Bot in C++) is going well, the svn repo for it has been created, and initialised, and will have more information about its featureset soon.

Unfortunately these are the only projects I shall be maintaining for at least the near future. I may re-evaluate this over time however. If there is a project or problem you think i should be working on, and its not listed here, please drop me an email via archerATpriorityonlineDOTnet or keithATchaos-realmDOTnet.

Until Next Time!

Keith

OK , it seems some times when installing packages, the installation scripts get a bit confused, and can't seem to handle initscript errors.

This results in said package being half installed, but marked as failed, On occasion running apt-get -f install or dpkg --configure -a, once you have solved the problem will get things into working order again.

These commands don't allways work however, and your left with a package stuck like this:

user@server:~$ sudo dpkg -l lighttpd
iF lighttpd 1.4.25-2 A fast webserver with minimal memory footpri

(iF meaning installation Failed)

In order to resolve this, if it still refuses to install properly (even after fixing the problem that caused the error in the first place), it is neccessary to force remove the package (unfortunately dpkg --purge or --remove on its own will not work).
Typing the following (replacing lighttpd with your package name), should get the system back into working order again.


Then if you try running apt-get -f install, it should bring your system back into the correct state again.

There are other ways around this problem (I think manually installing the .dpkg archive via dpkg -i may work, but i havent tried it), but i think this is the easiest.

Anyways Tara for now!.

Keith