pwrusr.com

Yesterday and Today I had a complex and clever Document and Business Process Management course, so I woke up early in the morning and drove 100Km away (totally I drove 400+ Km in two days for this course).

Yesterday, other than the full session-day, I returned home at about 10:00pm, hungry, tired, and, despite that, still able to update my site and then put my head on the pillow around midnight (just for the case, my new site is amitex.it - web and open source services and solutions!). Too bad that the combination of my recurring insomnia and the preparations for the day after, kept my head buzzing and running, and so, I started thinking if everything was perfect-ready for the day after, namely today, so, at about 1.00am I came at the conclusion that not everything was fine: my laptop missed an XP VM for the demo (my laptop seems to reserve a special place for Ubuntu and the course was about a native Windows Software). I then jumped down from my bed and powered my laptop up in the middle of the night, I wgetted the Sun xVM Virtualbox bins from their site and installed it; at the same time, I scp-ed my 12Gb, devxpvm1 from my Ubuntu server, through my crappy-limited 100Mbps lan, to my laptop.

The connection was damn slow (scp said something about 24 minutes), it was 1 and something am in the morning and I had pointed my alarm clock to 5.45am. WTF?!

Well, if I would’ve been lame enough, I would’ve taken the course without laptop (and related jerk expression…). Hopefully, this wasn’t my case, since the at command came in my help!

The at shell command, for me, is a recent re-discovery (I surely used it in the past). It allows you to temporarily schedule an imminent task to run once and only. Next reboot, no trace of previously scheduled tasks. Too bad I wasn’t remembering the right at syntax, so I launched it and lamely typed on its prompt what I wanted the laptop to do (well, I just wanted for it to shut down automatically after a safe time slice, in such a way for it to complete the scp transfer).

Basically, I launched:

sudo at 2.30 (+ root password).

at>halt
at>stop (noob…)
at>quit  (lame…)
at>exit (downgraded-pwrusr-jerk)

…and nothing happened…I wasn’t remembering how to confirm my scheduled task! (FYI, I just wanted for it to shut-the-f#-down…err, to halt). So I opened the man page, but nothing (maybe I eventually was too tired to "RTFM" AND "connect-and-understand™").

A fast, random (and nervous), google search, pointed me to an unexpected IBM doc, alleging somewhere that CTRL+D was the right key combo. I said nervous, because at bash linux terminal command ain’t easy search!

So, essentially, I found CTRL+D was the key-trick…I pushed down the combination, but nothing happened; I then tried the CTRL+SHIFT+D combo, and it happily worked :)

Then I went to sleep, and finally slept. In the early morning, I found my laptop correctly halted: too bad today my laptop was just a dead-heavy 17" luggage: the demo went through the projector! (and not inside course-takers’  laptops).

Arghh…but let’s look at its bright side: I re-learned a way old (and pretty useful) command (and hopefully you too!).

Thanks to the community effort, debian 5 was finally born.

This is a stable release, code name "lenny", continuing the debian toy story naming tradition.

With this release, there are a lot of changes, well, not the kind of changes you would expect from a modern .6 Ubuntu desktop refresh, because one of the developer’s aim is the combination of hardware and software stability (and so in fact the debian developers deliberately pick packages one by one and test them a lot, before releasing to the public), but it is, by the way, a message about "we are confident on those packages and we can build up on those".

Before this release, lenny was referred to as "testing" on the debian repository, now it has become "stable".

Debian is useful for System integrators, System Administrators and others interested on building something on top of it (generally servers), since the distribution is very prone to customization, it’s normal to see packages like kernel 2.6.26, X.Org 7.3, K (KDE) 3.5.10, GNOME 2.22.2 etc.

Don’t look at them like old packages, those packages are really and thorougly tested and debugged. If you really need a linux-based, fully featured desktop distribution, get Ubuntu instead: it is built around debian and the next minor update is going to offer some intersting new features and improvements; you may also wish to try debian squeeze (if you are a debugger/developer) or sid (if you are seriously confident with linux); you can do so just by editing /etc/apt/sources.list and changing all the "stable" keywords instances to "testing" for squeeze or "unstable" for sid (this is the edge of the edge of the new stuff, but dependencies sometime happen to break).

I suggest you to try debian64 for server-like production tasks and experiments; download debian from torrent sites to relieve some traffic from official servers and remember that, if you can spare some bucks, support the debian community by donating (especially if you make money on top of it).

Welcome debian stable!

Recently I encountered a whole load of problems related to Joomla and my new business open source web site.

Here I’m gonna post some general info and experiences, useful to troubleshoot possible joomla problems, especially related to when you’re unable to login to the administrator backend (I know how it feels, just free your mind: computers are numbers and circuits).

What I am sharing here is my reaction to frustration, with suggestions and feedback received from the official joomla! forum and the official joomla! italian community (thanks – you know who you are).

please check here: http://forum.joomla.it/index.php/topic,56790.0.html and

and here: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=431&t=262426

The first thing I feel to suggest you is to check configuration.php and .htaccess files on you site’s root.

It’s important for configuration.php not to contain any blank lines; also, check this file in respect to the Linux/UNIX text file conventions. On Windows, text file lines’ are terminated with a CRLF, on Linux/UNIX instead, the lines of a text file are terminated with just a LF (for a tutorial on what that means, check here: http://usertools.plus.net/tutorials/id/22).

The .htaccess (on the contrary of configuration.php), may contain blank lines, just make sure that, if any, they respect the ‘foretold Linux/UNIX text file conventions (lines have to be ended by LFs); also, check and make sure the rules are correct and there are no hidden CRLF after the rules declarations (in case of doubt, restore the original htaccess.txt from an untouched joomla! build).

From my experience, those checks helped me solve my admin loop, cannot login problems; an obvious way to avoid this kind of problems is to become a power user on the Linux side (aka pwrusr), but that’s a personal choice! If working directly on your joomla! site with, say, Ubuntu, these problems would’nt have ever happened to any of us (I admit it: I was jerking on my site with my powerful Vista64 gaming rig).

Another useful thing to check for, is to make sure you have the right PHP version: make sure your host is serving you with PHP 5 (since joomla was made with it). How to discover if you have PHP5 if you can’t access the admin backend? Well, upload on your site’s root the uncompressed file JTSPOST (here: http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/jts/frs/), and open the address corresponding to the copied file’s name. Once you open it up, it’s gonna give you some useful info about joomla! and your server, included what php version you have.
Please remeber that if you happen to fix your problem, then remove JTSPOST from your server’s root, because if you forgive it there, you may leave a possible information security hole.

OK, so, going on, as I said, I checked the joomla! official forums, and referred to them for other possible problems and related suggestions, wich I will report here for the sake of completeness (note that I edited some parts for some added clarity):

Suggestion n.1)

1. edited the file administrator/components/com_login/admin.login.php to comment out line 69 (//LoginController::display() )
2. browsed to the login page.
3. [tried to login] and got an ‘Invalid token‘ message.
4. Reedited the [administrator/components/com_login/]admin.login.php file to remove my comment at line 69.
5. Refreshed the login page in my browser and got the normal login form.
6. Logged in [successfully].

 try this and if it doesn’t work, then:

Suggestion n.2) [user inoxfire]

1. edit file administrator/components/com_login/admin.login.php [to comment out line 57, // JRequest::checkToken('request') or jexit( 'Invalid Token' );]
2. browsed to the login page.
3. [tried to login] and got an ‘Invalid token‘ message.
4. Reedited the [administrator/components/com_login/]admin.login.php file to remove my comment at line 57.
5. Refreshed the login page in my browser and got the normal login form.

 try this and if it doesn’t work, then:

Suggestion n.3)

1. Log into phpMyAdmin and navigate to the jos_plugins table.
2. Look for the "User – Joomla!".
3. Ensure that it is published as mine was not (set published to 1 just in case).
4. [Look for] in row "Authentication – Joomla"
5. Ensure that it is published as mine was not (set published to 1 just in case).

 try this and if it doesn’t work, then:

1. first check your Super Admin status:
   [Open PHPmyAdmin] in the "jos_users" table set SuperAdmin to:
   – field "id" – value "62"
   – field "gid" – value "25" or "26".
2. in the "jos_core_acl_aro" table find row for "62":
   – field "id" – write this down (should be 10 normally) – this is the "aro_id".
3. in the "jos_core_acl_groups_aro_map" table find row for "aro_id" = 10
   – "group_id" should be "25" or "26".

BONUS:

If, for some reasons, you need to reset your joomla! admin password, or if you need to offer admin access to somebody else, or for whatever the reason, please change it by doing so:

1. Open PHPmyAdmin.
2. access your joomla DB and goto table jos_users.
3. modify "admin"-row and set it’s password code to this: 21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3 (it’s the equivalent of ‘admin‘).

(for more info and explanations, check this post over here: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=10985).

Hope this info is useful for everyone, and wish you all have a good time.