Aigarius Blog (Posts about bugs)

Ubuntu 10.04 and NTFS filesystems

Aigars Mahinovs — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 15:03:03 GMT

subj. don't mix - just upgraded a simple Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04 and it failed to boot. After careful examination, it looks that something replaced the munt line of my NTFS partition in the /etc/fstab and claimed that it is a VFAT partition and 'mountall' that is run during boot gets very, very confused if presented with such dillema, so mach in fact that it hangs and stops the whole boot sequence.

The workaround is to boot from a livecd/usb and comment out all NTFS and VFAT lines in /etc/fstab. If that still does not help - replace the large UUIDs with device names back.

Still have not reported the bug as there look to be several - regression in NTFS support, the upgrader corrupting the fstab file and mountall incorrectly handling a case of an unmountable file system.

P.S. Also my Firefox would not start - that was solved by removing the sessionstore* files in my profile.

Gnome typing break has no way to lock the screen

Aigars Mahinovs — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:11:18 GMT

Want a definition of a paper cut bug? Here it is. And here and here are two more side effects of the same bug. The original bug report will be 6 years old in a month. Can we do something to prevent this bug surviving that long?

My first post with Google Wave pops up for people

Aigars Mahinovs — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:10:38 GMT

Some time ago I wrote a test post with a Google Wave embedded into the post. Only a couple days ago I discovered that to make a Wave public one needs to add public@a.gwave.com as a participant to the wave. I did that and the Wave became visible also to people without Wave accounts. But another fun thing happened at the same time - multiple people reported that this Wave popped up directly in their Google Wave Inbox. But in this case I suspect that when people saw the Wave (even in it's disabled form) either on my blog or on the Planet Debian, Google stored that info somewhere and when they logged in their new Google Wave accounts it added that wave to their Inbox, but the wave did not show up in their Inbox until I made it public a couple days ago. And thus there was a disconnect between action (people viewing my blog post) and reaction (Wave showing up in their Inbox) that will confuse a lot of people.

The way to fix that would be to only add waves to your Inbox if you've commented on them (or added to them) which would not be possible for private waves.

Re: HOWTO prep for migration off of SHA-1 in OpenPGP

Aigars Mahinovs — Wed, 06 May 2009 11:05:45 GMT

Daniel says that we should move away from SHA1 by switching hash algorithms for signatures and generating keys that use at least SHA256 from SHA-2 family. I have been bitten by non-default GPG options before. So I propose that we do a security release of GPG that changes the defaults of key generation and key signing in such ways that SHA-1 algorithms are not used by default for any operation, unless a backwards compatibility option is used.

Annoyed with USA

Aigars Mahinovs — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 21:12:01 GMT

My girlfriend is annoyed with USA timekeeping. More particularly with the way Sunday is the first day of the week in the Gnome calendar applet that shows up when you click on the time applet. After some searching I am unable to find how to change that short of changing the source code.

Help me, lazyweb!

Edit: yes it was meant to be Sunday and not Saturday.

Bug hugging?

Aigars Mahinovs — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 20:09:07 GMT

Hmm, I wonder if in the bug squashing parties one can eliminate bugs by hard random hugging?

Why? Oh Gods! Why?

Aigars Mahinovs — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 03:08:21 GMT

$ mv .ssh/ .ssh.old/ $ python >>>import gnomevfs >>> gnomevfs.get_file_info( "ssh://aigarius:password@aigarius.com/home/aigarius" ) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in ? gnomevfs.AccessDeniedError: Access denied >>> $ ssh aigarius.com The authenticity of host 'aigarius.com (85.254.216.40)' can't be established. RSA key fingerprint is 6d:29:c0:f3:d0:84:c9:a9:d9:4c:7e:e3:1a:18:a2:e2. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes Warning: Permanently added 'aigarius.com,85.254.216.40' (RSA) to the list of known hosts. aigarius@aigarius.com's password: ******* [...] aigarius.com$ exit $ python >>>import gnomevfs >>> gnomevfs.get_file_info( "ssh://aigarius:password@aigarius.com/home/aigarius" ) <gnomevfs .FileInfo 'aigarius'> >>>

Of course, this is mentioned nowhere in the sparse documentation. Please keep me away from the person who wrote GnomeVFS and its Python bindings. Bloodshed might ensue. Bug reported

Why can't someone write a nice, light, working network file transfer protocol abstraction library that would be independent of any desktop environment (bonus) and a working X server (I am looking at you, GnomeVFS). Something that would simply provided all file and folder manipulation operations in sync and async ways in such way that those operations work completely uniformly across all supported protocols. Support for at least ssh and ftp is essential, webdav, nfs, rsync and other protocols that allow writing files to remote locations and http, https and other protocols that only allow read only access to remote files would be very welcome. The library should be in C with bindings in C++, Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP and also a command line processor that would allow all commands to be used in a shell script.
Why something like this can not be written and obsolete the GnomeVFS and those KIOslaves. Freedesktop.org, I am looking at you, please!

Update: Apparently I only need to "import gnome.ui" and execute "gnome.ui.authentication_manager_init()" and my application will automagically get a proper authentication dialog in this case. Unfortunately it is not documented anywhere that I could find. :P

Crontab EOF

Aigars Mahinovs — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 18:03:58 GMT

If one of your crontab entries is not running lately without any errors, check if you have a newline at the end of the crontab, because if you do not, then the last job will never be executed and no error will be reported anywhere: 79037 (and possibly cause of 260789)

Oh and it will also not run /etc/cron.d/ file with a "." in the name: 324922

I managed to hit both of these bugs within a single day, yay me :P