Monthly Archives: May 2013

CentOS 6.4 Installation failed due to ACPI errors

I got the latest CentOS (6.4) iso to install on my Toshiba Satellite laptop. It’s a few years old, but still works great, and I found myself hardly ever using the Windows 7 install. Unfortunately I ran into a bunch of AE_NOT_FOUND and ACPI errors, always causing a kernel panic. I tried a few different versions, including 6.2 and 6.1 that I already had with the same results. Oddly enough, I downloaded and successfully installed Ubuntu 13.04 64bit, but not wanting that to be my distro, I tried again, this time hitting [tab] at the install menu, and adding “acpi=off” at the boot line, and viola, that did the trick. For some reason the acpi driver is causing a system panic. Once the OS is installed and configured I’ll see if I can get it to turn back on. It can be very useful on a laptop.

Update: acpi=off worked for the CentOS installation, but once it was installed I could not boot. I was able to do this to turn acpi back on (otherwise it can cause your fan to stop working, causing a hang due to overheating):

acpi=enable pci=assign-busse acpi=ht

This successfully allowed my system to boot. Once it is completely booted, I will need to update my grub conf to ensure the settings are persistent.

Clearing /tmp and /var/tmp with find in cron.daily

Moving from Solaris to Linux has been enriching, but not without subtle differences. One of many was the need for older SLES servers to clear out /tmp and /var/tmp. I started with the standard Solaris cron jobs:

/usr/bin/find /tmp/* -mount -depth -mtime +30 -a -exec rm -rf {} \; > /dev/null 2>&1
/usr/bin/find /var/tmp/* -mount -depth -mtime +30 -a -exec rm -rf {} \; > /dev/null 2>&1

In spite of how active some of these servers are, if /tmp or /var/tmp are empty, the above commands return a value of 1 instead of 0, thus resulting in a nice email that cron failed. Removing the asterisk was an easy way to fix this, however that posed the problem of deleting /tmp or /var/tmp itself if there was no activity on the server for 30 days. Unlikely, but possible. Rather than touching a file before the find commands (thus moving mtime to current), I opted to exclude directories and only remove files (adding the -type f option). Even though directories can still exist, they take up very little space and will likely get cleaned up on a reboot at some point. This was a happy medium. My script now looks like this:

/usr/bin/find /tmp/ -type f -mount -depth -mtime +30 -a -exec rm -rf {} \; > /dev/null 2>&1
/usr/bin/find /var/tmp/ -type f -mount -depth -mtime +30 -a -exec rm -rf {} \; > /dev/null 2>&1

Fixing a Permalink problem in WordPress

I wanted to post this because I saw quite a few people having the problem that I was having. I managed to find one thing that caused my problem, as opposed to disabling this plugin or that plugin, none of which I had installed.

The problem:
When changing the default permalink configuration from ?p=5 to /2013/05/my-cool-post, all of a sudden the links to both the posts themselves and to the comment buttons were giving 404 errors. After much searching.

Supporting Evidence:
Some people reported having multiple sites hosted in the same wordpress account or hosting account, but only having this problem with 1 site. This tells me that it is specific to the site, not the hosting provider, or even WordPress. That’s what led me to the solution.

The solution:
While perusing through the httpd.conf file on my system, I was looking at the following:

<Directory />
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes +ExecCGI
    AllowOverride None
</Directory>

Notice that “AllowOverride None” is set, which basically disables mod_rewrite (an apache module necessary for WordPress to be able to rewrite your urls — ie use Permalinks). I changed this to “All”, and restarted httpd, but still had the same issue.

Finally I went through and searched for “Directory”, and there are quite a few of them in there, but then I found another stanza:

<Directory "/var/www/html">

With quite a few comments inside of it. (That’s why I didn’t notice it the first time around.) Inside that Directory stanza, was this:

AllowOverride None

This one was overriding the “/” directive earlier, so as soon as I changed this from “None” to “All”, and restarted httpd, my links worked perfectly afterward.

I hope this helps you guys, it seems to be a chronic problem in WordPress.

Trying out new Linux distros

One of the last things I usually want to do is take something that works and put it at risk. That’s always how I feel when I’m upgrading any of my Linux systems at home, putting the whole thing at risk. The result: an installation of Ubuntu 10.10 that is no longer supported. Even the old-releases repos don’t have the updates that I want anymore. Nevertheless, I felt it was time for a change.

In the past, this would have meant either removing the drive and replacing it with another, or rolling the dice and just installing over top of my old OS, hoping that I copied all of those files I wanted.

Some time ago I started using Virtualbox, a free download from Oracle. For anyone who is not familiar with Virtualbox and the like, it’s a virtual platform for installing other operating systems.  You take a chunk of your host hard drive (the physical disk in your computer) and create a “virtual disk drive” that you can use as the boot disk for your virtual installation.

Aside from having a variety of operating systems at my fingertips with just one physical system, it also lets me “try before I buy” new distributions, and see how things look and feel before I commit to upgrading my existing Linux system. So far I couldn’t be more pleased, because some of them were discarded, and it’s as easy as right click/Remove, and viola, it’s gone.  You have the option of keeping the VDI (Virtual Disk Image) around, but if I’m trashing a virtual machine, I doubt I’d want the disk image again, so I always opt to save the space.

I just downloaded the newest Ubuntu, 13.04, so I can test it out before I commit…. I’m not a huge fan of Gnome 3, but I’m willing to try it for a while, since I mostly use CLI with screen.