I have a wish for a new feature that I didn’t know I wanted until I moved to Oslo. I would like to set a different “Home” address for my car than my appartment. My home address is not the same address where I park my car. The entry to my parking garage is on a different street, and GMaps often chooses completely different routes around/through Oslo depending on which address I set as destination.

For instance, getting directions from Drammen to “Home”, then GMaps often routes me on to “Ring 3″ near Lysaker. But when choosing destination of my parking it mostly takes me through the tunnels under Oslo on the highway E18.

I guess this might be an edge-case feature for the few, but at least it would make my life a tiny bit simpler.

I tried to tune log levels and found some tools lacking, such as “flac” and “lame”, but none of them fixed my problem, and still no explanation in the log files.

But I found something in the logs that led me in the right direction:

[16-08-29 23:03:04.3358] Slim::Player::TranscodingHelper::enabledFormat (209) Checking to see if wav-flc-*-* is enabled
[16-08-29 23:03:04.3360] Slim::Player::TranscodingHelper::checkBin (250)    enabled
[16-08-29 23:03:04.3362] Slim::Player::TranscodingHelper::checkBin (252)   Found command: [flac] -cs --totally-silent --compression-level-0 $START$ $END$ -- $FILE$ | [sox] -q -t flac - -t flac -C 0 $RESAMPLE$ -
[16-08-29 23:03:04.3364] Slim::Player::TranscodingHelper::getConvertCommand2 (446) Matched: wav->flc via: [flac] -cs --totally-silent --compression-level-0 $START$ $END$ -- $FILE$ | [sox] -q -t flac - -t flac -C 0 $RESAMPLE$ -

I was missing the “sox” tool!
So, I installed “sox”, and now the media server is properly encoding WAV/PCM audio files to FLAC (or something).

The first time I entered BIOS I was presented with some debug configuration options, a DEBUG-section and other advanced features, but every time I enter the BIOS now I just get the standard options… I have absolutely NO IDEA WHAT-SO-EVER how I can get to those advanced options back!

Another thing, booting from a USB stick doesn’t seem to work, even after I disabled UEFI Secure Boot. Might be the form factor of the USB stick, which has a contact that is a bit thinner than normal contacts, but it works on other computers I have. End-of-rant.

To enable debug logging in RMI connectivity, which logs hostname and port number, set this system property:
sun.rmi.transport.proxy.logLevel=BRIEF

Can also be set runtime with System.setProperty before RMI connections are made.

Log output are printed to console, such as:

Feb 19, 2015 1:03:28 PM sun.rmi.transport.proxy.RMIMasterSocketFactory createSocket
FINE: main: host: localhost, port: 1098
Feb 19, 2015 1:03:28 PM sun.rmi.transport.proxy.RMIMasterSocketFactory createSocket
FINE: main: host: localhost, port: 4444

This will output something like this:

Source IP             Destination IP         ST   PR   #pkts    #bytes       ttl
10.1.1.100,1052       199.47.216.148,80     4/4  tcp   37860   6446150 119:59:07
10.1.1.100,17500      255.255.255.255,17500 0/0  udp   11681   1740469      1:55
10.1.1.100,17500      10.1.1.255,17500      0/0  udp   11681   1740469      1:55

netstat -ano | findstr “:xxxx”

This outputs something like this:

Aktive tilkoblinger

  Prot. Lokal adresse          Ekstern adresse          Tilstand           PID
  TCP    0.0.0.0:135            0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       1232
  TCP    0.0.0.0:445            0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       4
  TCP    0.0.0.0:17500          0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       3500
  TCP    10.1.1.100:139         0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       4
  TCP    10.1.1.100:1051        10.1.1.1:443           CLOSE_WAIT      3500
  TCP    10.1.1.189:1052        199.47.216.148:80      ESTABLISHED     3500

In the right column you’ll find the PID of the process using the socket. Open task manager, make sure the PID column is visible (might need to add it to the view, then look around in the drop down menus).

Windows Task Manager shows process PID of Dropbox

Source: http://www.windowsnetworking.com/kbase/WindowsTips/WindowsServer2008/AdminTips/Network/DeterminingwhatserviceorapplicationownsaTCPport.html

The curiosity in me wanted to check out GSSAPI for authentication, but the IMAP server replied with SASL(-4): no mechanism available: no worthy mechs found.

Of course, I need the krb5-user package and run the kinit command to retrieve a valid Kerberos session ticket. What wasn’t so obvious was the need for the package libsasl2-modules-gssapi-mit. Voila! Got me some emails

At night this tool makes the screen a bit warmer, so your eyes wont “hurt” so much of the otherwise so bright display of your desktop background, browser or editor.

You provide the tool with your approximately geo coordinates and some value for upper and lower limit of color temperature, then it will automatically and continuously change color temperature all through day and night.

Example command for running this tool, if your’re in Norway:

$ redshift -l 60.0:10.0 -t 5700:3600 -g 0.8 -m vidmode -v

Jul  1 23:11:56 lance imapd: LOGIN, user=knut-olav@hoven.ws, ip=[::ffff:AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD], port=[48700], protocol=IMAP
Jul  1 23:11:56 lance imapd: knut-olav@hoven.ws: Permission denied

The solution was pretty simple.

The /tmp folder had bad permissions. This server was only meant for hosting email services, so bad permissions on /tmp folder was actually not an issue earlier.

I guess the wrong permissions were caused by my custom XEN node setup using multiple partitions, including a partition just for /tmp.

Debugging was quite hard

Authentication was successful, as I got a different error message when authenticating with a known bad password.

I debugged it using strace. It wasn’t easy, as courier imap forks out child processes for each connection, which I had to strace as well.

# strace /usr/sbin/couriertcpd -address=0 -maxprocs=40 -maxperip=20 -nodnslookup -noidentlookup 143 /usr/lib/courier/courier/imaplogin /usr/bin/imapd Maildir

Connect to port 143 using telnet.
Log in using this command:

i login MY_EMAIL_USERNAME MY_PASSWORD

Then find the imap process PID. Look for a process running as user vmail:

$ ps axuw|grep imapd
#...
vmail      362  0.0  1.0   4616  1344 ?        S    01:46   0:00 /usr/bin/imapd /var/spool/mail/vmail/hoven.ws/knut-olav/Maildir/
#...

In this case, the PID is 362. Then attach strace to it using strace -p 362, as sudo.

From the telnet interface, I entered a couple of commands like these:

2 select "INBOX"
5 UID fetch 1:10 (UID RFC822.SIZE FLAGS BODY.PEEK[HEADER.FIELDS (From To Cc Bcc Subject Date Message-ID Priority X-Priority References Newsgroups In-Reply-To Content-Type)])

Then I found this somewhere down into the strace output:

open("/tmp/tmpfWsezjv", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL, 0600) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
write(2, "ERR: knut-olav@hoven.ws: Permiss"..., 43) = 43

Fixing the problem
chmod 1777 /tmp

As I wrote earier… a simple solution.

But there is another great application launcher for KDE, called Krunner. The shortcut is ALT+F2, and the functionality is mostly the same. I don’t miss Katapult anymore.