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.

When adding Google Maps to your Android application, make sure that the <uses -library>-tag is inside the <application>-tag of the manifest XML. This might be obvious, but I got this wrong and it took me a long time to figure out the real reason for the error.


<uses -library android:name="com.google.android.maps" />


The quick fix might be to just install the package “ivtv-utils” and to reconfigure the video input/sources with mythtv-setup.

I also had a problem with disconnects and warnings of wrong protocol version. I cleaned out the database and deployed a new database with the sql file from /usr/share/mythtv/sql. That might be because of some badly configured IP-addresse for the backend and master, but I could actually not see why it changing from my LAN IP-address to 127.0.0.1 would have anything to do with it.

Anyway… Try installing ivtv-utils first. After installing that package the MPEG2 capture card selection becomes available. First I tried using the v4l option, but that didn’t work, not even any useful log messages to work with.

If you have been developing mobile applications for Android you have most likely seen some exceptions in the Eclipse debugger that you don’t understand, maybe not the tiniest bit. This mostly has to do with lack of experience with the API combined with the strict way that Android sets up views and restricts which threads that are allowed to draw and control the views, along with other concurrency issues.

Starting up your application in the emulated Android environment is not the fastest thing to do, so how can you debug your applications in a little more snappier way? – In short, I really don’t know.

What I want is a sane error message with a stack trace of my application code, but since I can’t get that, I have to debug my application in other ways.

Break points
By setting a breakpoint in your code on places where you think the bug might exist, you can step through your source code until the application fails.

The cons of this are that it is time consuming to do all the manual step by step operations, it’s a boring way of debugging and the exception message you get might not be understandable to you.

Logging
The Android API provides a Log class that can be used to log messages and exceptions. It took me some time to figure out how to read the log messages, but the Android Eclipse plugin provides a LogCat view.

To show the LogCat view in Eclipse, you go to “Window”, “Show View”, “Other …”, expand the “Android” category and then open the “LogCat” view.

Example output from the LogCat view.

01-09 16:56:52.069: ERROR/Listings(1064): Failed to get trip listings
01-09 16:56:52.069: ERROR/Listings(1064): java.lang.RuntimeException: Example of exception logging
01-09 16:56:52.069: ERROR/Listings(1064):     at no.ut.trip.Listings$ProgressThread.run(Listings.java:112)

The example above shows an error message on the first line, the exception class and message on the second line, with the stack trace on the following lines. Might be helpful.

For file transfer it uses File::RsyncP and for remote control it uses Net::SSH::Perl. Some times I get the error message Could not dupe: Bad file descriptor. Not a very informative error message, but I had an idea that it might have something to do with the file transfer. After I restart the application, running as a FastCGI web application, everything works, for a short while, then it breaks again.

I found out that it stops working right after I end my SSH connection, after debugging and restarting the application. After some research I found out it had something to do with the loss of STDIN. My best guess is that SSH needs STDIN to be able to read the password entered by the user, but I use keys for authentication, so I won’t need STDIN at all for interacting with SSH.

I tried different tactics to keep STDIN open. Running it using nohup did not help. Then I tried starting up the web application using screen, and now it still runs several hours after logging out from the server.

I don’t like this workaround very much. So if anyone has a better solution to this problem, I would love to hear about it.

A possible solution might be to redirect STDIN to a temporary file. Anyone had success doing this with Net::SSH::Perl or File::RsyncP?