Ubuntu open files limit

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Aug 262015
 

With ulimit -n you can see what the maximum number of open files can be. As superuser you can change that -per session- with the ulimit command, but an ordinary user can not do that. Therefore, you need to change the /etc/security/limits.conf file. For instance:

* soft nofile 10000
* hard nofile 10000

Meaning that the hard and soft limit are now increased to 10000. I didn’t know that this does not change the limits for the superuser. The asterisk (*) is not intended to change superuser limits. Instead, repeat both lines, changing the asterisk to the word root. You might need a reboot for that, but that’s all.

I needed this for Neo4j and was surprised to see that normal users could have more open files than the superuser. No more, I say, no more!

index.php fixed

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Jan 032015
 

I never noticed that my index.php when browsing to the domain-root (so www.switchbl8.nl) did not work and gave an error 403.

It took some puzzling and because all other stuff worked I knew it must have been since the transition to fcgid (instead of mod_php). I recalled blogging about it, checked my configs for errors, and found one (no plus signs in the options section).

Now it works. It’s not a special page, but it annoyed me that it didn’t work.

Next puzzle.

I screwed up /etc/sudoers

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Nov 092014
 

I edited /etc/sudoers without visudo, and made a mistake. That will prevent you from successfully using sudo again. No real harm done, but it takes rebooting to get it fixed.

1) reboot in recovery mode (press escape when booting so the grub options are shown)
2) drop to a root shell (option in the recovery menu)
3) mount -o rw,remount /
4) visudo (emacs based editor)
5) reboot the system

You should be up and running again!

Plex (Media Server)

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Aug 082013
 

Experimenting with Spotify, throw (Sony), DLNA, uPnP and knowing that my Squeezebox server is something that will obsolete in a while, I found something that might just be right. Of course it does not have the nice hardware like the Squeezebox itself, but I get some stuff in return.

I found Plex. It is a mediaserver that you run on a computer in your home. It indexes your music, your movies, and your pictures. And with the Plex clients, you can browse and even play that content. DLNA browsing is not so surprising, but DLNA by itself does not help if the browser/client does not know how to handle a specific filetype. My phone does not know how to handle a movie in MKV format. It does not recognize my camera’s RAW format. Plex does. And it does it well.

The client app on my phone was not free, it was € 3.71 or something like US$ 5.

When connected to WiFi on my local LAN, I can play content (movies will be the main bottleneck) in any quality, even 20Mbps in 1080p is no problem. But you don’t always have your own WiFi at your disposal, that’s why you can connect your server to myPlex. On the server you enter the myPlex account information, and you enter the same credentials in the Android app. This is how they find each other, much like the Squeezebox has.
Now I can still see everything on my server, and from within the client I can choose the quality I want the data to be streamed to me. If you’re on a tight data-subscription, you can turn the quality down, but when that is of no concern you can turn it up as much as you like (or as much as your provider lets you).

Just tested all this, and tonight in the restaurant I could show a movie in full HD with subtitles. Over just 3G. Don’t worry, it was just a test, we had a lovely dinner with no movies 😉

GeoServer on Linux to serve SQLServer data

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Aug 022013
 

I never knew that there was Linux support for SQLServer, but it turns out that there is a JDBC 4.0 driver for it that can be used in GeoServer.

From the download, put sqljdbc4.jar in the tomcat/lib directory if you only want JNDI connections, or in the GEOSERVER/WEB-INF/lib directory if you want connections that can be defined in GeoServer as well.
Download the sqlserver plugin for GeoServer, and put the jar file (in my case gt-jdbc-sqlserver-9.3.jar) into the GEOSERVER/WEB-INF/lib directory.

Now restart Tomcat (or just the GeoServer webapp if you don’t want JNDI connections). Now create a new store. Be sure to open up port 1433 on your Windows firewall, or otherwise GeoServer can’t reach it.

Mail

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Jul 212012
 

My mail is now running on the server again, not the Synology. The Synology does a good job, but the spamfilters are not what I like them to be. It marks mail as spam by adding “**SPAM**” to the subject line and listing how much spampoints the message got. Not what I want. I want an unaltered mailmessage in my spambox, or no message at all. I used to have that with Postfix/Postgrey/Amavis/Spamassassin.

 

I installed iRedMail, basically an installer layer over the standard Linux mailcomponents. Installing is done in about 2 minutes, switching of greylisting took me more time to figure out how…. Thanks people, for such a great product.

Bye Linux, hello Windows

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Jun 182012
 

On a side note, my desktop PC no longer runs Linux (OpenSuSE). I’ve had it with it. There’s always something that doesn’t work. Or that keeps crashing. Or that suddenly stops working until a reboot. Sound support sucks. After every kernel update I had to do a manual install of the NVidia drivers to get X running. Always waiting for the X64 versions, since the Linux community still thinks we all run 32-bit computers (same on Windows, but at least that let’s me run 32-bit programs without problems).

I bought a new videocard (a Sapphire HD7970 to be exact), bought an SSD (OCZ Vertex4 128GB) and switched to Windows 7. Everything works. Period. And I can now use Adobe software, so I bought Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to finally being able to organize my pictures (lastest count: over 26000) the way I like it (F-spot and Picasa are nice, but not more than that).

Main reason for the videocard was gaming of course. Racing in the first place, FPS as a close second. Bought Deus Ex Human Revolution (FPS-ish) today, more to follow.

OpenSUSE 12.1

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Mar 162012
 

Yesterday I upgraded from 11.4 to OpenSUSE 12.1. I’m not fond of the new Gnome interface, but everything works, so I’ll get used to it. What didn’t work (in one go) was the squeezeboxserver. I had to:

ln -s /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/Slim/ /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.14.2/Slim

as found on this page.

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