error - Binary Sludge

error

A collection of 11 posts

The network is reliable

A fascinating post-mortem on high profile network failures: This post is meant as a reference point–to illustrate that, according to a wide range of accounts, partitions occur in many real-world environments. Processes, servers, NICs, switches, local and wide area networks can all fail, and the resulting economic

BASH variable scope

As outrageously counter-intuitive as it may first appear, it is still possible to be hit by a scope bug in BASH when commands are executed in a subshell. I was running through The Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide's "Complex Functions and Function Complexities" (a long but

Fix postfix "fatal: open database /etc/aliases.db: No such file or directory" error

As there was no email coming from a VM, I checked /var/log/maillog: Jun 25 10:59:13 localhost postfix/local[20793]: fatal: open database /etc/aliases.db: No such file or directory As the missing file is some form of (Berkley?) DB, a simple touch doesn't

Realign columns on AWS Dashboard (EC2, RDS, S3, CloudFront)

It can be infuriating when resizing a window, to have Amazon's AWS Dashboard minimise all columns. To restore them back to their sensible layout: * Click Show/Hide * Toggle any column * Click Apply * The columns will have reordered (and you can now un-toggle the added column)

PhpStorm remote debugging Node.js on a foreign host (JetBrains, Webstorm, RubyMine)

node-inspector is the de-facto standard Node.js debugger, but runs in another browser window. For those that like their IDEs fully integrated, PhpStorm should support remote debugging functionality for Node.js but is currently buggy - it will only connect to servers on the same host. The bug is

How To Force Refresh Google Calendar

Google Calendar caches remote calendar URLs for some time - not helpful if you want to verify a change. This can be circumvented by altering the URL while requesting the same content. Adding a query parameter (or attempting to add another one) will cause Google to treat the calendar as a

PuTTY Connection Manager - Website Down

SSH connections on Windows are best managed through PuTTY, although the client only allows one connection per window. For marshalling many PuTTY instances, PuTTY Connection Manager is my preferred option (other window managers are available, including superputty). Unfortunately the URL of the PuTTY Connection Manager website is returning 403 Forbidden,

Running ntp/ntpd on a development Virtual Machine (VM)

Keeping the system clock on the right time is troublesome for a virtual machine if VM guest tools are not available to synchronise clocks. As the guest OS does not have access to the hardware clock it relies on software to tick over its own clock, and inaccuracies generally lead

Fix Kindle Not Syncing Across Multiple Devices By Correcting Filesystem Errors (Whispernet, Whispersync)

A Kindle will sync your progress through a book when it's powered down (presumably only if it has sufficient battery to connect to a mobile or Wi-Fi network). This allows another device (another Kindle or the software on a mobile device or PC) to download that location

YouTube's "500 Internal Server Error" Page

I received an HTTP 500 response from YouTube today after submitting a search for Shlomo (an excellent beatboxer and human voice percussionist) and received the cryptic error mesage below. It looks like potentially sensitive debug data have been serialised and encrypted into the error page, but it's not

MySQL ERROR 1137 (HY000): Can't reopen table: 'tmp_journals'

When setting up a query using a temporary lookup table, I got this error: ERROR 1137 (HY000): Can't reopen table: 'tmp_journals' It transpires that since 4.1 the way MySQL handles temporary tables has changed. This affects joins, unions and subqueries. There is an obvious