03.06.08

Random blank/black X sessions with GDM on a Dell GX280 running CentOS 5

Posted in Applications at 6:15 am by jgraham

While upgrading a lab of Dell GX280 systems to CentOS 5 today I ran into a bit of a snag. Seemingly at random when the system initially started or returned to the GDM login screen the user would get a black screen. The system still responded on the network, could be switched to VTs and the GDM screen would correctly display after a few gdm-restart commands. I found this bug report but no solution. I did notice that when the screen was blank if the mouse was moved up, till it the cursor (were it visible) would hit the top of the screen, the GDM screen would pop up and function normally.

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11.20.07

Patching neon on OS X 10.5 for GSSAPI authenticated SubVersion

Posted in Applications at 12:46 am by jgraham

Today I was attempting to configure Apache (2.2) to control access to my SubVersion repositories using mod_auth_kerb and I hit a snag when attempting to access repositories from Leopard clients.

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11.15.07

SSL Connections in Ruby with ruby-postgres

Posted in Programming at 5:40 am by jgraham

Not much here, just a quick note about getting SSL connections to PostgreSQL in Ruby. According to the ruby-postgres documentation arbitrary libpg options can be passed to the PGconn.open() call. Calling PGconn.open like this:

conn = PGconn.open( 'host'    => 'host.domain.com',
                    'options' => 'sslmode=require' )

results in PGError: FATAL: invalid command-line arguments for server process. After digging at some forums and the ruby-postgres source code I found that one needs to prepend the options string with -o, so a working example is:

conn = PGconn.open( 'host'    => 'host.domain.com',
                    'options' => '-o sslmode=require' )

10.14.07

Quicken 2006 and .Mac Backup

Posted in Applications at 8:16 am by jgraham

Recently I started getting errors from Quicken 2006 (15.0.5 – R6) when it attempted to backup data to my .Mac account.  The backup process would launch and then error at Making a copy of the data file and give the following error:

Quicken cannot create a copy of your file to upload to .Mac

Check to make sure you have sufficient free space on your hard drive and that you have permission to read and write files. Please try again later.

(014)

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10.13.07

SSL Certificates with DNS Aliases

Posted in Servers at 8:33 am by jgraham

At work I have several systems that provide SSL encrypted services but respond to multiple host-names. For instance an LDAP server may be named server1.example.com but have DNS aliases of ldap-1.example.com and directory.example.com. If a client system connects to ldap-1.example.com and the server returns an SSL certificate with a common name of server1.example.com ugliness will ensue.

To get around this problem one can install SSL certificates that employ the subjectAltName extension.

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