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Tuesday 21 February 2012

I think I broke Google

A tweet from @MarkMaceSmith asking :
 Why have you got hundreds of my images on your website Paul Regan?
Had me wondering what the hell !?

A quick look and he was right (kind of).. But not just his images, EVERYONES!

http://www.paulregan.co.uk/m/viewAlbum?uname=110372774069389594216&aid=5492124562868999953&start=0

Shows his gallery on my domain.  Note the the Picasa Mobile URL (/m/) which also gave me the answer.

I have masked the Picasa URL using an Apache rewriteRule on my site :
RewriteRule   ^m/(.*)   http://picasaweb.google.com/m/$1   [NC,P,L]
It appears the Google spiders came along and followed this all the way through Picasa's structure.  I don't know how deep but Google site:www.paulregan.co.uk/m/ currently returns >250K links and every one of them works!

I can probably fix this with robots.txt, but ..

  • Should I?  
  • Have I inadvertently discovered SEO gold? 
  • Will I be struck off and sent to web-master jail/gaol? (I probably should be)

#twitter

Monday 20 February 2012

Linux Clonezilla "Error: no argument specified"

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS cloned from an identical friend using Clonezilla.

When you boot theres a quick flash of an error, in this case SSD disks so too quick to read, and your presented with the GRUB menu.

Selecting the current kernel threw out :

Error: no argument specified
All the grub config files appeared correct.

Fix :

  1. apt-get remove grub-pc
  2. apt-get remove grub-common
  3. rm /boot/grub/grub.cfg
  4. apt-get install grub-common
  5. apt-get install grub-pc
    • Install grub to the disk to contain MBR, in my case /dev/sda / 


Wednesday 15 February 2012

Puppy Linux Full Install


  1. Download and create the Puppy linux LiveCD/LIveUSB
  2. Boot the PC using #1
  3. Follow the options to configure the screen res and then the locale options
  4. Prepare the disk, if you need.  Menu -> System -> GParted.  Delete/create the partitions as you need and restart the PC.  Don't save settings
  5. Install the files to disk.  Menu -> Setup -> Puppy universal installer. Follow the prompts to select your local disk.
  6. Install Grub. Menu -> System -> Grub legacy boot loader.  Follow the prompts and when asked select your local disk, eg /dev/sda1 and make sure you select destination to MBR.
Puppy Linux installed on 9 year old Sony Vaio.  I thank you.  

Wednesday 8 February 2012

Crowbar and OpenStack Pt Deux

As a follow up to part 1 which left me with an 'installed' environment but no networking I thought I should post a follow up.

Since I last messed around a new version of crowbar (1.2) had been released so that was used.  A nice addition is rather than research/guess the OpenStack barclamp install order they are now nicely arranged on the Crowbar admin panel.

I also came to the conclusion that my networking 'issues' were a result of both me trying to install on vSphere, which has no support for native VLAN's and by complicating things by trying to shoe horn the networking into my corp range.

So I build a little lab which consisted of anything not nailed to a desk, I could find lying around, or that no-body would notice missing.


Switch - vlans created with SVI ports as needed for default gateways and all ports 802.1q to the nodes.

Crowbar install went fine using Pt1 to fill in the missing details.

The Swift install failed until I added some more storage (those cutting edge USB disks on top) and restarted the Crowbar install from scratch.

My first attempt at building a instance failed.  The instance remained in status of 'building'.

To debug

Use the Nova console to check which node the image has been deployed to and then grep the local /var/log/nova/nova-compute.log for ERROR.

2012-01-13 02:52:59,933 ERROR nova.compute.manager [-] Instance '5' failed to spawn. Is virtualization enabled in the BIOS? Details: internal error no supported architecture for os type 'hvm'

This is a result of the crappy hardware I'm using so I changed the nova barclamp to 'qemu' and bingo,   deployed instance - well, sometimes.  It seems pretty hit and miss, which I can't yet trace.  I suspect I could still be suffering from the Heath Robinson lab I've put together.  Pt.3 :)


Some useful bits I picked up and am keeping here for the moment

nova uid and password : admin / crowbar

Deployed nova/images instance path - on nodes :
  /var/lib/libvirt

sudo nova-manage service list

mysql -u<user> -p<password>

Log entries of instance deploy and destroy.

2012-01-13 09:02:57,736 INFO nova.virt.libvirt_conn [-] instance instance-00000007: deleting instance files /var/lib/nova/instances/instance-00000007

2012-01-13 09:02:58,462 INFO nova.virt.libvirt_conn [-] Instance instance-00000007 destroyed successfully.

2012-01-13 09:07:29,306 INFO nova.virt.libvirt_conn [-] Instance instance-00000009 spawned successfully.

Monday 6 February 2012

Windows Killed my MBR

Having recently acquired a SSD and some more geebees I re-installed Ubuntu x64.  The SSD already had a OEM Windows partition and I (foolishly) decided to just resize it 50/50 and put Linux on the back end.  With a mind to come back and build the Windows OS as a dual boot.

Well this morning I went back, built the Windows OS and then fried my GRUB boot loader.  Bye bye Ubuntu, insert sad face.

Recovering it wasn't so bad although as usual there is LOTS of conflicting documents and ways to get yourself out of this mess.  This method worked for me :
  • Boot Ubuntu DVD in live mode.
  • Jump into a terminal and switch to sudo -i and run parted -l to establish which partition you need to rebuild the MBR for.
~$ parted -l
Model: ATA SAMSUNG SSD PM83 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 128GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Number  Start   End     Size    Type      File system     Flags
 1      1049kB  106MB   105MB   primary   ntfs            boot
 2      106MB   45.1GB  45.0GB  primary   ntfs
 3      45.1GB  128GB   82.9GB  extended
 5      45.1GB  120GB   74.4GB  logical   ext4  <---- Ubuntu Install
 6      120GB   128GB   8453MB  logical   linux-swap(v1)

  • mount the partition 
mount /dev/<partition> /destination
eg : mount /dev/sda5 /media/sda5

  • run 
grub-install --root-directory=<mount> <disk>
eg : grub-install --root-directory=/media/sda5 /dev/sda 
Assuming you get a success message your good to go.  Reboot and you should have Linux back and in my case Windows 7 also now existed on the GRUB loader.

Caveat : The first time I tried to boot Windows it complained of a missing loaded.  The second time it worked fine .. I never got to the bottom of that.

Moral of this story is install Windows first and Ubuntu second.  Ubuntu is a clever OS and Windows is not.