Mind Circus

Our 64-bit 1and1 Dedicated Server shipped with German as the default language on the CLI. Dead handy when you’re trying to troubleshoot…

I thought I’d found a solution by changing the Bash language but it broke some stuff (including yum) so I went back to the default and put up with it. By chance, whilst browsing around atomicrocketturtle.com, I found Scott had fixed the same problem far more elegantly:

Here a quick step-by-step guide for FC4, on the 64-bit systems:

1. Login as root (or su)
2. Backup your yum.conf file: cp /etc/yum.conf /etc/yum.conf.YYYY-MM-DD
3. Edit your /etc/yum.conf file
4. Comment out the entries in your yum.conf which feature ‘update.onlinehome-server.info’. That server doesn’t work right now, and by commenting them out, yum will resort to the defaults in /etc/yum.repo.d
5. Save yum.conf
6. Run: yum install system-config-language
7. You’ll be asked to confirm. Now, let it install…
8. To change the language, run this from the command line: system-config-language
9. Scroll up and choose English (British) (or whatever language you want).
10. Hit the Tab key to switch to “OK”
11. Hit return.
12. Ta-da, English language feedback

For reference, your yum.conf should look something like this: yum.conf.txt

After upgrading my laptop to 1.5GB of RAM, it began to frequently refuse to Hibernate, giving an error message in the system tray reading: “Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API”.

Digging around, I found this Microsoft Knowledgebase article, along with a patch, which, insanely, isn’t available on Windows Update. Grr!

It seems the problem is caused due to the fact that when instructed to hibernate, XP has to find contiguous free space equal to the amount of RAM installed in the system. Naturally, as RAM increases, this becomes harder. Why on earth it’s incapable of using non-contiguous space is beyond me…but maybe that’s what the patch solves

Does this bug anyone else?

Whilst reading up on IPsec at Wikipedia, I came across this:

IPsec is implemented by a set of cryptographic protocols for (1) securing packet flows and (2) internet key exchange. Of the former, there are two:

I want to learn about IPsec. I don’t want to be hindered by having to read back over the sentence to remind myself which was the former and which was the latter.

Would it be so hard to swap “Of the former, there are two:”  with “For securing packet flows, there are two protocols:” ? I’d find that much easier to digest.

This is a curiousity rather than a true solution. This morning, on booting his PC, a colleague found his PC refused to browse websites and (apparently) would not connect to any network shares, yet it could FTP to an external website and ping/tracert google.com. After booting XP, and entering user details (”loading your personal settings…”) the system would idle until the network cable was pulled from the NIC. The only thing which changed is that I installed VMWare Server Console on the system the day before (not the server itself, so it shouldn’t have added virtual NICs or messed with settings).

I solved the problem by uninstalling the NIC driver and letting it re-install after a reboot, but I’d love to know what may have caused the issue!

Nothing beats a Whiteboard for troubleshooting nightmares uh, issues