Firefox 89 appearance

Posted on by Simon

Upgraded to Firefox 89 this morning and I have to say that I do not like the new appearance! Within 10 minutes I’d found a few articles about how to customise and it make it look a bit like the previous version.

For comparison, this is Firefox 88.

And this is Firefox 89.

A very helpful article over at https://www.ghacks.net/2021/05/09/how-to-fix-the-firefox-89-user-interface/ linked to a GitHub repository https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix and after installing this customisation, the latest version doesn’t seem so bad.

This is Firefox 89 after customisation.

It’s not the same as 88 but at least the individual inactive tabs are a little more obvious and I can always edit the styles for a little extra contrast between the active and inactive tabs if I want to.

Stop Windows 10 waking up at night

Posted on by Simon

After doing a fresh install of Windows 10 and updating to version 1909 I noticed that even if I used hibernate instead of sleep, it would wake up in the middle of the night and even sometimes just seconds after it went to sleep. It’s now been two days since I made the following changes and it’s been asleep each morning so I think I’ve finally stopped it from waking unexpectedly.

From an administrator command prompt after it has woken up, you can run powercfg /waketimers and it’ll hopefully tell you which service name or task caused it to wake. Quite often I would find that it was the task “Microsoft\Windows\UpdateOrchestrator\Backup Scan” which had triggered it.

I figured this was probably an admin level task so I opened a Windows Powershell (Admin) prompt and ran taskschd to open the Task Scheduler as Administrator.

After expanding the groups on the left to find the task (there are quite a lot of groups listed), I eventually located it and opened the properties window.

Backup Scan Properties screenshot

As with a few other scheduled tasks, under the Conditions tab the checkbox for “Wake the computer to run this task” was checked so that seemed obvious – uncheck the box and click OK. Unfortunately it’s not that easy. It then asks for a username and password for running the task.

Enter user account information screenshot

Nothing you can enter here will actually work because it’s expecting the local system account as it says on the General tab.

Security options: When running the task, use the following user account: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM

After a bit of searching, I eventually found the answer. First go to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/psexec and download PsTools. Open the zip file and extract psexec or psexec64 to somewhere convenient.

Next open a command prompt (or powershell) and change to the folder you saved psexec to. Then run the following, changing psexec to psexec64 if that’s the one you’re using:

psexec.exe -i -s %windir%\system32\mmc.exe /s taskschd.msc

You should now be able to navigate to the Backup Scan task (or whichever one was listed), uncheck the box to wake the computer and press OK. There may be a few tasks that cause it to wake up so it may take a few days to find all of them.

After stopping all the tasks from waking the computer, I then found another reason for it waking – the network device. Open Device Manager, find your network card under Network adapters and open the Properties window. Check under the Advanced tab if present to see if there’s anything about Wake on LAN. On my onboard network adapter (a Realtek Gaming GbE Family controller), there were two settings. “Wake on Magic Packet” – leaving this enabled is fine, but the other is “Wake on pattern match”. I have no idea what pattern it’s matching, but setting it to disabled seems to stop it waking.

Network Adapter advanced properties screenshot

Using the spamassassin URIBL check on a primary nameserver

Posted on by Simon

Usually on a primary nameserver for a number of domains, you shouldn’t be using the local nameserver for your DNS lookups. The reason for this is that if a domain is transferred away from the nameserver without your knowledge, any local lookups for that domain will continue to give the old results and this could end up sending email to the wrong server or worse.

One option is to set /etc/resolv.conf to point to some public nameservers such as Google’s 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 or IBM’s 9.9.9.9. This works fine until you want to use the same server to provide email services using spamassassin. At this point, spamassassin will use /etc/resolv.conf to determine which nameservers to query for things like URIBL (the URI block list at uribl.com). Unfortunately if you are using the same nameservers as a lot of other people, the IP that queries the block list will be blacklisted due to query volume and you’ll end up with an error like the following:

ADMINISTRATOR NOTICE: The query to URIBL was blocked.
See http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/DnsBlocklists#dnsbl-block
for more information.

Running spamassassin and processing emails will result in a URIBL_BLOCKED rule showing in the headers with the other rules that were triggered.

A simple workaround that doesn’t involve too much of a change is to install a lightweight resolver, bind it to an internal IP such as 127.0.0.2 and set this as your default nameserver in /etc/resolv.conf

The following instructions apply to CentOS 7 but something similar should work for other Linux distributions. First install the PowerDNS Recursor. It doesn’t matter what your existing nameserver software is, I have BIND running but it could easily be something else.

[root@server ~]# yum install pdns-recursor

Now edit the configuration file /etc/pdns-recursor/recursor.conf to change the IP address that it binds to. Simply find the part of the file for the option local-address, uncomment it and change to read:

################
# local-address IP addresses to listen on, separated by spaces or commas. Also accepts ports.
#
local-address=127.0.0.2

Next create a new loopback alias for the IP 127.0.0.2 by creating the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-lo:0 with the following content:

DEVICE=lo:0
IPADDR=127.0.0.2
NETMASK=255.255.255.255
ONBOOT=yes
NAME=dnsloopback
BOOTPROTO=static

Bring the interface up and then start the PowerDNS Recursor daemon.

[root@server ~]# ifup lo:0
[root@server ~]# systemctl enable pdns-recursor
[root@server ~]# systemctl start pdns-recursor

If it’s configured correctly, you should be able to query 127.0.0.2 with the following command:

[root@server ~]# host -t TXT test.uribl.com.multi.uribl.com 127.0.0.2
Using domain server:
Name: 127.0.0.2
Address: 127.0.0.2#53
Aliases:

test.uribl.com.multi.uribl.com descriptive text "permanent testpoint"

If this works, the final step is to change your local resolver to use 127.0.0.2 instead of whatever it’s currently set to. Any queries for domains hosted locally will go to the PowerDNS Recursor which will then query the root nameservers and then the original nameserver software on your local server. If the domain has been moved away but you still have the zone locally, the PowerDNS Recursor running on 127.0.0.2 will simply query the new nameserver instead of your local one.

Edit /etc/resolv.conf – comment out any existing nameserver lines and add one that reads:

nameserver 127.0.0.2

It’s possible that you might need to restart spamassassin for it to take effect. This can be done using:

[root@server ~]# systemctl restart spamassassin

SMF 2.0 on PHP 7.2

Posted on by Simon

I recently changed my server from CentOS 6 to CentOS 7 and in the process decided that to avoid having to upgrade everything later, installing PHP 7.2 before migrating the sites would be a better option than staying with the default PHP 5.4.

This was a good idea – mostly. It forced me to upgrade a couple of mediawiki installs that hadn’t been touched in a while and those were migrated ok. When it came to migrating the Shartak Forum I was starting to think I should have gone for a slightly older version of PHP because SMF 1.1 (Simple Machines Forum) doesn’t work on such a recent version of PHP. It wasn’t just a minor issue, functions such as mysql_* that had been removed in PHP 7 were all over the place!

Time to take the plunge and upgrade to SMF 2.0 which had been stable for several years but there had never been a reason to upgrade before now. Looking at the large amount of spam user accounts and the upgrade process documentation, I decided it would be easier to start from scratch instead of trying to upgrade SMF 1.1 (with some custom tweaks) to 2.0.

I installed the SMF 2.0 code, configured the theme, found that only one of the old tweaks was really still needed and put it live. Then I checked the error logs in the SMF admin panel and found there were thousands of errors after just a few hours of it being live!

Function create_function() is deprecated

It turned out that SMF 2.0.15 only supports up to PHP 7.1 as PHP 7.2 is deprecating create_function() and this is used by the BBCode parser.

After some searching, I came across a message on the SMF forum that suggested adding an exception to the error handler to prevent it logging the deprecation warnings. The suggestion of comparing the version using the builtin PHP method version_compare() was taken into account and here is my version of the solution.

--- Sources/Errors.orig.php 2018-05-23 14:21:57.933367060 +0100
+++ Sources/Errors.php 2018-05-23 13:47:45.711567251 +0100
@@ -203,6 +203,10 @@
 {
 global $settings, $modSettings, $db_show_debug;

+ // Disable PHP 7.2 "Function create_function() is deprecated" errors from filling the forum error logs
+ if (defined('E_DEPRECATED') && $error_level == E_DEPRECATED && (version_compare(phpversion(), '7.2') >= 0) && strpos($error_string, 'Function create_function() is deprecated') !== false)
+ return;
+
 // Ignore errors if we're ignoring them or they are strict notices from PHP 5 (which cannot be solved without breaking PHP 4.)
 if (error_reporting() == 0 || (defined('E_STRICT') && $error_level == E_STRICT && (empty($modSettings['enableErrorLogging']) || $modSettings['enableErrorLogging'] != 2)))
 return;

It’s not a perfect fix but it’ll do until SMF 2.1 is released. I hope this helps someone else searching for the same issue.

Installing DBD::mysql on Mavericks

Posted on by Simon

3 years ago, I posted about getting DBD::mysql to build on OSX 10.6 – it seems the same thing works on Mavericks (10.9) as well!

#   Failed test 'use DBD::mysql;'
#   at t/00base.t line 18.
#     Tried to use 'DBD::mysql'.
#     Error:  Can't load '/Users/simon/.cpan/build/DBD-mysql-4.027-wbgMWL/blib/arch/auto/DBD/mysql/mysql.bundle' for module DBD::mysql: dlopen(/Users/simon/.cpan/build/DBD-mysql-4.027-wbgMWL/blib/arch/auto/DBD/mysql/mysql.bundle, 2): Library not loaded: libmysqlclient.18.dylib
#   Referenced from: /Users/simon/.cpan/build/DBD-mysql-4.027-wbgMWL/blib/arch/auto/DBD/mysql/mysql.bundle
#   Reason: image not found at /System/Library/Perl/5.16/darwin-thread-multi-2level/DynaLoader.pm line 194.
#  at (eval 7) line 2.

The version of MySQL has changed slightly (and hence the path used) but everything else is the same.

$ sudo install_name_tool -id /usr/local/mysql-5.5.30-osx10.6-x86_64/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/mysql-5.5.30-osx10.6-x86_64/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib

$ otool -D `mdfind libmysqlclient.18.dylib`

cpan2rpm for CentOS 6.5

Posted on by Simon

I’ve been attempting to build all the dependencies for Dancer on CentOS 6.5 and things just kept going wrong. Several of the modules complained about needing perl >= 5.006 even though CentOS 6.5 comes with Perl 5.10.

[mockbuild@build6 ~]$ cpan2rpm Test::Simple

-- cpan2rpm - Ver: 2.028 --
Upgrade check
Fetch: HTTP

-- module: Test::Simple --
Found: Test-Simple-1.001002.tar.gz
At: http://search.cpan.org//CPAN/authors/id/R/RJ/RJBS
Retrieving URL
Metadata retrieval
Tarball extraction: [/home/mockbuild/rpmbuild/SOURCES/Test-Simple-1.001002.tar.gz]
Unable to build module, the following dependencies have failed:
  perl >= 5.006
Stopped at /usr/local/bin/cpan2rpm line 491.

Despite there not being a newer version of cpan2rpm than 2.028 obviously available, there is a development version 2.028_02 which makes it compatible with Perl 5.10.  You have to download it directly from CPAN at http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/B/BB/BBB/cpan2rpm-2.028_02.tar.gz and then use cpan2rpm to build it!

[mockbuild@build6 ~]$ cpan2rpm --no-prfx --no-sign ./cpan2rpm-2.028_02.tar.gz

Once it’s built the new cpan2rpm rpm, install it using yum localinstall which will remove the old version at the same time. This new version is able to build the packages for more up to date versions of Test::Simple and URI.

Update: Test::Simple builds but doesn’t pass all the tests, URI is ok.

Extracting ebooks from Apple iBooks for Mavericks

Posted on by Simon

I decided to remove a lot of the read ebooks from my library but wanted to back them up first, especially the ones that weren’t purchased via iTunes. iBooks on Mavericks had “imported” them all from iTunes and as a result I couldn’t just right click on them in iTunes and use Show in Finder.

First step was to locate them – turns out they’re in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books/

Next problem was that all the files had been renamed from something human readable into a large string of hex characters! The Books.plist file contained a lot of metadata, including the original filename and the current full path of the ebook. I wasn’t about to go renaming them manually so wrote a quick Perl script using Data::Plist::BinaryReader to extract the data structures and print the values for ‘BkDisplayName’ and ‘path’ from each book.

Then I found that although some of them were still .epub files, quite a few had been unpacked into directories containing the epub contents but not with the OEBPS subdirectory.

I wasn’t about to go updating the script to repack all the epubs and just on a whim thought I’d try dragging an ebook out of iBooks onto the desktop.. it worked! The one I had tried was one of the unpacked ebooks but on the desktop was a zipped up epub file. I wish I’d tried dragging them in the first place as it would have saved a lot of hassle!

To back them up, I ended up simply selecting all the ebooks and dragging them to a separate folder. Now I can remove all the read ebooks from within iBooks without worrying about losing them.

cpan2rpm on CentOS 6.4

Posted on by Simon

I’ve just been building up a new server with CentOS 6.4 and noticed that cpan2rpm wouldn’t work for some Perl modules. The error you get is as follows.

Metadata retrieval
Can't locate object method "interpolate" via package "Pod::Text" at
/usr/bin/cpan2rpm line 522.

Turns out it’s because Pod::Text changed between the version that comes with CentOS 5 (2.21) and the version with CentOS 6 (3.13) and the interpolate method disappeared.

I found a patch attached to this ticket and when applied to cpan2rpm, it works once more. https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=27309#txn-323456

DigitalOcean – first impressions

Posted on by Simon

A couple of friends mentioned they were having a look at http://www.digitalocean.com/ as a VPS provider so I thought I’d take a quick look myself.

The signup process is painless, just an email address and a password required and you’re into a control panel that is relatively uncluttered. Just a few important options down the left side and as you click each one, the top right has a large button with what appears to be the most commonly selected option. For example, click “Billing” reveals “Manage Payments”, “Droplets” (their name for a VPS) results in a “Create” button and “Support” gives “New Ticket”.

There is plenty of space around the various options so no danger of accidentally clicking the wrong button and most of the icons have a tooltip pop up to say what they are (although it’s generally fairly obvious anyway).

There’s a well documented API available – just a couple of clicks to create an API key and you can do anything from create a new droplet to add a domain to their DNS. All the API functionality can be accessed from simple HTTP GET requests and results are JSON formatted so you could easily write a Javascript page to perform sequences of the common actions.

Support tickets get a fast response and there’s an active IRC channel (#digitalocean on Freenode) with plenty of helpful people and even some DigitalOcean staff.

Creation of a droplet takes just a couple of minutes. It says less than 55 seconds, but it took just over 2 minutes for mine – I guess there’s a certain amount of dependency on the load of the host servers. If you upload an SSH public key, it can be pre-installed on the server.

The billing is hourly and you can put some credit on your account with PayPal or add a credit card and then just create/destroy droplets as required. The control panel has a clear amount that the current month has cost you and it’s possible to create a snapshot, destroy the droplet and not incur any more costs until you restore the snapshot to a new droplet (this is apparently changing and snapshots will cost a small amount per month).

A couple of things I’ve noticed so far that aren’t so good:

They have datacentres in three locations: NYC (North Bergen, NJ), San Francisco, and Amsterdam, but only San Francisco is available for new droplets at present due to capacity issues in NYC and Amsterdam. This is supposed to be resolved soon and it’s possible to move droplets between locations by creating a snapshot and then recreating a droplet at the new location from the snapshot. I would imagine there will be limitations such as IP address changes and some downtime whilst the snapshot is made.

I created a CentOS 6.4 droplet and upgraded all the packages – when it rebooted, the kernel was still using an older one and not the one that just got installed. It turns out that you can’t boot a custom kernel, although there is a selection to choose from within the control panel (just not the most recent CentOS kernel).

Overall though, quite a nice system and not a bad price either!