Daniel Lange's blog (Entries tagged as bug)

Fix Umlauts in the XFCE Terminal

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:20:00 +0200

The XFCE Terminal has the weird issue of sometimes showing question marks (?) instead of German Umlauts (äöüÄÖÜ) although they work fine in any other stock XFCE application (e.g. the default editor "mousepad").

The solution to this can be found on the XFCE Forums but it took me quite some time to find it. It was difficult to find a suitable search query to dig out that page. Google turns up a lot of irrelevant stuff on "XFCE Terminal question marks"...

XFCE Editor Umlauts with and without LANG variable set

The problem with Umlauts (and other 8bit ASCII characters) showing as question marks arises if the user has no LANG variable set.

A simple

export LANG=en_US

resolves the issue. Put that into ~/.bashrc or any other place suitable in your distribution.

Gentoo users may want to

su # become root
echo "LANG=en_US" >> /etc/env.d/02locale
env-update
exit
source /etc/profile

to set the LANG variable system-wide.

So keywords, dear Google: Umlaute, deutsch, Fragezeichen, kaputt, falsch, broken, display, zeigt, charset, Zeichensatz

Seredipity default event_s9ymarkup plugin breaking URLs that contain underscores

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:30:00 +0200

The default Serendipity mark-up plugin (event_s9ymarkup) currently breaks URLs that contain underscores.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statler_%26_Waldorf

will end up

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statler%26_Waldorf

because of a faulty regex. Garvin Hicking does not really want to fix this. (See this s9y support forum article for arguments pro/contra fixing it). So if you encounter this problem, your options are:

replace _ in URLs with %5F (aka manually urlencode it)
remove the plugin or disable it
patch the plugin

Patching is basically changing

plugins/serendipity_event_s9ymarkup/serendipity_event_s9ymarkup.php:

$text = preg_replace('/\b_([\S ]+?)_\b/','\1',$text);

$text = preg_replace('/\ _([\S ]+?)_\ /',' \1 ',$text);

If you want to be writing things like "Haha[lol]" (which I have no real use for ...), extend the "\ " with whatever you'd like to be o.k. to delimit bolded words beyond blanks. It should only be symbols that are not valid in URLs (so none of "$-_.+!*'()," which are all valid in URLs according to RFC 1738).

You may also want to consider replacing one underscore ("_") with two or more ("__") to make the detection, that you actually wanted to write bold text, more reliable.

SSHd chroot and PAM

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 19:09:14 +0100

SSH with chroot patch has been working fine for a number of years. Since PAM v0.99 things have broken though, if users are chrooted with the "/home/username/./" syntax as their homedir.

SSH sessions will just terminate immediately after successful logon. Doh.

Two solutions exist:

Put UsePAM no into /etc/ssh/sshd_config and use the chroot patch and /./ in users homedirs
Keep UsePAM yes. Emerge sys-auth/pam_chroot and add session required pam_chroot.so to /etc/pamd.d/sshd setup /etc/security/chroot.conf or add a chroot_dir=/home/username/ to the pam_chroot.so line.
This will currently not work for amd64 though as the Gentoo bug regarding pam_chroot has not cought any attention from the arch testers. Since July...

Bugging the arch testers in #Gentoo-amd64 didn't help either:

Continue reading "SSHd chroot and PAM"

Serendipity plugin livesearch does not work with bulletproof template

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 23:09:25 +0200

The Livesearch (Javascript iterative search) plugin to Serendipity (s9y) currently does not work with the Bulletproof template active.

Matthias Mees (YellowLed) and Don(ald) Chambers are looking at it.

Apache fails to start at boot, but works when started manually

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:26:28 +0200

Since a baselayout update Apache fails to start on Gentoo at (re-)boot of a server if that server has unused ethernet interfaces.

The symptom is that Apache fails to start on boot although it has been added to the runlevel with
rc-update add apache default

This is caused by recent baselayouts not working properly with more than one eth and not all of them being up.

Thus changing depend() { need net ... } into
depend() { need net.eth0 ... } at the top of /etc/init.d/apache2 will help.

While you're at it you could also add an nice after urandom to the existing depend () construct
and make sure apr and apache are emerged with flag urandom set. Reading from /dev/random to initialize the digest authentication mechanism (or SSL for that matter) might cause apache to block otherwise if there is not enough entropy in the random pool.