Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

21Oct/122

Enabling Extended Attribute support in a Synology DiskStation DS212j

As small NAS devices go, the Synology DiskStation offerings are quite good. On the bang-for-the-buck scale, they rank well near the top, offering a diskless, 2-drive-capacity enclosure for right around $200 street price. I won't go into a litany of features here, and truth be told, Rosenthal & Rosenthal is not a Synology business partner, so I have no great axe to grind insofar as additional sales of these units is concerned. Detailed information on the hardware and software may be found on the net in various places. The focus of this post, however, is on getting support for EAs (extended attributes) on this device.

26Jul/121

Removing social networking links from WPtouch (free version)

I hate social networking.

If you're a regular reader of this site, you probably know that by now.

While I truly love the WPtouch mobile plugin for WordPress, and while I really should upgrade to the Pro version (note to self: let's do this before the end of the year), I absolutely hate those links to Tw-tter and F-c-book at the bottom of each article. I do like the email and bookmark links, though, as well as the navigation buttons.

A little poking around got me what I needed to find. The hack is fairly simple.

12Dec/110

Egad! Why do people do their own web development?

WordPress 3.3 is now GA. Knowing better than to blindly upgrade without at least having a look at what may be not quite ready for prime time (though WP is quite good about reasonable beta cycles and such), I happened over to the WP fora to see what reports had been made (yes, I should have gone to the bugtracker, but I like to get a view from "on the ground," so to speak).

8Dec/110

Configuring Squid Proxy on OS/2: Path adjustments

Following onto my post concerning web privacy, I wanted to produce some pointers concerning Squid configuration for web blocking. To do that, of course, I needed a working Squid configuration. Mine was sorely in need of an update. I'd been running 2.6 stable 14(?) for a long time, then upgraded to 3.0 stable 13. I recall that took me some time to get working, but still I suffered repeated crashes under heavy load, so as a result, I did what any other normal user would do: I turned it off.

Well, that's no solution, now is it? It's especially no solution if the goal is to be able to tell other people how to use it!Hit with Ball

10Apr/110

Rsync error 5 may be exactly what it says

I use (and love) rsync on a variety of platforms. On Windows, about the easiest implementation I've found is DeltaCopy.

Recently, though, I've been seeing a problem at a particular client running DeltaCopy, and only for one machine (which happens to be the box running the server component, as well. Wanting to rule out the obvious, I suggested he run a full chkdsk pass against his local drive. After that, we got a slightly different error message:

@ERROR: chdir failed
rsync error: error starting client-server protocol (code 5) at /home/lapo/packaging/rsync-3.0.4-1/src/rsync-3.0.4/main.c(1504) [sender=3.0.4]
Error starting client-server protocolRsync.exe returned an error. Will try again. This is retry number 1 of 5

Well...

Various sources on the net point to bad passwords, tabs in command lines, and such. In fact, I originally suspected a bad password...until I went looking.

All of the jobs for this machine back up to an eSATA-connected RAID volume. I have one directory for each day of the week located under the root of the volume. Well, upon browsing the volume's contents, I found that all of my backup directories (virtual directories, in DeltaCopy-speak) were gone! So, apparently, chdir did indeed fail, as there was no target directory available.

I re-created all of the daily directories, set it off manually, and it is happily backing up as I write this.

Go figure.

 

14Feb/100

Mass renaming files at the OS/2 command line

An interesting head scratcher to which I have been returning almost monthly for some time is the distinct lack of ability to rename files based upon a mask at the OS/2 command line (in a minute, I'll explain why this is a fairly regular occurrence). Of course, OS/2's cmd.exe is not alone in that regard; DOS' COMMAND.COM, 4DOS, 4OS2, JdeBP's 32-bit CMD, Windows' CMD, and even the *nix shells with which I'm familiar don't naturally lend themselves to this kind of flexibility (okay, I lied: you can do it with Bash, of course; see below).

Why a monthly occurrence?

I don't normally send paper invoices to clients anymore. Not only does it kill more trees than it's worth (and no, I'm not an environmental zealot; we grow new trees every day - I'm just the guy who has to buy the paper and the laser toner), but the postage has over the years become a major factor in this decision. Anyone who has to regularly bill clients for outstanding balances knows from whence I speak; send the same client a dunning notice for six months, and that $150 bill has just been whittled down to $147.36 ($0.44 * 6 = $2.64; $150 - $2.64 = $147.36). This just adds the insult to the injury.