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Installing and using ownCloud on QNAP hardware. EDIT1

Tiago Ferreira October 13, 2012 October 13, 2012 sysadmin2 Comments

Editor’s note: There is an issue with ownCloud 6 on QNAP. There is a new post with the extra steps here. As of lately, services such as Dropbox and Google Drive, are getting more and more attention, both on the cloud storage front and on file sharing and synchronization. For personal and non critical purposes, those are just fine, specially if you don’t mind the 5GB free capacity. Once you get used to it, either the 5GB storage limit, or the fact that the files are not hosted by a trusted 3rd party, might get on you nerves. On my …

User-agent adventures: flipboard

Tiago Ferreira August 28, 2012 August 28, 2012 sysadminLeave a comment

Flipboardis one of the most talked about apps of the last fewmonths. It presents itself as a social magazine, where users are to access portions of websites without having to access them on the browser, and instead get all the topics of a number of websites on one single place. Let’s call it a RSS reader on steroids. Also, there is an alternative from Google called Google Currents, which does mostly the same. Both exist for both Andoid and IOS, but Flipboard is the incumbent as is was launched earlier. From the websites’ point of view, both apps are a new …

Facebook bot ( facebookexternalhit ) can be a bandwidth hog

Tiago Ferreira August 24, 2012 August 24, 2012 sysadminLeave a comment

Recently I started paying a lot more attention to usage of Facebook on make some content more accessible to users. At the same time, I starting making sure that each link on Facebook has the right thumbnail on it. After doing it, some side effects were apparent: 1. Facebook doesn’t keep the processed images for long after the page was shared. So, every so often, you get a request for each of the images you ( or someone ) shared on Facebook. 2. It also makes a poor job at making sure that each server doesn’t needs to get the …

Problems with WordPress Like Plugin and Polylang

Tiago Ferreira August 21, 2012 August 21, 2012 sysadminOne Comment

Sometimes, drugs interact with each other, and the same happens to WordPress Plugins. The following example demonstrates one of such interactions. Both Polylang and Facebook Like plugins work completely as expected on themselves, however, when used together somethings get broken. Facebook Like plugin does somewhat what it’s name implies: add the facebook button to your wordpress blog. It’s also possible to share the page directly to facebook. Both features work flawlessly on its own. Polylang it’s one of most useful plugins you can find if you need to post stuff on two or more languages. It checks the configured language …

The state of openID third party login integration on WordPress

Tiago Ferreira June 12, 2012 June 12, 2012 sysadmin2 Comments

Last week a friend of mine asked me why count’t I simply do the same authentication scheme as on Blogger? From a user’s point of view, it made some sense: why have one more login, in as many sites. Well, from a security point of view, it may also make sense. On the aftermath of the Linkedinscandal, where around 9 million hashed passwords were disclosed, and about 2 million passwords were recovered, I wouldn’t feel confortable having another unprotected database containing sensitive user data, even if that database was mine. It’s far better to have Google, Facebook or Microsoft handle …

Upgrading the hard drive on old Macbook Pro (and upgrading to Lion)

Tiago Ferreira November 27, 2011 November 27, 2011 sysadminLeave a comment

My old 13″ Macbook Pro’s 250GB is at it’s limit. It’s full and slow, and it is running Snow Leopard. So it was time to change it all. The old disk was a 250GB Hitachi HTS542525K9SA00 with a 5400RPM rotational speed, the new, a Seagate Momentus 750GB 7200RPM beast. The Plan? 1. Get the new hard drive onto a usb case 2. Install Snow Leopard on it 3. Install Lion on the usb drive Ad 4. Check if all the applications are ok 5. copy all the data from the old drive to the new one (*) 6. Install the new …

Problems of replicating Virtual Machine

Tiago Ferreira October 25, 2011 October 25, 2011 sysadminLeave a comment

One of the biggest advantages of VMs, is the capability of cloning and replicating them. This allows the creation of a number of similar systems, without having to replicate the configuration and installation time. Unfortunately , there are a small number of downsides: The MAC addresses are also cloned. Remember to generate new MAC addresses on each new cloned VM. Also, Ubunto caches this value, which will generate a typical error message on dmesg: “udev: renamed network interface eth0 to eth1” . To avoid this problem, delete the the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and restart the system.

How to manage a small Virtual Machine infrastructure

Tiago Ferreira October 23, 2011 October 23, 2011 sysadminLeave a comment

Over the last months, I felt the need to start a small virtual machine infrastructure to manage every small need on a laboratory at work. The set up infrastructure is the following: 1x Apple Macbook Pro 4.1 – for development of the appliances 2x HP DL360 with 8GB RAM running Ubuntu 10.4 – to run the VMs Note that is this NOT a production environment. This only covers a LAB needs and requirements, so stuff like redundancy and fail safe will not be included. Ad Over the next few weeks, I’ll add some important notes. Workflow The workflow …

Recover data from a non booting Macbook Air (OSX 10.6 and 10.7, and probably 10.8)

Tiago Ferreira August 2, 2011 August 2, 2011 sysadmin3 Comments

The Macbook Air is the best tool for someone whose main function is to attend to meetings. Although the new (2011) models all feature SSDs, the older models only offered those as an option. As such, even the best build machines are not free from hard drive failures, which remain as the component with highest failing component. Regardless, in case you get stuck with a non booting Macbook Air, here’s how to recover the data: 1. First, why does this even works? Simple. OSX uses a kind of file system called “Journaled“, which is far different from FAT or NTFS, …

Check opened files by a process on OSX

Tiago Ferreira July 26, 2011 July 26, 2011 sysadminLeave a comment

Recently i’ve been fighting some performance issues with Spotlight on OSX 10.6. As sad as it may seem, the problem is not on Spotlight it selft, but on it’s reliance on third parties to search inside files. On my case, the issue is related to Office 2010 Exel files: Jul 26 10:52:51 macbook-2 mdworker32[18995]: (Normal) Import: Spotlight giving up on importing file /Users/xxx/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/xxx/xxx.mbox/Attachments/156147/2/_excel_filename_.xlsx after 240 seconds, 235.697 seconds of which was spent in the Spotlight importer plugin. Which makes Spotlight take DAYS for index all my files and emails. Regardless, the way to ckeck what Sportlight is actually doing is …