Uncategorized – Page 2 – Small Dropbear

June 14, 2014Craig 8 Comments

WordPress 3.9.1

The Debian package of WordPress version 3.9.1 was uploaded to the ftp master recently. While the update was pretty simple, the upload took a lot more doing. I’m not sure why the Debian ftp-master server didn’t like me, but it was so slow. Strangely, even dcut uploads were slow and they are only a few lines of text.

Apologies for the delay too, I’m not sure why I didn’t notice the update from 3.9 to 3.9.1 but there you go.

The other change is that the package uses the system CA certificates rather than the ones pre-shipped with wordpress. This is done so that if the administrator makes decisions on what certificates to trust, then the wordpress client http libraries will follow that decision.

June 7, 2014Craig 11 Comments

A python utf gotcha

This one had me stumped for a while:

# -*- coding: utf-7 -*-
import datetime
from sqlalchemy import ForeignKey, Column
from sqlalchemy.types import Integer, Unicode, Boolean, DateTime

default_due_date = datetime.datetime.now() + datetime.timedelta(days=30)

Syntax error found on last line.

Hmm, bring up a python interpreter and type the last line in with the imports. Works fine.

It’s the first line that is the problem, I typoed it and made it utf-7 not utf-8. I suppose it means that it is case-insenstive. Still, it wasn’t too clear to me at least, what was going on.

April 14, 2014Craig 3 Comments

mutt ate my i key

I did a large upgrade tonight and noticed there was a mutt upgrade, no biggie really….Except my I have for years (incorrectly?) used the “i” key when reading a specific email to jump back to the list of emails, or from index to pager in mutt speak.

Instead of my pager of mails, I got “No news servers defined!” The fix is rather simple, in muttrc put

bind pager i exit

and you’re back to using the i key the wrong way again like me.

April 9, 2014Craig 6 Comments

Important WordPress update

WordPress 3.8.2 was released yesterday which contains some important security fixes. This is an important security release and the Debian packages were uploaded to the ftp-master a few minutes ago.

Besides fixing Debian Bug #744018, the release fixes the following two vulnerabilities (as mentioned in the bug report):

CVE-2014-0165 WordPress privilege escalation: prevent contributors from publishing posts
CVE-2014-0166 WordPress potential authentication cookie forgery

I recommend if you use the Debian package to upgrade as soon as it is available.

WordPress 3.8.2 Addresses 2 Vulnerabilities, Includes 3 Security Hardening Changes (news.softpedia.com)
WordPress 3.8.2 now available to download and install (thewayoftheweb.net)

February 14, 2014Craig 7 Comments

Resetting USB devices

I’m not sure if it is just a bad motherboard, cable, USB device or just bad luck, but when I reboot the computer the UPS doesn’t appear. It’s not even seen in lsusb and of course that makes nut-server fail which makes nut-client complain that it cannot work out the UPS status.The solution was to unplug and plug the cable in then reset nut-server and all was good. But playing with cables seems so last century, surely there was a better way?

Some Googling showed up a way to Reset USB without a reboot but the directories the entry mentioned didn’t exist on my computer; though there was something very close to it. Perhaps that would work? A few tweaks later and I had a working UPS monitoring cable!

The changed script is below:

#!/bin/sh

SYSXHCI=/sys/bus/pci/drivers/xhci_hcd

if [ "$(id -u)" != 0 ] ; then
 echo This must be run as root!
 exit 1
fi

if ! cd $SYSXHCI ; then
 echo Weird error. Failed to change directory to $SYSXHCI
 exit 1
fi

for dev_id in ????:??:??.? ; do
 printf "${dev_id}" > unbind
 printf "${dev_id}" > bind
done

Thanks to Eli for the original idea which got me onto the right path.

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