John's Blog

In Gnome Shell 3 (3.18 actually) if I chose DarkGlass as my Shell theme and I clicked on the date at the top the calendar that "pops down" would be cut off at the right side. Actually it was there but the background color was missing. The fix is to find either the file /usr/share/themes/Dark-Glass/gnome-shell/gnome-shell.css or ~/.themes/Dark-Glass/gnome-shell/gnome-shell.css and change width: to min-width like so: /* Calendar popup */                                                                                                                                                           ...

Synergy  is a very useful piece of software that allows two (or I suppose more) computers to share a keyboard and a mouse. One computer is configured as a server, one as a client, and the client computer can be then controlled with the server computer's input devices. In my typical setup at work I have two Ubuntu computers (although I'm a Fedora user at home) - a desktop and a laptop with a dock. The desktop is configured as the server and the client is the laptop. Everything basically would work until such time as I undocked and redocked the laptop . Without thinking too much about what I was doing or why - when it came time to go to a meeting I would simply undock the laptop and go. Usually undocking wasn't too much of an issue but when I returned to my desk on redocking the laptop it would sometimes (but not always) behave incorrectly. The laptop would act as if some modifier key were permanently pressed. And up-arrow press might show "3A" on the termi...

Determine if you're vulnerable to the Logjam Attack - go to  https://weakdh.org/  with your chrome browser and see if you get a blue bar (good) or a red one (bad). When I tried this Firefox was OK, Google Chrome was not. I fixed this by editing /usr/bin/google-chrome and adding the --cipher-suite-blacklist parameter. # Make sure that the profile directory specified in the environment, if any, # overrides the default. if [[ -n "$CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR" ]]; then   # Note: exec -a below is a bashism.   exec -a "$0" "$HERE/chrome"  --user-data-dir="$CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR"  --cipher-suite-blacklist=0xcc15,0x009e,0x0039,0x0033 "$@" else   exec -a "$0" "$HERE/chrome" --cipher-suite-blacklist=0xcc15,0x009e,0x0039,0x0033 "$@" fi as shown above. https://cc.dcsec.uni-hannover.de/  will tell you which ciphers your browser currently supports.

My OBI-100 drops outbound calls usually right at 16 minutes. First thing I noticed there was some stale config on the OBI device. When I thought Google Voice (free) was going away I paid for another VOIP provider. Today I noticed there was some stale config related to the old VOIP provider related to keepalive server config. I restored all of that to default. So hopefully that will fix the problem. But then I wanted to setup syslog for my obi device and also to direct those logs to their own file. On Linux host which is on same LAN open up /etc/rsyslog.conf and uncomment the below lines: # Provides UDP syslog reception # $ModLoad imudp # $UDPServerRun 514 # Provides TCP syslog reception # $ModLoad imtcp # $InputTCPServerRun 514 (i.e. remove the hashes in red ).   2. In /etc/ryslog.conf add the following lines just before the indicated lines (assuming that OBI is at 192.168.1.2). Notice that the & ~ line will discard the message so it won't also end...

After upgrading from Fedora 21 to Fedora 22 I experienced a kernel panic on booting into the new, 4.0.2 kernel with the message given in the title "VFS Unable to mount root FS on unknown-block(0,0)". Long story short - looking into /boot there was the vmlinuz kernel, vmlinuz-4.0.2-300.fc22.x86_64 , but no corresponding initramfs-4.0.2-300.fc22.x86_64.img file. Also in the grub.cfg stanza there was a missing reference to the .img file i.e.    initrd16 /initramfs-4.0.2-300.fc22.x86_64.img was missing. Again, in the interest of brevity, I ran dracut manually on the 4.0.2 kernel and it errored - complaining about "no module bootchart found". (Bootchart is a package I had installed previously that attempts to measure or profile time spent during booting - I'm assuming that F22 dracut does not have the needed support.) Fortunately Dracut has an option to ignore arbitrary modules e.g. bootchart with the parameter -o. So the fix was ultimately to do somet...

Indexing borked so you get no results when you type in the search box. What I found to do: Search | Search Tools | Search Options | Indexing Options Remove the "Outlook" file and then replace it which forces the index to rebuild. Elsewhere there is an option to "rebuild the index" but it doesn't seem to have any effect. The above procedure will cause the index to rebuild. While it is rebuilding you can see its status and as it rebuilds a search will start returning more and more results.

I couldn't make outgoing calls with my OBI 100. On the phone you'd hear the high pitched three tones that signify an error and hear something like " The number you dialed, was rejected by the service provider, error 4 0 0".  Incoming calls worked OK.  A test call to  **9 222 222 222 which is the OBI echo service worked fine. A check of the call history at the OBI device web interface at 192.168.1.x shows the outgoing call log as shown below. The 400 error was more specifically a Content Length Mismatch which is a mismatch between the content as given by the SIP header and that given by the UDP header. Examples of the Content Length Mismatch in the OBI call log are shown below. This onion had three layers to peel back. The layers were: First I saw that resetting my Netgear router would temporarily allow outgoing calls to go through. It was a start, but the next time I would go to use the phone the errors would return and I would then have to reset the router...

IMPORTANT - Pipelight works as a Firefox plugin but doesn't work for Chrome. So we're going to be basing this on Firefox only. Some Helpful Links - but there's a caveat - stay away from the DarkPlayer Pipelight Repo - it will cause you to descend into dependency hell! http://pipelight.net/cms/install/installation-fedora.html http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/62171/fedora-21-pipelight-pipelight-selinux-error/ If you were to install the DarkPlayer Pipelight yum repo for fedora 21 i.e. sudo wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/DarkPlayer:/Pipelight/Fedora_21/home:DarkPlayer:Pipelight.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/pipelight.repo that looks like it should work but it didn't for me. Some of the above links advise to do this but if you go that route you will end up in dependency hell, something like --> Processing Conflict: wine-1.7.36-2.1.x86_64 conflicts wine-wow(x86-32) = 1.7.36-2.1 --> Finished...

The Samsung BD-P1600 Blu Ray player streams Netflix albeit with one restriction - you either need a direct  (wired) Ethernet connection or if you want to use WiFi you need a Samsung Wifi "dongle". But OK - this player is about 3 or 4 years old and it used to work great with Netflix. You added a movie to your Netflix "Instant Queue" then you could browse your "Instant Queue" (on the device) and watch your movie. So ...  Life was Good. Flash forward to about 2 years ago - Netflix changed the "Instant Queue" that was globally associated with a single account, to the idea of "My List" such that each Netflix user had their "own" queue. So given a single Netflix account and 3 users e.g. "Moe", "Larry", and "Curly". Moe would have his own list, Larry his own etc. Now when Moe wants to add a movie to a queue it doesn't go to the global "Instant Queue" associated with the account it goe...

sudo yum install deja-dup-nautilus log out/log back in