crunchlife: Tag Oops

Subversion: Merging a Branch into Trunk

Ryan Baxter — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:21:00 -0700

I can never remember how to merge a Subversion branch into trunk. So for future reference, here is how it’s done.

First, get a working copy of the head revision of trunk.

svn checkout svn://svnserver/project/trunk project

Next, merge the branch with your working copy.

svn merge svn://svnserver/project/trunk svn://svnserver/project/branches/branch project

Finally, commit the results of the merge.

cd project
svn commit -m "Merging branch X.X.X into trunk."

You can also specify a revision number in your merge.

svn merge svn://svnserver/project/trunk@223 svn://svnserver/project/branches/branch@223 project

That’s it.

Installing RMagick on Ubuntu*

Ryan Baxter — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:00:00 -0700

Because I always forget how…

sudo apt-get install libmagickwand-dev
sudo gem install rmagick

and you reference it in code like so:

# Don't forget the capital "RM"!
require 'RMagick'
include RMagick

*I’ve only done this using Ubuntu 9.04. Your mileage may vary.

Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2

Ryan Baxter — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:27:00 -0700

A few weeks ago I began having problems with my Linksys NAS200. At the time, I couldn’t discern whether it was a hard drive failure or a problem with the NAS200’s disk controller. The status message within the NAS200’s administrative panel suggested that the drive had been “removed”. I received no alert message and proceeded to diagnose the problem to the best of my abilities.

After some thought, I devised a plan to back up the remaining good disk, power down the NAS200, and replace Disk 1 with a new hard drive. I purchased an Eagle Consus M-Series external drive enclosure and a spare Western Digital 500 GB hard drive for a total of $102.95. I placed the order last Saturday and UPS delivered the package to my door on the following Tuesday.

Last night I backed up the files on my Linksys NAS200 using the Eagle drive enclosure and a spare 250 GB SATA drive that I had laying around. Transferring the files from my NAS200 to the external drive was painful. At speeds between 900 KB/sec and 1.9 MB/sec, I decided to make a sacrifice and chose not to include my music and movie collection.

Even without my media files the backup still took about nine hours to complete. It’s almost inevitable that my wife is awake at 3 AM. Before bed, I asked her to wake me up so that I could check on the progress of the backup. I didn’t want to risk having the USB drive enclosure overheat and foil my plans. My wife is more cheerful than I am at 3 o’clock in the morning. She woke me up as planned and I stumbled from the bedroom to sit on the floor in front of the NAS200. The backup was complete.

Do not attempt to insert a hard drive into your NAS200 in the dark. Remember the puzzling “ribbon” that I found in each of the drive bays? Well, half of the ribbon is encased in plastic. I didn’t even think about it last night and ended up turning Disk 1’s ribbon into an accordion. In the dark, at 3 AM, I thought the drive was properly seated. I turned on the device and waited. The Disk 2 LED lit up brightly. I waited some more. Disk 1 remained dark. My wife turned on our living room lights and found me squatting on the floor holding the NAS200 inches from my face. Within the glow of the incandescents I could tell what I had just done.

I had to shake the NAS200 (gently) to remove the disk that I had just securely wedged into the first drive bay. Once the drive was removed I decided to try again in the morning. With proper lighting and a few more hours of sleep, I carefully inserted the new drive and pressed the power button. The NAS200 whirred and its lights began blinking. Disk 2… Disk 1… Disk 1! According to what I had previously read, The NAS200’s disk LEDs alternate when mirroring. My NAS200’s lights were doing just that.

After work I noticed that both disk lights were solid indicating that both drives were active. I checked the NAS200’s administrative panel and both drives were listed as “Used by RAID 1”. Satisfied, I mounted the shares and proceeded to browse through my files. Everything was there!

My original NAS200 review has over ninety comments and both the Linksys community forums and linksysinfo.org are filled with posts left by people inquiring about the device. I’ve read a lot of bad reviews and received quite a few disparaging comments regarding the reliability of the NAS200. I bought it knowing it was new on the market. Trusting the Linksys brand name, I figured it’d be a sturdy device and for eighteen months it has been.

It’s just as foolish to rely on a single device as it is a single hard drive for safe file storage. Hardware will always fail. That said, I’ve begun to work on an off-site storage strategy for my home backups. I’ll be posting more on this when I’ve worked out the details.

Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure

Ryan Baxter — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:58:00 -0800

After 18 months of abuse, my NAS200 finally lost a hard drive. I heard a muffled beep this evening while working on a new design for this website. Thinking it was one of my daughter’s many noisy toys, I dismissed the alarm and continued working. About an hour ago I attempted to save my work to a share on the NAS200, but was greeted with this rather ambiguous error message.

I could ping the device, but browsing to its administrative website resulted in a 404 error.

The NAS200’s power and Disk 2 lights were blinking in alternation. The Disk 1 indicator was not lit at all. My heart sank at this point. So I next did what all IT professionals do when disaster strikes. I hit the power button and said a small prayer. Unfortunately, my NAS200 would not shut down. I yanked its power cord from the wall, let it cool down, and plugged it back in. As the NAS200 powered up, its fan whirred and lights began blinking.

After reboot, the NAS200’s lights blinked in the same pattern as before, but this time I decided to wait a few minutes rather than have a panic attack. During this time the ACT light flickered rapidly for about 10 minutes. When it finally went out, the power and Disk 2 lights stayed lit, but Disk 1 remained dark. At this point I was able to browse to the administrative website and view Disk 1’s status. The drive appeared to be “removed”. Huh?

I’m perplexed as to what this means. I did not receive a hardware failure e-mail and the “removed” status makes me think that the controller has failed rather than the disk itself. Hmmm… Disk 2 is still accessible so my plan is to back it up as quickly as possible and then proceed as if I’m dealing with a disk failure. Wish me luck.

*Update: The second part of this article can be found here.

System.Net.Mail.SmtpFailedRecipientException and Exchange 2007

Ryan Baxter — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:45:00 -0800

I’d recently been struggling with a .NET application that sends email via SMTP through Exchange 2007 outside of my domain at work. That is, until I found a workaround that uses the Exchange 2007 Pickup folder. This eliminated my authentication hassles and resolved the dreaded Mailbox unavailable. The server response was: 5.7.1 Unable to relay error. I’ve posted the solution here, but I also suggest reading the original post.

SmtpClient smtpClient = new SmtpClient("EXCHANGESRV", 25) {
    DeliveryMethod = SmtpDeliveryMethod.SpecifiedPickupDirectory,
    PickupDirectoryLocation = "\\EXCHANGESRV\PickupFolder"
}

Keep in mind that you’ll either need sufficient write permission on the Pickup folder or be able to impersonate somebody that does. I happen to have written about identity impersonation a few months ago. You’re in luck.

Kudos to stackoverflow.com. I only wish I had enough rep to upvote the submitter. :(

Samba Network Shares with Nautilus in Hardy Heron Part 2

Ryan Baxter — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 16:07:00 -0700

Nearly a month ago I wrote about my problems connecting to the network shares of my Linksys NAS200 using Nautilus in Ubuntu, Hardy Heron. My fix was simple and it worked. Unfortunately, the solution’s WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) was low. Apparently she didn’t think it was easy enough to execute smbmount from a Terminal window. Whatever :) I have since written a small shell script that is called from Session Startup.

Initially, the script failed to connect to my network shares because my wireless network connection hadn’t finished negotiating before the script was executed. I coded around this by creating a while loop that greps the output of a ping to my router. If successful, the mount_shares function is called. Otherwise. the thread will sleep for 10 seconds and try again.

#!/bin/bash

user="thorbardin/ryan%password"
root_dir="/home/ryan/Network Shares"

mount_shares() {
  public_dir="$root_dir"/"Public on Thorbardin"
  home_dir="$root_dir"/"Home on Thorbardin"

  [ -d "$public_dir" ] || mkdir -p "$public_dir"
  [ -d "$home_dir" ] || mkdir -p "$home_dir"

  smbmount "//192.168.1.105/public disk" "$public_dir" -o user="$user"
  smbmount "//192.168.1.105/ryan" "$home_dir" -o user="$user"
}

while [ 1 ]; do
  if ping -c2 192.168.1.1 2>&1 | grep ttl; then
    mount_shares

    exit 0   
  fi
  sleep 10
done

exit 0

I’m already thinking about rewriting this script so that it scans my network using smbtree and automatically mounts all available network shares. That’ll be Part 3!

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit: Transparent Tab Control Images

Ryan Baxter — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:18:00 -0700

I’ve found a use for the Tab Control that is included with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. The control’s default style is passable for now, but I’ve grown tired of looking at the white borders surrounding active tabs. If your background is not white, you’ve probably noticed this too.

To fix this, I’ve edited the images and posted them here. I’m not sure why the two active tab images were missed when all of the other images have transparent borders. Here are the before and after shots. Please don’t use these.

Before		After

Setting Focus in ASP.NET Ajax Pages

Ryan Baxter — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:24:00 -0700

At the new job I’ve been using a lot of ASP.NET Ajax to help ease the transition of users from VB6 desktop applications to web applications on our company intranet. In doing this, the UpdatePanel has become my new best friend. Albeit charming, my old ASP.NET 2.0 friends were not as impressed.

With ASP.NET 2.0, came the long-awaited Focus method that allowed developers to set the page focus without having to write any JavaScript. Developers loved it and all was right with the world. That is until ASP.NET Ajax showed up.

I recently spent way too much time trying set the page focus on a page that contained just a few TextBox controls and an UpdatePanel. My site’s ScriptManager was located in a MasterPage, but more on that later. My obligatory googling turned up many work arounds, but none as simple as the following:

// Example

if (Page.IsPostback)
{   
    // Use the GetCurrent method if your ScriptManager is located
    // in a MasterPage. Word.
    ScriptManager.GetCurrent(this.Page).SetFocus(TextBox1);
}
else
{
    // Here is the money.
    AjaxControlToolkit.Utility.SetFocusOnLoad(TextBox2);
}

The above example is a two-fer. The ScriptManager’s SetFocus method is handy, but remember that only one ScriptManager is allowed per page and if you’ve put your ScriptManager in a MasterPage, then you’ll need to access it in code using the GetCurrent method of the ScriptManager class.

Two. The ASP.NET 2.0 UpdatePanel is not the only Ajax control. Download the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit. With this toolkit, you’ll have access to dozens of controls and best of all – the SetFocusOnLoad method. Located in the Utility class, the SetFocusOnLoad method is the answer to your !Page.IsPostback problems.

Cannot convert type 'ASP.login_aspx' to 'System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login'

Ryan Baxter — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:38:00 -0800

Just a quick fix. If you’re experiencing the error message, Cannot convert type ‘ASP.login_aspx’ to ‘System.Web.UI.WebControl, try renaming your page from Login.aspx to something else.

I ran across this earlier this morning when attempting to deploy an ASP.NET 2.0 WebSite project. My code worked great locally (isn’t that always the case). I haven’t had time to really dig into why this happens, but maybe someone else can provide an answer.

Expect the Unexpected: Irony

Ryan Baxter — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:45:00 -0800

Code Snippet: Turning Oops into Ahah with Ruby.

Ryan Baxter — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 08:49:00 -0700

Scrapbooking is my wife’s favorite hobby (stay with me). To fuel her passion, she takes hundreds of pictures at each family function with her digital camera. She edits the pictures, uploads them to yorkphoto.com, and then checks and rechecks our mailbox daily for the printed pictures. With the pictures finally in hand, she manages to combine the photos, bits of paper, stickers, and collected mementos to create a beautifully designed scrapbook page. Each page in her album is an original work. I’m constantly amazed and secretly jealous of her improving sense of design.

The Oops:

The camera my wife uses is a Canon PowerShot A80. It names each digital image with a sequential number that starts at 1 with the very first picture taken. In exploring the camera’s settings, I managed to reset the picture count. So rather than her next picture having a file name of IMG_103995837284942 it was named IMG_1. No big deal. Wrong! This messed up her entire workflow. Apparently my wife used the image’s file name as a unique identifier. Copying newly taken pictures to her working directory would have overwritten hundreds of files. Oops!

The Ahah:

To fix my blunder, I planned on renaming all of her archived images with a UUID. That way none of her images would be overwritten when adding the new pictures. Normally I would have written a bash script to handle this, but since I’d been spending some time with Ruby I thought I’d take the opportunity to learn from my mistake. It worked! The code from my image renaming script can be found below.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'uuid'

file_path = '/home/wifename/Desktop/Pictures'
destination_path = '/home/wifename/Pictures'
file_types = ['jpg', 'jpeg', 'gif', 'png', 'xcf']

Dir[file_path + '/*.*'].each do |file|
    file_extension = file.split('.').last.downcase
    if file_types.include?(file_extension) then
        file_name = UUID.new
        File.rename(file, destination_path + '/' + file_name + '.' + file_extension)
    end
end

puts 'Finished...'

With the above script, I was able to undo my mistake and learn while doing so. Now if only she didn’t have to use the command-line to run the code. Does anyone have experience with widget toolkits in Ruby? If so, contact me.