itsadok's questions

This is driving me crazy. Occasionally when I start Chrome after a reboot, it does not show up on my screen. The process is running, but no window is opened. After a lot of digging around, it looks like the problem is that it is waiting for some authorization for accessing the password storage.

When Chrome works, I can see a section titled "Passwords" on the left side of the "Password and Keys" (AKA Seahorse) app. When the problem occurs, that section is not there. The Certificates, Secure Shell and PGP Keys sections are there, but the Passwords section is not.

I looked through all the menu options and I was not able to get it to re-appear. After restarting, it sometimes comes back, and sometimes not.

Any idea what is going on, and how I can make the Passwords section appear when it doesn't?

Ever since I upgraded to 14.10 I get a strange behavior on my desktop. I get popups claiming "Authentication is required to change your own user data" and a prompt for my password. It happens at random times, though it seems to get triggered by my actions. For example, it happens every time I switch keyboard layouts, but only after I've been working for a while. Sometimes it pops up several times in a row.

Hitting "Cancel" doesn't seem to cause any problems.

Clicking "Details" on the authentication dialog reveals Action: org.freedesktop.accounts.change-own-user-data and Vendor:.

I looked at /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.accounts.policy, and under the change-own-user-data action, the settings are:

<defaults>
  <allow_any>auth_self</allow_any>
  <allow_inactive>auth_self</allow_inactive>
  <allow_active>yes</allow_active>
</defaults>

I don't have any interesting files under /etc/polkit-1.

My laptop has a very similar setup (14.10, same policy files) but the problem does not exist there.

Is there a way to find what is triggering those popups, or better yet, just get rid of them?

When doing server maintenance, I often find myself writing multi-level nested commands, so as:

for server in A B C; do sh -c "ssh $server 'mysql db -e \"select where line like \\\"%abc%\\\"\"'&"; done

This may be a contrived example, but it's really the kind of thing I have to do sometimes for some odd, ad-hoc task.

The problem is the quotes. As you go to deeper levels, you have to start escaping the quotes, escaping dollar signs, and escaping the escaping. Using single quotes helps avoid one level, but that's it.

I began working on a solution for myself, inspired by the qq() function in perl, but I thought I'd ask around first: is there a tool, method or framework that will make it easier to write these nested commands without getting bogged down with backslashes?

I have a bunch of servers running 10.04 with the timezone set to Asia/Jerusalem that have all wrongly switched out of DST last night. My workstation running 13.04, however, has the correct time (for now).

Looking at the package details, it looks like only recent ubuntu versions get timezone updates, so my questions are:

1. Really? Timezone database updates do not get backported to supported ubuntu versions? It seems like a weird decision, so maybe I'm missing something.

2. What would be the recommended way to make sure older servers get tzdata updates?

3. It seems that even the latest tzdata package (2013d) still contains stale information, and would change out of DST a few weeks to early. http://www.ietf.org/timezones/data/asia seems to contain the latest update (2013-06-27), but I'm not sure how to turn that into a zoneinfo database. How should I approach fixing this?

Update: Somebody opened a bug.

I have two users on my system: itsadok, my main user, and elasticsearch, a user with a different ulimit for running ElasticSearch.

I would like to be able to run stuff as the secondary user without being prompted for password every time.

I added the following line to /etc/sudoers:

itsadok ALL=(elasticsearch:elasticsearch) NOPASSWD: ALL

The way I understand it, this should allow the user itsadok, on any host, to run any command as (user or group) elasticsearch without a password. However, trying something like

itsadok@dev001$ sudo -u elasticsearch ls

prompts me for a password. Restarting the machine did not help.

What am I doing wrong?

UPDATE:

It turns our that the order of lines in sudoers is significant. I placed the line under "User privilege specification" which sounded like the right place, but the line for the %admin group that comes later was overriding the setting.

Putting the same line at the end of the sudoers file fixed the issue.

I'm setting up edubuntu for my son's kindergarten, and I put shortcuts on the desktop for some of the applications. The problem is that when you double click an icon, you get no visual hint that anything at all has happened.

This causes even me to doubt whether my double-click was detected, and I end up launching several instances of the same application. I suspect it would be even worse for the teacher and kids.

Is there a way to get something to happen as soon as you double-click the icon? Alternatively, is there a way to put "Buttons" on the desktop, so that clicking them would create an obvious visual cue of being pressed and depressed?

Something about the color scheme changed in 11.04, and now it's very difficult for me to tell which tab is the selected one.

On my screen, the colors look more similar the further down I slouch in my chair (i.e. angle of view).

If I change the color scheme the problem is solved, but that solution is too extreme for me. Is there a way to just change the color of the selected tab in terminal, or otherwise make it more prominent?

UPDATE: In 12.10 the accepted solution doesn't work. Can anyone fix it?

Say I have 5 different worksheets open in Calc, and I'm trying to switch between them. As far as I can tell, I have two options: use Alt-Tab to switch - by looking at zoomed out versions of the windows, or double click on the Calc icon in the Launcher to show all the windows, zoomed out.

In either case, it's very difficult for me to know which is the right window just by looking at the general shape of the document, and the title of the individual windows don't appear anywhere.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better way to switch between windows? Is there a way to make the titles of the windows appear under them, or inside the Alt-Tab window, like in Windows?

I manage several ubuntu servers remotely, and occasionally, there will be a need to run fsck on the root partition.

From what I've read, the best way to achieve this without physical access to the machine is to have another OS installed, and tweak grub to boot into that OS after reboot. I have done that on some of the servers, and it did prove useful once or twice.

However, installing the two OSes was a pain, since I couldn't use simple "Guided - use entire disk" options, and had to manually craft the partition sizes and define the boot/swap/root etc, which made the installation less pleasant.

So my question is: is there a simple way that I'm missing to just install a second ubuntu server on the same machine, where I can just tell it "use 5 GB of the hard drive, and don't bother me with questions"?

Alternatively, is there a better way to enable fsck-ing of the root partition without physical access?

Update: after looking around some more, it seems that it might make more sense to install SystemRescueCD on the hard drive, rather than a full-fledged ubuntu. As long as I'm behind a firewall this might be acceptable. Still not an easy solution.

I can define a secondary IP address on the same network card by adding the lines

auto eth0:1
iface eth0:1 inet static
        address 192.168.9.101
        ...

to /etc/network/interfaces.

This gives me an IP address that I can turn on or off using ifup and ifdown. However, by default it is on. From reading the man page, it seems that to have it off by default I just need to remove the line auto eth0:1. However, this makes ifup/down not work at all.

Is there a way to do this?

UPDATE: OK, so the problem was a lot simpler than I thought. Here's what I originally did:

root@dev003:~# cat /etc/network/interfaces 
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
    address 192.168.2.101
    netmask 255.255.0.0
    network 192.168.0.0
    broadcast 192.168.255.255
    gateway 192.168.1.1
    # dns-* options are implemented by the resolvconf package, if installed
    dns-nameservers 192.168.1.1

auto eth0:1
iface eth0:1 inet static
    address 192.168.9.101
    netmask 255.255.0.0
    network 192.168.0.0
    broadcast 192.168.255.255
    gateway 192.168.1.1
    # dns-* options are implemented by the resolvconf package, if installed
    dns-nameservers 192.168.1.1

root@dev003:~# /etc/init.d/networking restart
 * Reconfiguring network interfaces...                                                                                                                       ssh stop/waiting
ssh start/running, process 3339
ssh stop/waiting
ssh start/running, process 3373
                                                                                                                                                      [ OK ]
root@dev003:~# ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 08:00:27:03:43:82  
          inet addr:192.168.2.101  Bcast:192.168.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::a00:27ff:fe03:4382/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:2836310 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:2806585 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:220309837 (220.3 MB)  TX bytes:187167315 (187.1 MB)

eth0:1    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 08:00:27:03:43:82  
          inet addr:192.168.9.101  Bcast:192.168.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:1909267 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:1909267 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:160262241 (160.2 MB)  TX bytes:160262241 (160.2 MB)

root@dev003:~# sed -i 's/auto eth0:1/#auto eth0:1/' /etc/network/interfaces 
root@dev003:~# /etc/init.d/networking restart
 * Reconfiguring network interfaces...                                                                                                                       SIOCDELRT: No such process
ssh stop/waiting
ssh start/running, process 3787
                                                                                                                                                      [ OK ]
root@dev003:~# ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 08:00:27:03:43:82  
          inet addr:192.168.2.101  Bcast:192.168.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::a00:27ff:fe03:4382/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:2840372 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:2810267 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:220637496 (220.6 MB)  TX bytes:187451978 (187.4 MB)

eth0:1    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 08:00:27:03:43:82  
          inet addr:192.168.9.101  Bcast:192.168.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:1911328 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:1911328 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:160435069 (160.4 MB)  TX bytes:160435069 (160.4 MB)

root@dev003:~# ifdown eth0:1
ifdown: interface eth0:1 not configured

This is the point where I got stuck, and figured there's something wrong with using ifup/down in such a configuration. As it turns out, the solution is quite simple:

root@dev003:~# ifup eth0:1
ssh stop/waiting
ssh start/running, process 3829
root@dev003:~# ifdown eth0:1
root@dev003:~# ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 08:00:27:03:43:82  
          inet addr:192.168.2.101  Bcast:192.168.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::a00:27ff:fe03:4382/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:2840609 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:2810473 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:220656625 (220.6 MB)  TX bytes:187469288 (187.4 MB)

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:1911447 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:1911447 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:160445053 (160.4 MB)  TX bytes:160445053 (160.4 MB)

Thanks @Gilles for calling me out, and thanks @Marius for the alternate solution.

Wanting to listen to Pandora from outside the US, I followed the instructions here and changed my /etc/tor/torrc file according to the instructions here.

I learned about pianobar, a console-based Pandora player, and decided to give it a try. However, I kept getting the same error:

(i) Login... Network error: Connection refused.

In ~/.config/pianobar/config I tried each of the following lines, to no avail:

proxy = http://localhost:8118/
control_proxy = http://localhost:8118/
control_proxy = http://localhost:9050/

Same error every time.

Here's what I want: I have a folder with MP3 files. I would like to play all the files in the folder, alphabetically. And I need a way to pause, skip to next file, and that's pretty much it.

I don't want to use my music player to organize my music library, I don't need connection to network services, and I don't even need ID3 support.

On Windows, WinAmp 2 did what I wanted. What's my best option on Ubuntu?