http://scratch.johnnypez.com/hex-to-uicolor

I had a quick look with ifconfig eth0 to see what was going on. These were the lines of interest from the output:

RX packets:404933416 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:501341708 errors:31383248 dropped:0 overruns:11 carrier:62766496

Obviously something is not right.
I spent a while reading through log files to no avail, this isn’t really my area of expertise so I gave in and contacted my hosting provider.

A Digiweb engineer got back to me very quickly advising me to check if the network interface was running at half-duplex.
I used ethtool to check this out:

john:~$ sudo ethtool eth0
Settings for eth0:
	Supported ports: [ TP MII ]
	Supported link modes:   10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
	                        100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
	Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
	Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
	                        100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
	Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
	Speed: 10Mb/s
	Duplex: Half
	Port: MII
	PHYAD: 32
	Transceiver: internal
	Auto-negotiation: on
	Supports Wake-on: pumbg
	Wake-on: d
	Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)
	Link detected: yes

The interface was only running at 10Mb/s half-duplex.
It seems auto-negotiation of the link had failed.

john:~$ sudo mii-tool eth0
eth0: autonegotiation failed, link ok

I fixed this be turning off auto-negotiation and applying the desired settings to eth0 with the following command:

john:~$ ethtool -s eth0 speed 100 duplex full autoneg off

Then to make sure this is always done with the interface is being brought up I added that command to /etc/network/interfaces just after the iface line:

iface eth0 inet static
pre-up /usr/sbin/ethtool -s eth0 speed 100 duplex full autoneg off

Having done this, the error count on eth0 hasn’t increased. Job done.

I solved the problem by doing the following.
First I found out where java actually was with:
>ls -l' `which java`
/usr/bin/java -> /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/Current/Commands/java

I noticed a command called java_home in that same directory. Running that command yields the correct java home directory.
>/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/Current/Commands/java_home
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home

To correctly set the my JAVA_HOME environment variable in future, I added the following to my ~/.profile

export JAVA_HOME=`/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/Current/Commands/java_home`

Once you have done this you can restart your terminal window or run >. ~/.profile to reload you profile into the current terminal session.

sudo gem install passenger
cd `passenger-config --root`
rake nginx

Download latest stable nginx tarball. (currently 0.6.36) to the directory of your choice, then, in that directory

tar -xzf nginx-0.6.36.tar.gz
cd nginx-0.6.36
./configure --with-http_ssl_module --add-module=`passenger-config --root`/ext/nginx
make
sudo make install

OR

If you already have nginx installed you might just want to copy the nginx binary from objs/nginx and replace the existing nginx binary with that.

cp -f objs/nginx /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx

Edit the nginx.conf (should be in /usr/local/nginx/conf) to add passenger_root, again you can get this path with passenger-config --root.
Create a virtual host with a root in the rails app public dir and set passenger_enabled on; also set rails_env development;. It is important that the server root directive is set to the public directory of your rails app.

The following is an excerpt from my nginx.conf with passenger relevant config only:

http {
  #
  #
  passenger_root /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.2;
  #
  #
  server {
    listen 80;
    server_name www.example.com;
    root /some/path/to/my_rails_app/public;
    passenger_enabled on;
    rails_env development;
  }
  #
  #
}

Essentially WP-Super-Cache was only half on, it could generate wp-cache files but was not creating static cache files.  The reason for this was that the querystring always contained at least one value even though it wasn’t in my URLs. That drove me crazy until I remembered this morning that the recommended Nginx setup was the problem the last time. The reason for this is the following part of the Nginx config that rewrites any non existing file requests to Wordpress’ index.php


if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
}


This will cause WP-Super-Cache to never generate any static cache files since one of its conditions for doing so is that the querystring is empty.
If your Nginx config has this, try changing removing the ?q=$1 as below:


if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php last;
}


To start, I shared my broadband connection through my iMac’s in-built Airport, setting up a 40/64bit WEP passphrase in the process.  Then on the PS3 I went to the Network Settings menu and scanned for a wireless connection. It picked up my shared wireless connection right away, I then chose WEP for the security and entered the passphrase that I set up.

It seemed that was mistake number one.  The only way I could get this WEP key to work was to enter the HEX version of the passphrase.  OSX doesn’t show you the HEX version of your key so I popped over to this site : http://www.andrewscompanies.com/tools/wep.asp and entered a passphrase to get the HEX equivalent. So for example ASCII: fubar = HEX: 6675626172

I entered the 10 characther HEX key and that got me to the next step.

Note: Stronger encryption keys will be longer, 128bit WEP uses a 13 character passphrase or 26 character hex key.

The second place where I ran into trouble was with DHCP. It just doesn’t work for me with some devices. My iPod Touch gets its IP address without any trouble but the PS3 just wouldn’t. Luckily I had just been through the same trouble with my Nokia E51 last week so I knew that I had to assign addresses manually.

My iMac’s Airport issues addresses in the range 10.0.2.x, so I jumped into the PS3 custom network setup and manually assigned it an IP address of 10.0.2.5, subnet mask remains at 255.255.255.0,  the router address in this case is 10.0.2.1, and the DNS primary address I set to the address of my broadband router which is 192.168.1.1.

After that everything was up and running.

I fired up Nullriver MediaLink (which is just brilliant btw) to share media content from my iMac and I was browsing my movies and music from the comfort of my couch in no time.

I’m now running Wordpress 2.7 served up with Nginx and PHP over fast-cgi. I don’t get much traffic but if I ever do I’ll be able to handle it.

That’s all for now. Enjoy the Holidays.

So long since I’ve posted a song of the week. Laziness really, or maybe just lack of songs that I really felt good about. I never really gave Glen Hansard much attention until I watched Once. I can’t stop listening to him now. And this track ‘Say it to me now’ has gone straight into my all-time favourite songs.

./lib/rubygems/spec_fetcher.rb:1:in `require': no such file to load -- zlib (LoadError)
	from ./lib/rubygems/spec_fetcher.rb:1
	from ./lib/rubygems/source_index.rb:10:in `require'
	from ./lib/rubygems/source_index.rb:10
	from ./lib/rubygems.rb:767:in `require'
	from ./lib/rubygems.rb:767
	from setup.rb:22:in `require'
	from setup.rb:22

Having a look around the web yielded several approaches to solve the problem but no solution so I decided to build Zlib from source, then rebuild Ruby and then install Rubygems. That worked.

Here it is step by step.
I assume you already have the ruby and rubygems sources at this point.

1. Change directory to wherever you keep source files. I use ~/src. Download and extract the Zlib source tarball to that directory.

       cd ~/src
       wget http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz
       tar -xzf zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz

2. Build Zlib

       cd ./zlib-1.2.3
       ./configure
       make
       sudo make install

3. Rebuild ruby

       cd ~/src/ruby-1.8.6-p114
       ./configure
       make
       sudo make install

4. and finally install Rubygems

       cd ~/src/rubygems-1.2.0
       sudo ruby setup.rb

You should be up and running now.

I needed the mysql gem so I ran gem install mysql only to find I got the following error:

*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.

The solution was to use the following:
gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

It should work as long as the path to mysql_config is correct, you may need to change the path for your own system. You can check the path to mysql_config with: which mysql_config