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  • 30 June 2012

Archives For 30 June 2012

Overriding default keyboard shortcuts in Mac OSX (Mountain Lion)

29 July 2012 — 15 Comments

I’ve upgraded my 3 year old MBP with a fast SSD. I decided to install from scratch instead of migrating or cloning the old disk. The good thing is that everything is now fast and clean. The downside is that all customisations I did over the past years are also gone.

One thing I customised was shortcuts. I forgot how easy this can be done in OSX, so I’ll describe it below so others can benefit as well.

For example, I want the shortcuts in Terminal for Next and Previous tab to be CMD+right arrow, and CMD+left arrow. In Terminal you can see the default shortcuts for this in the menu:

It looks ok, but you cannot directly press ‘}’ on most keyboards; It’s SHIFT+], so this makes the default shortcut CMD+SHIFT+]. I prefer a shortcut with just two keys. To change these you’d go to:

System Preferences | Keyboard | Keyboard Shortcuts

From the left, choose ‘Application Shortcuts’ and then click the + icon to add a new shortcut. First, select the application you want to change the shortcut for, ‘Terminal.app’ in this example. Then, specify the exact menu title for the command you’d like to change the shortcut for. As you can see above, you’d enter ‘Select Next Tab’ to change that command. Repeat for ‘Select Previous Tab’. Just press the shortcut and it will appear in the box. Afterwards it should look like this in the keyboard preferences pane:

Now, go back to the Terminal application and have a look at the same menu as before. It should now list the shortcut you just added.

Try changing tabs by pressing CMD+left/right arrow.. it works!

One thing to note, it that the shortcuts I used in this example, by default belong to changing windows instead of tabs. When you want to change windows in Terminal using a shortcut, you’ll need to add new shortcuts for these as well. Alternatively, you use the CMS+` shortcut which still cycles through your windows, it just cannot go back. For me this works ok as this works in any application.

Changing shortcuts in Mac OSX is easy and allows you to make them work exactly as you prefer. I’ve done this in Mountain Lion, but I believe this can be done in Lion as well.

In Mac OSX , , , ,
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Fixing OpenVPN/Tunnelblick DNS issues on OSX Mountain Lion

28 July 2012 — 7 Comments

I just upgraded to OSX Mountain Lion and had some trouble this morning getting my OpenVPN connection (using Tunnelblick) to work. It would connect, but the DNS resolving was unstable. I managed to get it to work on the latest stable by changing the DNS-server setting to ‘set nameserver 3.0b10’ but then internet traffic would not work. The best solution for me at the moment is to upgrade to Beta release 3.3beta16 3.3beta18.

After upgrading, everything works as expected!

More info:

  1. Mountain Lion DNS issues with Tunnelblick
  2. Discussion the issue

Update: see this blog I wrote as well (experience after one week)

Update 2: TunnelBlick 3.3 beta 18 has just been released and the release notes state it has fixed more Mountain Lion bugs.

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Removing old equipment from datacenter

21 July 2012 — Leave a comment

We’ve virtualized many servers already this year. Last month we moved the MD equipment that still needs to be virtualized. Today we removed the old MN servers that are no longer needed due to our new private cloud. All our main equipment is now together in the DC-2 datacenter in Amsterdam!

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Moving a MySQL slave to a new replication master

10 July 2012 — Leave a comment

I’m upgrading our MySQL master/slave setup and am moving it to new (virtual) hardware in our cloud environment. One of the things I did last night was moving the MySQL slaves to a new master that I had prepared in the new environment. This post describes how I connected the slaves to their new master in the cloud.

First, you’ll need to make sure the new master has the same data as the old one.
1. Make sure no more updates occur on the old master
2. Create a sql dump of the master using mysqldump
3. Import that dump into the new master using mysql cmd line tool

At this point both masters should have the same data.
4. Now, shut down the old master as it can be retired 😉
5. Before allowing write access to the new master, note it’s position by executing this query:

mysql> show master status\G;
File: mn-bin.000005
Position: 11365777
Binlog_Do_DB: database_name
Binlog_Ignore_DB:
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

We’ll need this information later on when instructing the slaves to connect to their new master.

6. It’s now safe to allow write access again to the new master
7. Do this on any slave, it will connect it to the new master:

CHANGE MASTER TO
master_host=’master_hostname’,
master_user=’replicate_user’,
master_password=’password’,
master_log_file=’log-bin.000005‘,
master_log_pos= 11365777

Note the ‘master_log_file’ and ‘master_log_pos’. Their values are the ones we selected from the master at step 5. Then check if it worked (allow a few seconds to connect):

mysql> show slave status\G;

Look for these lines, they should say ‘Yes’:

Slave_IO_Running: Yes
Slave_SQL_Running: Yes

And the status should be:

Slave_IO_State: Waiting for master to send event

That’s it, the slave is now connected to a new master. Test it by updating the master, and checking whether the slave receives the update too.

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Setting locales correctly on Mac OSX Terminal application

10 July 2012 — 69 Comments

I’ve had some trouble when using the Mac OSX Terminal app for some time now. Until today, it just gave me some annoying warnings from time to time. Like when installing an application with apt-get in Debian:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LC_CTYPE = “UTF-8”,
LANG = “en_US.UTF-8”
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale (“C”).
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

It did work, so nothing too serious. I’ve also found applications, like iotop for example, that refuses to start when LC_ALL was unset. But a quick

EXPORT LC_ALL=$LANG

made the application start, so I didn’t take the time to investigate it further. Today I run into a more serious issue that cost me quite some time to figure out.

I had stopped the pure-ftpd deamon to do some maintenance and then started it again. It did start without error, but connecting failed:

server:~# ftp ftp.server.nl
Connected to ftp.server.nl.
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
ftp>

Nothing had changed in the ftp configuration. After some debugging and trial & error, I found out that when I started the deamon from within a shell on Ubuntu it worked, but when I started it within a shell on my MacBook, it didn’t.

When looking at the locales I found:

server:~# locale
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_TIME=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_COLLATE=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_MONETARY=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_MESSAGES=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_PAPER=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_NAME=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_ADDRESS=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_TELEPHONE=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_MEASUREMENT=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_IDENTIFICATION=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_ALL=

Notice the two errors at the top. I talked to a colleague about this and he suggested looking at the Terminal app settings. There I found a setting called “Set locale environment variables on startup” which was activated. The setting is located in Preferences | Settings | Advanced. I’ve unchecked the button now as you can see in this screenshot:

When closing the Terminal app, and reopening it again, I tried again:

server:~# locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_NUMERIC=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_TIME=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_COLLATE=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_MONETARY=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_MESSAGES=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_PAPER=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_NAME=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_ADDRESS=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_TELEPHONE=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_MEASUREMENT=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_IDENTIFICATION=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_ALL=

No more errors! I tried restarting the pure-ftpd deamon from my Terminal app and it now works as expected. Even the warnings and errors when installing applications in Debian (apt-get) are gone. In fact, it seems this is the way it is supposed to work.

Glad I’ve fixed this 🙂

Update: As Reza mentions in the comments, it’s also possible to fix this problem on the server side. This is the best way to go if you want to fix this for your users. Thanks Reza!

In Linux sysadmin, Mac OSX , , , ,
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