Plymouth in 16.04 doesn’t automatically switch to login terminal

In Ubuntu 16.04, there is a bug in plymouth that it doesn’t automatically switch back when the boot process is finished. In fact, the splash screen is terminated and stayed in graphical terminal (VT7). Hence the user is stuck with a fsck screen output without login prompt that the user has to manually enter CTRL + ALT + Fn keys to login.

See this bug entry.

It takes me a while to come up with a workaround solution. Simply add the following line at the end of /etc/rc.local.

(sleep 1; chvt 1) &

However, I have no idea why simple ‘chvt 1’ won’t do the job but it works.

ICMP Identifier field in UDP between Linux and OSX

Ping packet is traditionally created as a raw packet and formatted into ICMP ECHO REQUEST. The problem with creating a raw socket requires root privilege. It is alright if the program is running as part of the system service under root anyway. However, running as a non privilege user, the program requires extra care by configuring the setuid bit which poses security risks e.g. the program may have memory leak which can be hijacked with shellcode.

PowerDNS: Configuring and Running Authoritative & Recursor Servers In The Same Host.

This article gives a quick introduction of setting up PowerDNS (pdns) Authoritative and Recursor servers, and also demonstrates a scenario that how we need to use both in the same host.

DNS

DNS has two type of server operations: Authoritative and Recursive. Most common use of DNS servers is authoritative. For those who don’t know the difference, here is a good introduction. Both are for different purposes, also both types of server can be operated individually and cooperatively under the same host.

Checklist to configure headless and offline Ubuntu 14 system

Headless

Grub Failsafe boot

Set the boot failsafe prompt to have some timeout instead of indefinite wait

echo 'GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT=5' >> /etc/default/grub
update-grub

Grub RecordFail boot

In some cases, a power outage can cause the Ubuntu stuck in the GRUB menu indefinitely in the next boot which causes headless system to hang. Here is more info of the issue. To avoid that, add the following line to /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT=$GRUB_TIMEOUT

Then runs update-grub. Alternatively, runs this command and it will remove the issue in the next boot.

grub-editenv create

Fsck fix

Don’t ask when fs needs checking

echo 'FSCKFIX=yes' >> /etc/default/rcS

Offline

Automatic Check New Release

/etc/update-manager/release-upgrades

[DEFAULT]
Prompt=never

Apport – sending bug/crash reports

/etc/default/apport

enabled=0

Postfix – Mail transfer agent

update-rc.d postfix disable

apt-check – periodic apt check

/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "0";

More to come when I find out more ….

Creating Bash 4.3.27 source package

Due to the severity of shellshock bug, I have to patch some of the internal legacy systems, like FreeBSD 8.0 which there are no more updates available. The only way I can update is to download the source from GNU site and build from that. However, the main source package is only available at version 4.3.0 at the time of writing. To remove the shellshock bug, it needs at least version 4.3.25. Although all the patches are located in the bash-4.3-patches directory, not of all them were created by pointing to “../bash-4.3” directory, some with different names.

So here it is, I have created this bash source package 4.3.27 with all these patches. I built it on FreeBSD and it passed the env test.

Extract a list of symbols from stock exchange indices

As far as I know there is no free web service that can produce a single page of stock symbols from a stock exchange. Moreover, for webpages that produce stock symbols, all of them only output with pagination. However, the easiest webpage to extract the symbols list is the Yahoo finance. This article shows how to extract a full list of symbols with a few repeated commands.

For Yahoo Finance, each page list approximately 50 symbols and it takes 3 calls to get all the symbols of FTSE 100 stock exchange. Here are the commands:

# Return the first 49 symbols
curl -s "http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q/cp?s=%5EFTSE" | grep -o '>[A-Z]*\.L</a>' | sed -n "s/>\(.*\)<\/a>/\1/p"
# Return the next 50 symbols
curl -s "http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q/cp?s=%5EFTSE&c=1" | grep -o '>[A-Z]*\.L</a>' | sed -n "s/>\(.*\)<\/a>/\1/p"
# Return the final symbol (last page)
curl -s "http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q/cp?s=%5EFTSE&c=2" | grep -o '>[A-Z]*\.L</a>' | sed -n "s/>\(.*\)<\/a>/\1/p"

For Dow Jones Industrial Average, it returns 30 symbols

curl -s "http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cp?s=%5EDJI" | grep -o 'q?s=[A-Z]*">[A-Z]*' | sed -n 's/.*=.*">\([A-Z]*\)<\/a>/\1/p'

For Nasdaq Composite, it is the same as above except changing the cp query to s=%5IXIC and repeat for many pages with parameter c. Alternatively, you can use this link to download the whole list.

Installing new kernel within Linux kickstart

I have to build a Ubuntu installer ISO using the kickstart utility but I need the installer to install a particular version of kernel. Here is the link for a quick guide on setting up Ubuntu kickstart. First, I added the following line into %packages section in the installer build script to install the target kernel package, ks.cfg:

VMplayer: How to bridge to a specific network port

Suppose you need to bridge another network interface under your VM to a specific physical network port. First, you need to create a vmnet port and bind with that specific port. Here are the commands:

vmnet-bridge -n 2 -i eth1  -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-2.pid -1vmnet2
mknod /dev/vmnet2 c 119 4
vmnet-netifup -d /var/run/vmnet-netifup-vmnet2.pid /dev/vmnet2 vmnet2
ifconfig vmnet2 up

(Mac) Taking screenshots with mouse pointer not supported by Grab

In Mac, both Preview and Grab can take screenshots but Grab can also capture the mouse pointer. If you want different mouse cursor look, then you have to select your desired pointer type in Grab -> Preferences.

FreeBSD /usr/ports build with all the default options

Something to remind myself

make -DBATCH install clean