The ramblings of a geek

I’m currently moving VMs around a lot between VirtualBox and ESXi and came across the following problem I hadn’t had for a while.

If you clone a Ubuntu VM and import it into ESXi you may get the following error:-

SIOCSIFADDR: no such device

The problem is that a new MAC address is created, and the old one still exists. What you need to do is get the MAC address of your card from the Virtual Infrastructure Client (right click the VM – select network adapter and you will see the MAC address).

Then and edit this file:-

/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

What you need to do is delete the old NIC references (i.e. the ones that arent your MAC address).

Now save the file, and reboot the system (a cold reboot) and your NIC should now be recognised.

If you have had problems with linear-gradient and rounded corners support in IE9, then you are probably aware there are several fixes available to make these two features work together, although should we really be having to do this in 2011? Come on Microsoft step up!

After looking at the options and reading an interesting thread here, my preferred fix is to use SVG to create a gradient and use background-image with a base64 encoded file. There is a nice little tool available that will do the hard work for you here:-

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/SVGGradientBackgroundMaker/Default.html

For those of you that don’t want to go to the bother rilling your own gradients, you can also use CSS3 PIE, which essentially does the same thing via a JS library.

Hope this helps!

I recently integrated the Facebook Like button into a client’s website (see here for more details on the like button) using XFBML to allow website visitors to also send a message along with their FB like. The message box however was cutoff inside my DIV due to overflow: hidden and also the message box was not ideally positioned.

I changed the CSS for the parent DIVs to overflow: visible and inserted the following CSS to overridew the standard facebook CSS selectors:

.fb_edge_widget_with_comment span.fb_edge_comment_widget {
    top: 120px !important;
    left: -215px !important;
}

Hope this helps some of you out that have been having a similar problem.

I’ve been running Ubuntu 8.04 for quite a while now, and thought it was about time I tried out a more recent LTS version of Ubuntu Server, so downloaded and installed 10.04 recently. First thing I found was that the screen console in VirtualBox was dog slow.

After a bit of digging I found out this was to do with running the 16 bit framebuffer driver, so all you need to do is blacklist it. The file you need to edit is here:-

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer.conf

just add the followin onto the end of the file:

blacklist vga16fb

Reboot and you should be fine.

Well, you would I was dead from the lack of activityon here, however I have been busily beavering away, albeit not on my blog!

I have a new flying job and I now work for Jet2 on the 737, based back in my home city of Newcastle. I have been busy  training for the past few months, so web design and all things tech related had to take a bit of a back seat. I am now busy working on a couple of new projects, one is an online appointment booking system for a physiotherapist, and the other is a website for a riding stable.

To change the account activation text that is sent to the user when he first registers, you need to go to the jSeblod field manager and edit the field “user construction email”, click on the EDITOR button and edit the message accordingly.

Note – Dont try to edit the en-GB.com_user.ini language file, as this is not used by jSeblod.

VirtualBox is now my defacto development environment for websites. I came across the VirtualBox feature Shared Folders and thought I would give it a try, and see if it was any better or different from using Samba or just plain old FTP for file copies.

Easier said than done…….

Everytime I tried to install the GuestAdditions from the VirtualBox ISO file I got the following message from the install script:

Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel modules ...fail!

Heres how I resolved the problem. Remember however that this solution is for Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS and that your system may be configured differently.

First update your system using:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Guest additions needs some dev tools to help build the Kernel which I found were missing from my server install (namely dkms gcc and make):-

sudo apt-get install dkms gcc make

Once I installed these and restarted the system everything built perfectly.

Another thing you might have a problem with is not having the build and kernel headers installed, so you might want to try updating them:-

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

If you get totally stuck a good place to start is the install log which is at /var/log/vboxadd-install.log

Happy virtualising!!

When working with files at my web host, I usually either use DreamWeaver to edit files directly, or just FTP them up with my FTP client. Sometimes it would be convenient to access my remote files using Windows Explorer, just as you do with local files.

A lot of hosting providers use cPanel, and one of the features of CPanel is something called “Web Disk”. This allows drag and drop access using (in my case) the Windows desktop. On trying this I just could not get it to work, I kept getting the error – “The folder you entered does not appear to be valid”.

I discovered there is a compatibility issue with regard to Web Disk folders with Windows 7 64-bit, which hopefully someone might find helpful, if like me you have struggled to make this feature work.

SOLUTION

The problem is that Windows 7 64-bit expects [I]digest authentication[/I], and will not use [I]basic authentication[/I] to establish the webDAV connection to the web host.

Apache server can be configured to use digest authentication (see here – http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_auth_digest.html). This would be my preferred solution as I dont have to use any 3rd party software, but currently my web hosting provider does not support it.

The solution I found was to use a 3rd party application.  bitkinex will support webdav and will work with Windows 7 64-bit, it does not (as far as I am aware) integrate with Windows Explorer, but it does allow easy access using WebDAV. You can download a copy here – http://www.bitkinex.com. I have also tried NetDrive with good results.

Hope this helps someone else with this problem.

It’s been a long while since I posted on here and feel my blog is being sadly neglected. However I have been using my time productively and have recently finished two websites.

listenupnorth.com is a really exciting project by Rachel Cochrane and provides spoken word content such as online books, dramas, stories, poems and interviews. It is as its name suggests focused on the North East of England and brings together some of the best writers from the region.

My other site has just been completed for a friend at thepaintedtree.co.uk. The Painted Tree restores furniture and produces quirky hand made items. Hopefully they will get around to putting some content on shortly to show their wares!!

I’m currently working on a website project where we will be uploading large MP3 files to a Joomla site. Smaller MP3 files would load fine, but larger files just refused to upload. I checked all the obvious settings within Joomla, all of which were fine and set for 100MB max upload.

I then thought to check my php.ini settings, and sure enough upload_max_filesize variable=2M (maximum of 2MB), I changed this, restarted Apache and it still didn’t work!

Eventually I found out that PHP uses the POST method to upload files and an additional variable post_max_size was set too low. I upped the size, restarted Apache and ihey presto, upload of large files now worked fine.