Acquisitions!
The company I work for just finished an acquisition of another publishing company. Of course, they’re ending the agreement with the logistics service that was doing fulfillment and warehousing for the other company and transferring everything to our warehouse. Yay! Over the next week or two we’ll be getting 7 FTLs of pallets to add to our aisles.
There’s only a handful of titles. But they are all much bigger then the books we’re used to dealing with. That means lots of stacking.
Time Machine naming issues
I had to go back to the office last night and replace a failed sparsebundle for one of the production computers. Somehow, it had corrupted (Google “error 109″) and then it got deleted. I’m not sure how that happened. TimeMachine kept trying to create a new sparsebundle on the Drobo and failing.
I still use the instructions I had from before, but with one important difference. networksetup -getcomputername can have a different value from the actual machine name. It turns out TimeMachine will create a sparsebundle with the value it finds with networksetup -getcomputername, but it looks for a sparsebundle with the machine name first. That I got from the terminal app prompt:
17300x: 19900iMac$
so the sparsebundle needs to be named
19900iMac_000000000000.sparsebundle
where the bunch of 0′s are the MAC address. I tried using the computer name, but TimeMachine wouldn’t see it and kept trying to create its own.
VMware Server 2.02
Installing VMware Server 2.02 finally in my Ubuntu 10.04 home desktop. I don’t use it that often, but I do play around with new distros and I always keep a Windows version floating around just in case. Of course, there are issues.
Lucid Lynx has a new kernel, and VMware won’t compile properly. Fortunately, there’s a patch already out (pushed out for 9.10) and instructions on the Ubuntu support site. The only thing I’d mention is that you need build-essentials and xinetd installed before you start. I got a few errors about VMware not working with upstart, but the server came up so I ignored them.
Firefox 3.6 won’t launch the vmware-console. You can connect to the server and launch images, but I wasn’t able to connect to the desktop. It’s got a huge thread at the Mozilla support site. The upshot is to launch the Firefox plugin by hand or downgrade to FF 3.5. A little more complicated, but at least it connects. Which leads to…
My mouse is broken! The new version breaks the mouse in the console. Another thread on the Ubuntu support forums and it’s a simple fix (if you know about it), just add a quick line to the console launcher.
So now I can connect to the server, start my vmware images, and switch to my home folder and launch this script:
#!/bin/bash export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes /home/USERNAME/.mozilla/firefox/XXXXXXXX.default/extensions/VMwareVMRC@vmware.com/plugins/vmware-vmrc -h localhost:8333 -u USERNAME -K
and log into my virtual machine. So far its working great. I haven’t tried rebooting yet, that will be the real test.
Printers Fixed, Maybe
It was the last batch of CUPS updates that killed my Eltron printers on the network. I had to re-add them, and the printer on the production machine didn’t want to cooperate. I gave up on using http://localhost:631 to add it and used the command line
lpadmin -p Eltron1 -v http://192.168.1.15:631/printers/Eltron1
and then throw in a
cupsenable Eltron1 cupsaccept Eltron1
For some reason using the web interface kept pointing the URI to file:///dev/null. Which can be correct, depending on how you install the printer. It does make it look broken, though, when you check the status.
Also a big help: lpstat -t that tells you everything you need to know about your lp status.
Email Clients
I just upgraded my work desktop to Ubuntu 10.04 with no major issues (other then UI tweaks). I tried using Evolution as a mail client, but gave up. I ended up going to Ubuntu’s Karmic repository and pulling all the Thunderbird 2.0.0.24 debs and installing them in Lucid (which only offers Thunderbird 3). I don’t know why I can’t find an email client I like. If I were a programmer, I’d use:
- Thunderbird 2 : Separate inboxes, add ons. I don’t know why everyone else likes all the incoming mail in one inbox, but I have several email addresses. Some I only check once a day, some are business, some are personal and business. Having only one inbox makes it difficult to keep track of what’s what. Yes, I could spend a while setting up filters on incoming (and outgoing, there’s only one outbox too), but why? I also dislike Thunderbird’s inability to import or export it’s own format, but there’s an add on for that. There’s an add on for almost every shortcoming that Thunderbird has (well, there’s no add on that will fix Thunderbird 3)
- Evolution: Backup and Restore. Speaking of importing and exporting, nothing beats Evolutions Backup and Restore. All it does is tar.gz your profile and place it on you desktop (and then reverse the procedure for restore) but it simplifies things so much. I’m lazy! And it does a great job importing and exporting data.
- Outlook: PST. OK, I don’t like the idea of a proprietary mail storage system in one giant file. But I love the ability to open and close PSTs on a whim. I have PSTs covering every year, and whenever I need to pull out an old attachment or some shipping instructions I just click “Open PST” and browse to Archive_YYYY.pst and find the email. Then close it so it’s not in the way (and less likely to get damaged when Outlook crashes).
- Mutt: text only. I have the preview pane disabled and images off by default. But there’s always something, like the people that embed “Please don’t print this email” images in their sig file. Or use tiny fonts. Or giant fonts (just because you can’t read text on your laptop doesn’t mean it’s not big). Plain ASCII text is so comforting.
Someday, when I win the lottery, I’m going to commission an email client for the people! And when new mail arrives it’ll play “La Cucaracha“
Ubuntu 10.04
I’ve installed the beta of Ubuntu 10.04 on my laptop. It runs very nice but does take some extra customizing (besides ditching the superdark theme) with gconf-editor.
Fix the awful Mac-style button layout:
Apps -> Metacity -> General -> button_layout = menu:minimize,maximize,close
Remove the 60sec shutdown warning:
Apps -> Indicator-Session -> supress_logout_shutdown_restart
Show paths in file browser:
Apps -> Nautilus -> General -> always_use_location_entry
Restore Home and Trash icons to desktop:
Apps -> Nautilus -> Desktop -> show_home && show_trash
And for good measure, set the workgroup:
System -> SMB -> workgroup = "MSHOME"
I understand the reasoning, I guess. I just wish I didn’t have to spend an afternoon on google finding ways to restore the settings I use now. Maybe a “Classic Ubuntu Desktop” or “Super Awesome Desktop” checkbox somewhere?
Printers, again
It looks like the broadcast printers were still working, but the printers I added manually disappeared. I do seem to recall doing updates earlier this week, but nothing for CUPS. This is odd. And annoying. I just reset the printer for the EDI workstation so hopefully it will stay up for a while.
Missing Printer
My antique RPS thermal printer that I use for development disappeared from the network today. Last night I was sending it test jobs trying to get a new label to format correctly and this morning when I called it
lpr -P Zebra1 testlabel.txt
the server replied that the device was not accepting jobs.
The printers are all at workstations and shared back to the server so the server can send jobs to them. I’ve never had a problem before, and the only error message in CUPS error_log (yes, lets start a new naming system just for CUPS logs) was that it couldn’t find the server name. The CUPS web page showed the printer still listed, but the location and description were “Unknown” and the URI was set to file:/dev/null. I modified the printer settings and pointed it back to my workstation, and after some trouble (Firefox, HTTPS, and CUPS don’t mix) I got it running again. Later this afternoon, though, the printer reappeared. Now I’ve got it listed twice.
The only thing I can come up with is the broadcast of available printers from my workstation got lost somewhere. I must have let CUPS add the printer on it’s own via Show printers shared by other systems. From now on I’m going to manually add printers instead of depending on local browsing to get them to show up. In fact, I may just disable browsing altogether.
Pallet, Come Home!
I lost a pallet last week.
Well, actually, I didn’t lose it. It shipped out of the warehouse OK but got lost in the paperwork shuffle of our LTL carrier. The Bill of Lading listed two pallets, but the driver only signed for one. That caused a chain reaction throughout the carrier while the shipment was in transit. The paperwork shows it left here as two pallets but arrived as one pallet. At some point, someone noticed the driver only signed for one pallet and dropped the second off the end of the universe.
Needless to say, the customer (prepping a container for overseas shipment) was not amused. And because the driver signed for one pallet, everyone (and I mean everyone) at the carrier assumed I must be crazy to think there was a second pallet. It did turn up at the destination terminal — too late to avoid a reship to keep the customer happy but at least it wasn’t lost for all time.
So here’s the newest checklist for shipping:
- Check the order against the Bill
- Check the labels against the order
- Check the pallet count (and make sure they all get PRO stickers)
- Make sure the driver reads the Bill
- Make sure the driver signs the Bill (I have chased a few)
If a loss does occur, make sure you pull as much paperwork as you can find for the shipment. The more references you have the better. Then start calling and keep calling. Start with dispatch at source and destination terminal, then move to OS&D, then call the Rep and have him or her start checking into it. The main problem I encountered is most people look at the Bill of Lading and go no further.
Dropbox fixed!
I just found a new nautilus-dropbox in my update manager! They’ve fixed the segfault issue with cut/paste over SMB shares. Dropbox rules!
Also, the new lanshare feature made syncing my laptop back up insanely quick. It just pulled everything from my desktop dropbox. Very nice.
