Tuesday, January 3, 2017¶
Online registration¶
The welcome mail to a new user must contain a link which should open the dialog window of the Verify action. But Lino currently has no good way for generating a permalink for this.
The tedious work of maintaining servers¶
Oh, how I would love to have a system administrator! One who would care about problems like the following one!
I had my inbox bombed every 30 seconds with the following message:
Subject: Cron <root@vps> [ -x /usr/lib/php5/sessionclean ] && /usr/lib/php5/sessionclean
PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php5/20131226/json.so' - /usr/lib/php5/20131226/json.so: undefined symbol:
+json_c_version in Unknown on line 0
It started after our dist-upgrade on that server. Yes, it seems that the PHP is broken:
$ php5
PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php5/20131226/json.so' - /usr/lib/php5/20131226/json.so: undefined symbol: json_c_version in Unknown on line 0
I had the folllowing in /etc/cron.d/php5:
# Look for and purge old sessions every 30 minutes
09,39 * * * * root [ -x /usr/lib/php5/sessionclean ] && /usr/lib/php5/sessionclean
Actually I think that I once uninstalled PHP completely there. Command to verify whether it is installed:
$ apt list --installed | grep php
php5-common/now 5.6.27+dfsg-0+deb8u1 amd64 [installed,upgradable to: 5.6.29+dfsg-0+deb8u1]
php5-curl/now 5.6.27+dfsg-0+deb8u1 amd64 [installed,upgradable to: 5.6.29+dfsg-0+deb8u1]
php5-gd/now 5.6.27+dfsg-0+deb8u1 amd64 [installed,upgradable to: 5.6.29+dfsg-0+deb8u1]
php5-mysql/now 5.6.27+dfsg-0+deb8u1 amd64 [installed,upgradable to: 5.6.29+dfsg-0+deb8u1]
I removed these packages.
I am still having another series of warnings:
dpkg: warning: files list file for package 'libffi5:amd64' missing; assuming package has no files currently installed
dpkg: warning: files list file for package 'libopenjpeg2:amd64' missing; assuming package has no files currently installed
dpkg: warning: files list file for package 'gcc-4.4-base:amd64' missing; assuming package has no files currently installed
dpkg: warning: files list file for package 'libdb5.1:amd64' missing; assuming package has no files currently installed
dpkg: warning: files list file for package 'libtiff4:amd64' missing; assuming package has no files currently installed
dpkg: warning: files list file for package 'librtmp0:amd64' missing; assuming package has no files currently installed
dpkg: warning: files list file for package 'libjpeg8:amd64' missing; assuming package has no files currently installed
When I try to reinstall them, I get:
$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall libffi5
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reinstallation of libffi5 is not possible, it cannot be downloaded.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 23 not upgraded.
(demo)luc@vps:~$
A quick surf revealed that they are probably just obsolete packages, so I removed them as well:
$ sudo apt-get remove ... libdb5.1 libtiff4 librtmp0 libjpeg8
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
liblcms1
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove it.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
libdb5.1 libgd2-xpm libgvc5 libjpeg8 libmagickcore5 libmagickcore5-extra libmagickwand5 libpython2.6 librtmp0 libtiff4 openjdk-6-jre
openjdk-6-jre-headless openjdk-6-jre-lib python2.6 python2.6-dev
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 15 to remove and 23 not upgraded.
After this operation, 92.7 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
dpkg: warning: files list file for package 'libdb5.1:amd64' missing; assuming package has no files currently installed
dpkg: warning: files list file for package 'libtiff4:amd64' missing; assuming package has no files currently installed
dpkg: warning: files list file for package 'librtmp0:amd64' missing; assuming package has no files currently installed
dpkg: warning: files list file for package 'libjpeg8:amd64' missing; assuming package has no files currently installed
(Reading database ... 170289 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing python2.6-dev (2.6.8-1.1) ...
Removing libpython2.6 (2.6.8-1.1) ...
Removing python2.6 (2.6.8-1.1) ...
Removing libdb5.1:amd64 (5.1.29-5) ...
Removing libgvc5 (2.26.3-14+deb7u2) ...
Removing libgd2-xpm:amd64 (2.0.36~rc1~dfsg-6.1+deb7u4) ...
Removing libmagickcore5-extra:amd64 (8:6.7.7.10-5+deb7u7) ...
Removing libmagickwand5:amd64 (8:6.7.7.10-5+deb7u7) ...
Removing libmagickcore5:amd64 (8:6.7.7.10-5+deb7u7) ...
Removing libtiff4:amd64 (3.9.6-11) ...
Removing librtmp0:amd64 (2.4+20111222.git4e06e21-1) ...
Removing openjdk-6-jre:amd64 (6b38-1.13.10-1~deb7u1) ...
update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/policytool to provide /usr/bin/policytool (policytool) in auto mode
Removing openjdk-6-jre-lib (6b38-1.13.10-1~deb7u1) ...
Removing openjdk-6-jre-headless:amd64 (6b38-1.13.10-1~deb7u1) ...
Removing libjpeg8:amd64 (8d-1+deb7u1) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.19-18+deb8u6) ...
/sbin/ldconfig.real: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjbig.so.0 is not a symbolic link
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.22-1) ...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.58) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.0.2-5) ...
Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme (0.13-1) ...
I then stopped at 6:05 after rebooting the server. At 10:28 I noticed that the server still hadn’t restarted. Andi got it up and running again. He said that systemd was the guilty and that I am not the first one to get disturbed by this.
Oh, how I would love to have a system administrator! One who would care about problems like this!
Lino Noi now requires rest_framework¶
Grigorij reported that Lino Noi now (after 2016-12-29) needs rest_framework. I added it to the project’s install_requires: acd718b remove usage of restframework
It’s of course a shame that newbies must stumble over such problems. Actually we have Travis CI for this. But Travis CI is currently kind of disabled because it is failing all the time, I simply ignore these failures. This in turn is because most of these problems are “just” some environment problem which does not occur on a production site, and because it takes time to fix them, and (last but not least) because I believe that this is a good job for a volunteer. I dare to hope that we will soon find a volunteer who cares about “quality control”:
As a Lino Quality Supervisor you are going to watch the builds done by our Travis CI account and try to fix them when appropriate. You learn a lot about Python in general, continuous integration and the development workflow of an open source project. You will have write access to the Lino repositories, so this responsibility requires a certain experience.