Adams Bros Blog

Slow SSH Login

I had slow login problems with my SSH server for many months, and never bothered to try and fix it. Finally I got sick of it, and enabled verbose mode. I noticed it was doing public key authentication, GSSAPI authentication, and then password. The authentication would fail on public key, then the GSSAPI authentication would sit there for a long time, before moving on to password authentication.

Add the following to your /etc/ssh/sshd_config

GSSAPIAuthentication no
GSSAPICleanupCredentials no

Asus Transformer Android 3.1 Contacts Force Close

I just bought an ASUS Transformer TF101.  I set everything up, and suddenly found that my contacts manager application from Google was crashing with a "Force Close" button.  I was very upset about that, so I tried to rectify it.  I was getting the following error...

• The process android.process.acore has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again.

tcpdfilter – tcpdump filter

To anyone looking for this page. I noticed that some people had searched for my tcpdfilter program as recent as 2007. I had assumed that fresh meat would keep it around forever, so I just left it there, and forgot about it. Seeing it is now gone, I got to thinking, and it's possible there's people out there that might have really old systems that they still need to support, via network debugging of some sort. If you have a more recent system, tcpdump will output hex and ascii, if that's all you need. Or, if you need packet decoding capability then ethereal or wireshark may be better choices for you. Still kicking myself for not making a GUI packet decoder like ethereal. ethereal came out relatively shortly after I wrote tcpdfilter.

So, if you are still looking for it, let me know, and I can scrounge up the source for you. I do have it on my system.

Intel WIFI 5300 AGN Unknown error 132

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Recently I started having problems with my Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 5300 AGN card.  It simply quit working after I did a kernel upgrade.  It was giving errors like "Unknown error 132", and "deauthenticated (Reason: 9)".  The hardware switch did not seem to affect it, and the errors were the same whether I had the switch on, or off; so I'm assuming it had to do with the hardware not being initialized properly when the module loaded.

Gentoo Portage Python Update issues

I have been having some gentoo portage problems due to my system being out of sync. When I finally updated a month or two later, it simply wasn't working. I was getting an error like the following...

Performing Global Updates: /usr/portage/profiles/updates/3Q-2009
(Could take a couple of minutes if you have a lot of binary packages.)
 .='update pass'  *='binary update'  #='/var/db update'  @='/var/db move'
 s='/var/db SLOT move'  %='binary move'  S='binary SLOT move'
 p='update /etc/portage/package.*'
......................................................                    

Performing Global Updates: /usr/portage/profiles/updates/4Q-2009
(Could take a couple of minutes if you have a lot of binary packages.)
 .='update pass'  *='binary update'  #='/var/db update'  @='/var/db move'
 s='/var/db SLOT move'  %='binary move'  S='binary SLOT move'
 p='update /etc/portage/package.*'
..................
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "/usr/bin/emerge", line 40, in <module>
 retval = emerge_main()
 File "/usr/lib64/portage/pym/_emerge/main.py", line 1328, in emerge_main
 return action_sync(settings, trees, mtimedb, myopts, myaction)
 File "/usr/lib64/portage/pym/_emerge/actions.py", line 2173, in action_sync
 if portage._global_updates(trees, mtimedb["updates"]):
 File "/usr/lib64/portage/pym/portage/__init__.py", line 8572, in _global_updates
 moves = bindb.move_ent(update_cmd)
 File "/usr/lib64/portage/pym/portage/dbapi/bintree.py", line 273, in move_ent
 mytbz2.recompose_mem(portage.xpak.xpak_mem(mydata))
 File "/usr/lib64/portage/pym/portage/xpak.py", line 106, in xpak_mem
 indexglob=indexglob+encodeint(len(x))+x+encodeint(datapos)+encodeint(mydatasize)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xb0 in position 49: ordinal not in range(128)

HDA Intel Alsa volume low

I've been having a problem where the volume level of my Dell Studio 17 notebook is just not loud enough when I'm running Linux.  I went to windows, to see if the problem was the same there, and I found that the volume in Windows Vista was way higher.  So, I booted back into Linux, and started googling.

I quickly found a few places that talked about setting the model to 3stack, and various other options.  But, none of that worked for me.  So, I decided to search for the problem on my own.  I ended up checking out the alsamixer again, from the command line.  Last time I checked, I saw that the "Speaker" volume was set to about two thirds, but I had thought that was referring to the volume of the PC Speaker, as on many sound cards, it is actually an option.  As it is, that is actually the volume of the external speaker.  Once you pump that puppy up to 100% the volume level is good.  From there, you can simply adjust the master or PCM volumes as you choose.