CRAZ8

I’ve just installed Trac on a sub-domain on Dreamhost. The best information I could find on this is at natmaster.com but the information does have one issue.

The instructions cause the required Python libraries to be installed in two places – some go into lib/python and others into lib/python2.3/site-packages. To make the installation work for me, I needed to add both locations to the PYTHONPATH environment variable in all the locations that define it.

PYTHONPATH=/home/{user}/packages/lib/python2.3/site-packages

becomes

PYTHONPATH=/home/{user}/packages/lib/python2.3/site-packages:/home/{user}/packages/lib/python

It took me an hour to track down the error when running trac-admin.

Also, I did miss some places where the username must be added to the scripts, as I was trying to go too fast.

I’ve given up on Collaboa for this function, as I need to spend time debugging my own code. Running Rails apps on Dreamhost can be tricky, and if the app needs some advanced configuration, like talking to Subversion, then the problems compound to the point where you spend all of your time trying to keep the site running.

Anyone who’s using Deprec from Windows is likely to run into a problem where they get a strange SFTP StatusException error. The stack looks something like this:

c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/net-sftp-1.1.0/lib/net/sftp/operations/abstract.rb:78:in`do_status':Net::SFTP::Operations::StatusException (4, "Failure") Net::SFTP::Operations::StatusException (4, "Failure"))
        from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/net-sftp-1.1.0/lib/net/sftp/session.rb:221:in `do_status'

The Bug

The bug is in a method called su_put that puts configuration files on the server using sudo. The temporary file name for this process is incorrectly generated if a /tmp directory does not exist on the client. This code should check for the /tmp directory on the server, not the client.

The Workaround

To workaround this, just create a directory called tmp in the root of the drive your project is on.

Earlier this week, I was installing Ubuntu server 6.06 as a virtual machine on Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. When this OS boots, the screen freaks out and goes into a screen resolution that makes it impossible to do anything useful.

If you search for this in Google and others, all the information you find will point you towards X Windows configuration changes. Ubuntu server doesn’t have X Windows installed so none of that information is useful.

The only place I found that was useful was the What Works page for Virtual PC. Here is the relevant section:

At Grub press ESC and edit the kernel line to include the option vga=0×314. To make it permanent edit /boot/grub/menu.lst

So, for bad screen resolution with Ubuntu Server 6.06 on Virtual PC, this one configuration change will make the system usable.