Solving “I have no name!@*”

[imported from my old site, not a new post (if that’s important)]

So I’m not sure how, but I broke one of my Ubuntu vir­tual machines now, right at a about the worst pos­si­ble time for it to break. The symp­toms were that while I could still login to the machine as my user, and if I was root I could still “su” to that user, every time I was that user the user itself seemed to have no under­stand­ing of itself, while the sys­tem still did. That was a pretty hairy sen­tence, so let me explain by show­ing what I tried.

root@gw-pkl-01:~# su - charles
I have no name!@gw-pkl-01:~$

Now when you try SSH’ing any­where or doing any­thing use­ful you are told to get lost.

I have no name!@gw-pkl-01:~$ ssh charles@anywhere.i.can.think.of -Cv
You don't exist, go away!
I have no name!@gw-pkl-01:~$

But I won­der whether the sys­tem knows who I am?

I have no name!@gw-pkl-01:~$ id
uid=1000 gid=1000(charles) groups=4(adm),20(dialout),24(cdrom),25(floppy),29(audio),30(dip),44(video),46(plugdev),107(fuse),109(lpadmin),115(admin),1000(charles),1001(wheel)
I have no name!@gw-pkl-01:~$ whoami
whoami: cannot find name for user ID 1000
I have no name!@gw-pkl-01:~$ echo $USER
charles
I have no name!@gw-pkl-01:~$

That almost all seemed cor­rect, so what on earth could be going on? I tried adding new users to see if they were alright, and they also had the problem.

The answer is that your /etc/passwd file is not read­able by all users. This was con­firmed by com­par­ing the bro­ken machine with another one that I had deployed from the same template.

root@dynamips-pkl-01:~# ls -la /etc/passwd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2104 2008-07-17 00:12 /etc/passwd
root@dynamips-pkl-01:~#

root@gw-pkl-01:~# ls -la /etc/passwd
-rw------- 1 root root 2331 2008-08-12 13:49 /etc/passwd
root@gw-pkl-01:~#

Make it read­able and every­thing works again.

root@gw-pkl-01:~# chmod +r /etc/passwd
root@gw-pkl-01:~# su - charles
charles@gw-pkl-01:~$ id
uid=1000(charles) gid=1000(charles) groups=4(adm),20(dialout),24(cdrom),25(floppy),29(audio),30(dip),44(video),46(plugdev),107(fuse),109(lpadmin),115(admin),1000(charles),1001(wheel)
charles@gw-pkl-01:~$ whoami
charles
charles@gw-pkl-01:~$ echo $USER
charles
charles@gw-pkl-01:~$

Thanks to this post which made that all easy to realise.

Debian or Ubuntu on a Sun Netra

[imported from my old site, not a new post (if that’s important)]

I will prob­a­bly expand on this at some stage, so for now it’s going to be short, but I recently put Debian onto a Sun Netra, which was pretty cool, but I decided to cross-grade from Debian to Ubuntu which I’ve done before with­out hav­ing any issues, and I ran into issues. Tons of them in fact. But only one was bad enough that I almost gave up, and by bad enough I mean that any­body who is good with dpkg would have solved this quickly but no mat­ter how hard I searched (at first), all I could find was whin­ing about how if you have this prob­lem it’s your own fault because you’ve mixed Debian and Ubuntu, but not giv­ing any clues as to how to solve the prob­lem. I had mixed the two, but I also hadn’t. My /etc/apt/sources.list had only Ubuntu sources, but some of the soft­ware on the machine was Debian. Any­way to get to the point if you have this problem:

Selecting previously deselected package sysvutils.
(Reading database ... 168107 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking sysvutils (from .../sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/mesg.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Then please fix it by doing the following:

$ sudo dpkg --force-overwrite -i /var/cache/apt/archives/sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb(Reading database ... 168508 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking sysvutils (from .../sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb) ...
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/mesg.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/last.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/lastb.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man8/pidof.8.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man8/killall5.8.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/last', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/mesg', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/sbin/killall5', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/lastb', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/bin/pidof', which is also in package sysvinit
Setting up sysvutils (2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9) ...

And when you are done, thank these guys.

Updated: it appears that some­body other than me is actu­ally read­ing my web­site, so I wanted to make a point of not­ing that the prob­lem I had was exactly as above, but obvi­ously not with i386 debs, so please don’t try fix­ing it exactly as pasted above, but rather apply that to a sparc64 setup. I’m kinda think­ing that if you’re hav­ing this issue then you already knew that, but I had to men­tion it :)

merry christmas everybody!!!

Merry Fuck­ing Christmas!

Spain Codifies ‘The Right to Broadband’

[This arti­cle orig­i­nally found here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2356014,00.asp]

MADRID, Nov 17 (Reuters) — Spanish cit­i­zens will have a legal right from 2011 to be able to buy broad­band inter­net of at least one megabyte per sec­ond at a reg­u­lated price wher­ever they live, the country’s indus­try min­is­ter said on Tuesday.

The tele­coms oper­a­tor hold­ing the so-called “uni­ver­sal ser­vice” con­tract would have to guar­an­tee it could offer “rea­son­ably” priced broad­band through­out Spain, said Miguel Sebas­t­ian in a state­ment sent to media.

For­mer state monop­oly Tele­fon­ica has always held the uni­ver­sal con­tract aimed at pro­tect­ing con­sumers in poorly pop­u­lated areas from being cut off in cases where oper­a­tors would oth­er­wise con­sider pro­vid­ing the ser­vice unprofitable.

The ser­vice also sub­sidises tele­coms to dis­abled users.

Until now, the “uni­ver­sal ser­vice” has only guar­an­teed inter­net via tele­phone line, fixed tele­phone, direc­tory ser­vice and tele­phone booths.

Ear­lier this month, Spain’s tele­coms reg­u­la­tor, the CMT, pro­posed that Tele­fon­ica, Voda­fone and Orange foot the cost of pro­vid­ing the uni­ver­sal ser­vice for 2006, which it judged had cost 75.34 mil­lion euros, with Tele­fon­ica pay­ing 71 per­cent of the costs.

Adding inter­net to the uni­ver­sal ser­vice would increase the future cost of the uni­ver­sal service.

The yearly cal­cu­la­tions of the cost of the ser­vice take about two years to complete.

Con­sumer group FACUA said it wel­comed that broad­band inter­net would finally be a right but said the speed was insuf­fi­cient and the mea­sure should be intro­duced before 2011.

“FACUA calls on the min­is­ter to speed up the mea­sure, increase the speed and to set a rea­son­able price,” the organ­i­sa­tion said in a statement.

(Report­ing by Sarah Morris)

Finland makes 1Mb broadband access a legal right

[This arti­cle orig­i­nally found here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10374831 – 2.html]

Finland’s Min­istry of Trans­port and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions has made 1-megabit broad­band Web access a legal right, YLE, the country’s national broad­cast­ing com­pany, reported on Wednes­day.

Accord­ing to the report, every per­son in Fin­land (a lit­tle over 5 mil­lion peo­ple, accord­ing to a 2009 esti­mate) will have the right of access to a 1Mb broad­band con­nec­tion start­ing in July. And they may ulti­mately gain the right to a 100Mb broad­band connection.

Just more than a year ago, Fin­land said it would make a 100Mb broad­band con­nec­tion a legal right by the end of 2015. Wednesday’s announce­ment is con­sid­ered an inter­me­di­ate step.

France, one of a few coun­tries that has made Inter­net access a human right, did so ear­lier this year. France’s Con­sti­tu­tional Coun­cil ruled that Inter­net access is a basic human right. That said, it stopped short of mak­ing “broad­band access” a legal right. Fin­land says that it’s the first coun­try to make broad­band access a legal right.

But Finland’s def­i­n­i­tion of “access” to broad­band is a lit­tle fuzzy. Accord­ing to the Helsinki Times when it reported the 100Mb tar­get last year, the Finnish gov­ern­ment said that no house­hold “would be far­ther than 2 kilo­me­ters from a con­nec­tion capa­ble of deliv­er­ing broad­band Inter­net with a capac­ity of at least 100 megabits of data a sec­ond.” It did say, though, that “about 2,000 (house­holds) in far-flung cor­ners of the coun­try” wouldn’t be included. Osten­si­bly, Fin­land plans to keep that same dis­tri­b­u­tion when its 1Mb broad­band access is implemented.

Fin­land has long been a tech-industry leader that has done a fine job invest­ing in tech­nol­ogy, more than many of its Euro­pean coun­ter­parts. It’s also home to Nokia, among other tech firms.

Bad Apples

I have a Mac­book Pro 15” 2.2GHz which was pur­chased in 2007. I pur­chased Apple­Care with it locally as the com­pany I work for has an arrange­ment which allows them to pur­chase Apple­Care locally. Doing a war­ranty check against my ser­ial num­ber on the Apple web­site con­firmed that the war­ranty expires in 2010. The machine started giv­ing me graph­ics related issues, but they weren’t con­sis­tent so I didn’t take it in for a few days while I tried to find out what the prob­lem was, if any. I ended up run­ning Apple diag­nos­tics and unfor­tu­nately my sus­pi­cions were con­firmed as I was told that I do indeed have a graph­ics card issue. I then found out that this is a com­mon prob­lem with Mac­book Pros that have NVIDIA graph­ics cards like my one and that Apple extend the stan­dard one year war­ranty to two years for this fault. Given all of that I felt that it was safe to assume that this was a fairly com­mon prob­lem that Core must surely see pretty fre­quently, and that it couldn’t be too hard to diag­nose see­ing as even I was able to diag­nose it, and that given how com­mon the prob­lem was, Core would be silly to not keep stock of the replace­ment parts.

I was going to take the machine to the Core tech­ni­cal cen­ter in Jet Park, so I went to the Core web­site to find the address. Mmm, con­fus­ing. The web­site still said that Core were in Kramerview. Con­fused and not want­ing to go all the way to a loca­tion in Jet Park that I had yet to con­firm the address of, I tried phon­ing them. Not ONE of the num­bers on their con­tact page worked!!!!! I asked a friend who used to work for Core if she could find out for sure whether I was able to take the machine in to an iStore, and she said I could, so I took it to Clear­wa­ter and booked it in all offi­cially etc. A few days later I phoned all the num­bers I could find for the tech­ni­cal cen­ter to see how far they were to solv­ing my prob­lem, and was told that the machine wasn’t even booked in yet, despite the iStore hav­ing said that they have a daily courier ser­vice between all iStores and the tech­ni­cal cen­ter. I then began many frus­trat­ing days of try­ing to get through to Core and sim­ply not suc­ceed­ing. I was given an email address for a sup­posed “Nuno” who I wrote an email to, only to have it bounce as he doesn’t really exist. I had a secu­rity guard answer a phone after ten min­utes on hold only to tell me that I must phone back in ten min­utes because nobody was there and that he was just a secu­rity guard and I must not get cross with him. Not there?? In the mid­dle of the day?

I’m sure you can appre­ci­ate how I was feel­ing about Core (and Apple in gen­eral) at this stage. Pretty damn furi­ous. And that aside, if you have a Mac or a job then you will appre­ci­ate either how much I was hat­ing not hav­ing a Mac, or how much my work was being neg­a­tively affected by not hav­ing a proper machine to work on.

I finally man­aged to get hold of Core and was told me that a quote had been sent to the iStore many days ago. Thanks iStore, don’t bother phon­ing me or any­thing. I’m sure my sen­sors will just fig­ure this one out for them­selves. I told them that being sent a quote was crap and that they didn’t need a proof of pur­chase when they were being told quite clearly by Apples own web­site that the machine is under war­ranty until 2010. I was told they would let the tech­ni­cian know. I wasn’t told that this was code for “thanks a lot sir now you can begin another four week wait dur­ing which you have no idea what’s hap­pen­ing as you can’t get hold of us.”. But that’s what happened.

Tick, tock.

When you reach this point you become stuck as to what, if any­thing, you can do about it. I thought about Hello Peter’ing them but decided that this wasn’t going to make any dif­fer­ence with a com­pany that clearly gives rocks for whether they have unhappy clients or are pro­vid­ing an even vaguely decent ser­vice. Besides, enough peo­ple had already com­plained there, and they were mostly all still unhappy. Stuck as to what my plan was, I dreamed up dif­fer­ent ways for them to die, and made some of these pub­lic (on every social net­work that I’m on thanks to ping.fm).

And what an excel­lent plan that was, as I was imme­di­ately given the atten­tion of the first of two of the only one decent peo­ple to work at Core. In an email I told him: “I don’t have the energy or time to baby such a large col­lec­tion of incom­pe­tent peo­ple, so who knows how long this is going to take if you or some­body else there isn’t able to help. As much as I love my Mac, and you must under­stand… I really really love it, this kind of sit­u­a­tion is going to play a large part in decid­ing whether or not I spend another R30 000 in a few years when it’s time for my next machine. It’s _really_ bad ser­vice!!!!”. This was only sent to him at around mid­day, and yet that very same day he had man­aged to track down on their side what the story was, make a deci­sion on whether they could help me or not, and what help they’d give me, get the sec­ond decent per­son who works there to fix the thing and have him phone me to find out whether I wanted a cer­tain par­ti­tion on that machine and finally to have him rein­stall Leop­ard on my machine. Very impres­sive! My prob­lem was imme­di­ately solved. It took another three or four days for the machine to return to the iStore, but I was happy to be able to fetch it on Fri­day after work, despite the time being 20h00… yes, 8 o’clock in the evening.

After all of that I hadn’t wanted to spend any more of my life wast­ing time with Core, as I just did by writ­ing this post, but if it’s going to help make up the mind of a poten­tial pur­chaser of a Mac who doesn’t really have R30 000 to spend on a lap­top but has been told really good things about Macs, then I guess it wasn’t that much of a waste of time.