Comments for The DF Lab

Comment on Upgrading Ubuntu from Jaunty to Karmic Behind a Proxy by asen

asen — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:32:29 +0000

@Richard Baldry
Dude! Thanks a lot. Works like a charm. Had I known this fix, would have been able to save atleast a couple of hours trying to search for a solution. Anyway, better late than never .

Comment on Update to mod_rootme by Dan

Dan — Tue, 25 May 2010 10:35:35 +0000

Yeah, I’ll do that. It’s a very nifty tool! Actually the version I managed to post here my friend recently pointed out was nit the version I meant to post… it’s a bit off but I’ll fix that soon too. Laziness is a bitch!

Comment on Update to mod_rootme by Christophe Devine

Christophe Devine — Tue, 25 May 2010 08:55:27 +0000

That’s awesome, I had no idea five years ago this project would live on, congrats ^^ Btw, do you mind submitting your version to packetstormsecurity ? This way it will be included with the previous versions.

Comment on Upgrading Ubuntu from Jaunty to Karmic Behind a Proxy by Tim B

Tim B — Thu, 20 May 2010 00:46:41 +0000

Richard’s hack works wonders – upgrading to 10.04 on my laptop at work now, although I did have to slightly modify the hack. Had to match the indent of the lines below and leave off the semi-colon.

Also, remember to add the proxy username and password to apt.conf if you need one! I forgot the first time, and was left wondering why it was still failing (though not hanging at least).

Comment on Gnome Do Theme Issue by Berk

Berk — Sat, 08 May 2010 22:55:38 +0000

Update: The problem still happens but less frequently. If you have any idea what causes this please let me know. Berk

Comment on Gnome Do Theme Issue by Berk

Berk — Fri, 07 May 2010 20:44:44 +0000

I had an intermittent problem where gnome-do would not work on start-ups. I’d write firefox for example and only see the letters I wrote and not the Firefox logo. This solved the problem. Thanks!

Comment on Upgrading Ubuntu from Jaunty to Karmic Behind a Proxy by Dan

Dan — Mon, 03 May 2010 12:45:19 +0000

@Richard Baldry
Ah Richard, you’re the problem-solver I can’t muster in myself in the morning. Thanks for the hack!

Comment on Upgrading Ubuntu from Jaunty to Karmic Behind a Proxy by buge

buge — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:51:59 +0000

@Richard Baldry Thanks for the hack! I managed to successfully upgrade that way. It's annoying that there seems to be a proxy bug of some sort in every release.

Comment on Upgrading Ubuntu from Jaunty to Karmic Behind a Proxy by Richard Baldry

Richard Baldry — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:43:36 +0000

I’ve just tried upgrading to Lucid from Jaunty behind a proxy and experienced the same problem.

The problem is not authenticating vs non-authenticating proxy. It happens with any explicit proxy – any situation where you have to specify a proxy address in order for any HTTP to work.

The problem stems from the function url_downloadable() in /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/UpdateManager/Core/utils.py. It looks like this function is called during the process of deciding which mirror to use. The intent of this function is simply to check whether a given URL works and I think it is used here to check whether a given mirror is up and available and serving the right files.

Unfortunately something in the way this function invokes the http library means that the proxy settings are ignored. The library tries to make a direct connection to the site serving the url in question. You can see this by running ‘netstat -at’ while the update process is hung – you will see a connection to a canonical.com host in the SYN_SENT state.

I don’t have the inclination at this stage to work out how to re-plumb all this so the url_downloadable() check does respect proxy settings. However, I did use the following hack to make the installation work:

$ sudo vi /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/UpdateManager/Core/utils.py

Search for the ‘url_downloadable’ function def. Now look for the following lines of code within that function and add ‘return True;’ as shown:
if scheme == “http”:
import httplib
try:
return True;
c = httplib.HTTPConnection(netloc)
c.request(“HEAD”, path)

This basically bypasses the ‘url_downloadable’ check and forces the upgrade process to assume it’s succeeded. When the upgrade process comes to actually download and install stuff, it uses the proxy settings correctly.

This is clearly a bug in the Upgrade process.

Comment on Fixing NVIDIA driver issues on Ubuntu Karmic by george

george — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:55:48 +0000

i get the same as ramon install archives failed. this was all working fine on my karmic then my gl drivers stopped working so i tried to reinstall the 185 driver and then i have run into problems. i have done this many times in the past without problems (first removing the driver with sudo sh NVIDIA* –uninstall) and then reinstalling with sudo sh NVIDIA* so im wonderinf now why this doesnt work.

having them looked at the dkms problem (dkms status), and then using this jockey idea (which shows clearly that although i have removed nvidia i havent removed everything because it shows that i have 185, 190, and 195 (all of which i have tried and supposedly removed) still there but disabled and not in use.

it seems that if there was a way to completely remove all these drivers to avoid conflicts and start again it would proably solve the probelms, although i havent yet sem how to do this.