Shallow Thoughts : : 13

Feisty Fawn Versus Apache

In the last installment, I got the Visor driver working. My sitescooper process also requires that I have a local web server (long story), so I needed Apache. It was already there and running (curiously, Apache 1.3.34, not Apache 2), and it was no problem to point the DocumentRoot to the right place.

But when I tested my local site, I discovered that although I could see the text on my website, I couldn't see any of the images. Furthermore, if I right-clicked on any of those images and tried "View image", the link was pointing to the right place (http://localhost/images/foo.jpg). The file (/path/to/mysite/images/foo.jpg) existed with all the right permissions. What was going on?

/var/log/apache/error.log gave me the clue. When I was trying to view http://localhost/images/foo.jpg, apache was throwing this error:

 [error] [client 127.0.0.1] File does not exist: /usr/share/images/foo.jpg

/usr/share/images? Huh?

Searching for usr/share/images in /etc/apache/httpd.conf gave the answer. It turns out that Ubuntu, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that no one would ever want a directory called images in their webspace. Instead, they set up an alias so that any reference to /images gets redirected to /usr/share/images.

WTF?

Anyway, the solution is to comment out that stanza of httpd.conf:

<IfModule mod_alias.c>
#    Alias /icons/ /usr/share/apache/icons/
#
#    <Directory /usr/share/apache/icons>
#         Options Indexes MultiViews
#         AllowOverride None
#         Order allow,deny
#         Allow from all
#    </Directory>
#
#    Alias /images/ /usr/share/images/
#
#    <Directory /usr/share/images>
#         Options MultiViews
#         AllowOverride None
#         Order allow,deny
#         Allow from all
#    </Directory>
</IfModule>

I suppose it's nice that they provided an example for how to use mod_alias. But at the cost of breaking any site that has directories named /images or /icons? Is it just me, or is that a bit crazy?

Tags: linux, ubuntu, web
[ 22:55 May 13, 2007    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]

Feisty Fawn: The Adventure Continues, with the Visor Driver

When we left off, I had just found a workaround for my Feisty Fawn installer problems and had gotten the system up and running.

By now, it was late in the day, time for my daily Sitescooper run to grab some news to read on my Treo PDA. The process starts with making a backup (pilot-xfer -s). But pilot-xfer failed because it couldn't find the device, /dev/ttyUSB1. The system was seeing the device connection -- dmesg said

[ 1424.598770] usb 5-2.3: new full speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
[ 1424.690951] usb 5-2.3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

"configuration #1"? What does that mean? I poked around /etc/udev a bit and found this rule in rules.d/60-symlinks.rules:

# Create /dev/pilot symlink for Palm Pilots
KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", ATTRS{product}=="Palm Handheld*|Handspring *|palmOne Handheld", \
             SYMLINK+="pilot"

Oh, maybe they were calling it /dev/pilot1? But no, there was nothing matching /dev/*pilot*, just as there was nothing matching /dev/ttyUSB*.

But this time googling led me right to the bug, bug 108512. Turns out that for some reason (which no one has investigated yet), feisty doesn't autoload the visor module when you plug in a USB palm device the way other distros always have. The temporary workaround is sudo modprobe visor; the long-term workaround is to add visor to /etc/modules.

On the subject of Feisty's USB support, though, I do have some good news to report.

My biggest motivation for upgrading from edgy was because USB2 had stopped working a few months ago -- bug 54419. I hoped that the newer kernel in Feisty might fix the problem.

So once I had the system up and running, I plugged my trusty hated-by-edgy MP3 player into the USB2 hub, and checked dmesg. It wasn't working -- but the error message was actually useful. Rather than obscure complaints like end_request: I/O error, dev sde, sector 2033440 or device descriptor read/64, error -110 or 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to dead device it had a message (which I've since lost) about "insufficient power". Now that's something I might be able to do something about!

So I dug into my bag o' cables and found a PS/2 power adaptor that fit my USB2 hub, plugged it in, plugged the MP3 player into the hub, and voila! it was talking on USB2 again.

Tags: linux, ubuntu, udev, palm, pda, usb
[ 21:10 May 13, 2007    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]