Before I discovered what my Bifferboard really is, I almost disposed it, but now It found a new purpose. It’s a networked rfid Terminal for time tracking on our BORM ERP. I use a simple python script on the device because it’s easier to experiment on a device where I would rather not compile too much every time trying something. In fact, this is my first python project appart from looking through some scripts and changing a few lines here and there.
Tag: debian
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Running debian on a nas dongle [updated]
I used a nas dongle from ARP for a while to share an USB harddisk, and I always wondered about what’s inside. It’s a nifty little device that works reasonably well. It needed a reboot from time to time, and it had some issues with the filesystem. Because of the FAT filesystem it couldn’t store large files, but what I missed most was ssh. Not ssh itself, but scp, sftp and rsync. I knew that without further information it would be impossible to add these. But so far I couldn’t find out anything on the internet. Then somehow I found a blog post with a device that looked similar from the outside but was sold more like a hacker device. So I went to figure out if it’s the same. It looked similar from the inside as well. So, it is probably really a bifferboard. The pins for the serial console matched, which was even more proof…
The boot messages with the stock firmware look like this:Â $ minicom -b 115200 -D /dev/ttyUSB0
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missing env variables when running from cron
Today I solved another problem that bugged me for a while. Namely, I wanted to run the free flight prediction runs automatically from cron. When I ran it from the commandline or a script, it worked well, but when I tried to run it directly or through the same script from cron, it always failed with the following message : “critical error : basic_string::_S_construct NULL not valid”
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debian/postinst froze when restarting apache2
With my flugbuch2 and flightpred projects I had a problem for a while in the debian packages. Namely the installation froze after restarting apache2, while the installation seemed to have succeeded as the websites were accessible. When I reloaded apache instead of restarting, the installation ran through but the websites could not be found.
After endless googling, I found that the debian gallery packages used to suffer the same problem and that it was fixed. So I examined the source. What triggered the problem is an apache installation that’s not properly configured. Namely, if your apache complains that it cannot resolve the fully qualified hostname upon startup, then restarting apache inside my old postinst script would fail the postinst script. It has something to do with debconf waiting on some open file descriptors.
To make it short: move the db_stop to just before the apache restart and that solves the problem.