Category Archives: troubleshooting

Stopping Gajim from autostarting OTR end-to-end encryption

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Is Gajim auto-negotiating OTR? Does that annoy you by preventing server-side message archival and message carbons being delivered to other clients you use?

  • Go to Preferences (hit ctrl+p).
  • Go to Advanced tab
  • Under Advanced Configuration Editor click Open.
  • Use search to find ‘autonegotiate_esessions’ and ‘enable_esessions’ options
  • For each account, click on value ‘Activated’ to toggle it into ‘Deactivated’.

I definitely want the option to initiate crypto via GPG and OTR. I don’t want it started automatically and preventing other useful archival that I do on my self-hosted hardware.

Streaming to YouTube Live with VLC and FFMPEG

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Let’s say you’re on OS X. (If you’re not, substitute the path to VLC executable with /usr/bin/vlc or just vlc; you could even use cvlc).

PATHTOFILE=/Users/ivucica/my_video.mp4
STREAMID=ivucica.aaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd
VLC=/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC
if [ ! -e "${VLC}" ] ; then
    VLC=vlc
fi
"${VLC}" "${PATHTOFILE}" --sout '#transcode{vcodec=FLV1,acodec=mp3,samplerate=44100}:std{access=rtmp,mux=ffmpeg{mux=flv},dst=rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/'${STREAMID}

I’ve seen a variant where vcodec is h264, acodec is aac and also vb is set to 1000.

If you want to use FFMPEG instead:

./ffmpeg -re -i "${PATHTOFILE}" -vcodec libx264 -preset veryfast -maxrate 1984k -bufsize 3968k -vf "format=yuv420p" -g 60 -acodec libmp3lame -b:a 96k -ar 44100 -f flv -s 1920x1080 rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/${STREAMID}

Where do you get the STREAMID from? Create a YouTube Live event in the Creator Studio, then create a ‘custom ingestion’, then read the settings:

YouTube Live stream id

Let’s say you haven’t been running your stream for months. I’m only guessing about what is actually happening, but the logical explanation is that something is garbage-collecting the ingestion settings without telling the UI about it. Error as follows may happen:

VLC media player 2.2.1 Terry Pratchett (Weatherwax) (revision 2.2.1-0-ga425c42)
[0000000100302968] core libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
[000000010038a3f8] avcodec access out error: Failed to open rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/ivucica.aaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd
[0000000100389aa8] stream_out_standard stream out error: no suitable sout access module for `rtmp/ffmpeg{mux=flv}://rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/ivucica.aaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd'
[0000000100389838] core stream output error: stream chain failed for `transcode{vcodec=FLV1,acodec=mp3,samplerate=44100}:std{access=rtmp,mux=ffmpeg{mux=flv},dst=rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/ivucica.aaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd}'
[000000010050f648] core input error: cannot start stream output instance, aborting

If that is the case, go and create a new custom ingestion. Or create a whole new stream. Then use the new ID where appropriate.

n.b. As of August 2015, if you’re just playing with streaming, Ustream seems to start streaming (and thus provide useful feedback) far faster than YT Live.

Gajim causing kernel lockup on startup

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Specifically, Gajim’s use of python-crypto (or something similar) has been causing the kernel to lock up for me, months ago. 100% repro rate: I would launch Gajim, and kernel would lock up on the relevant core even before Gajim showed the first window.

Trying to pinpoint it using strace, it was actually an attempt to read /proc/brcm_monitor0. I have no idea why it would try to read it, but once it did, kernel would lock up on one CPU core (seen by examining dmesg), and slowly other CPU cores would follow.

Given that I don’t actually need the Broadcom wireless card on my desktop machine (at least ever since I wired up my room), I’ve just blacklisted the wl module:

$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-IVUCICA.conf
blacklist wl

Samba AD issues are hard, hard, hard to fix

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So it looks like I did something wrong at some point while setting up a domain and Samba4 is now broken for me.

Of course this had to happen after I spent time migrating my local account to the domain account. (No, it did not go as smoothly as the sources might lead you to believe.)

So I am understandably reluctant to reprovision the machine and go through that process again, breaking who-knows-what-else by breaking the NTFS ACLs formed since.

So yeah, I’ll use this post as an outlet for complaints about this breakage:

Mar  1 00:42:17 commander samba[12250]: [2015/03/01 00:42:17.752020,  0] ../lib/util/util_runcmd.c:317(samba_runcmd_io_handler)
Mar  1 00:42:17 commander samba[12250]:   /usr/sbin/samba_dnsupdate: Traceback (most recent call last):
Mar  1 00:42:17 commander samba[12250]: [2015/03/01 00:42:17.753033,  0] ../lib/util/util_runcmd.c:317(samba_runcmd_io_handler)
Mar  1 00:42:17 commander samba[12250]:   /usr/sbin/samba_dnsupdate:   File "/usr/sbin/samba_dnsupdate", line 612, in <module>
Mar  1 00:42:17 commander samba[12250]: [2015/03/01 00:42:17.753757,  0] ../lib/util/util_runcmd.c:317(samba_runcmd_io_handler)
Mar  1 00:42:17 commander samba[12250]:   /usr/sbin/samba_dnsupdate:     get_credentials(lp)
Mar  1 00:42:17 commander samba[12250]: [2015/03/01 00:42:17.754374,  0] ../lib/util/util_runcmd.c:317(samba_runcmd_io_handler)
Mar  1 00:42:17 commander samba[12250]:   /usr/sbin/samba_dnsupdate:   File "/usr/sbin/samba_dnsupdate", line 118, in get_credentials
Mar  1 00:42:17 commander samba[12250]: [2015/03/01 00:42:17.755084,  0] ../lib/util/util_runcmd.c:317(samba_runcmd_io_handler)
Mar  1 00:42:17 commander samba[12250]:   /usr/sbin/samba_dnsupdate:     creds.set_machine_account(lp)
Mar  1 00:42:17 commander samba[12250]: [2015/03/01 00:42:17.755797,  0] ../lib/util/util_runcmd.c:317(samba_runcmd_io_handler)
Mar  1 00:42:17 commander samba[12250]:   /usr/sbin/samba_dnsupdate: RuntimeError: (-1073741275, 'NT_STATUS_NOT_FOUND')

…uh, so the machine account is missing? What? How did that happen? Is it really missing?

# samba-tool user create COMMANDER$
New Password: #DUMMYPASSWORDHERE#
Retype Password: #DUMMYPASSWORDHERE#
ERROR(ldb): Failed to add user 'COMMANDER$':  - samldb: Account name (sAMAccountName) 'COMMANDER$' already in use!

Let’s try this, found on Samba’s wiki:

samba-tool dbcheck --fix --reset-well-known-acls

Hurray, an error has been fixed! But everything is still horribly broken.

Oh look! There’s a DC diagnostics tool shipping in Windows:

C:\Users\ivucica>dcdiag /s:ds.badc0de.net /v

Directory Server Diagnosis

Performing initial setup:
   * Connecting to directory service on server ds.badc0de.net.
   Ldap search capability attribute search failed on server ds.badc0de.net,
   return value = 52

Thanks, Microsoft, that’s helpful.

So I fiddled a bit and ended up with this:

C:\Users\ivucica>dcdiag /s:commander

Directory Server Diagnosis

Performing initial setup:
   Ldap search capability attribute search failed on server commander, return
   value = 81

C:\Users\ivucica>dcdiag /s:commander.ds.MYDOMAIN

Directory Server Diagnosis

Performing initial setup:
   Ldap search capability attribute search failed on server
   commander.ds.MYDOMAIN, return value = 81

No, passing /v did not help identifying either error 52 nor 81. But that 81 is mildly googlable. Wait, it’s mentioning LDAP… Is it even running?

Oh wait, Microsoft has another diagnostics tool (of course it does)

C:\Users\ivucica>nltest /dsgetdc:ds.MYDOMAIN force /gc
Getting DC name failed: Status = 1355 0x54b ERROR_NO_SUCH_DOMAIN

Of course there is no such domain, why would there be, am I right? tcpdump revealed that UDP packets on 389 were being rejected (and nothing is listening there). And connections to localhost were failing. So let’s look at help for samba-tool dbcheck. Huh. Let’s try this:

samba-tool dbcheck --fix --reindex --scope=base

And breakage begone!

C:\Users\ivucica>nltest /dsgetdc:ds.MYDOMAIN /force /gc
           DC: \\commander.ds.MYDOMAIN
      Address: \\10.0.99.150
     Dom Guid: b066b58f-6fa9-42d6-a45a-ABCDEFABCDEF
     Dom Name: ds.MYDOMAIN
  Forest Name: ds.MYDOMAIN
 Dc Site Name: DO-AMS1
        Flags: PDC GC DS LDAP KDC TIMESERV GTIMESERV WRITABLE DNS_DC DNS_DOMAIN
DNS_FOREST
The command completed successfully

Or not?

C:\Users\ivucica>dcdiag /s:ds.badc0de.net /v

Directory Server Diagnosis

Performing initial setup:
   * Connecting to directory service on server ds.badc0de.net.
   Ldap search capability attribute search failed on server ds.badc0de.net,
   return value = 52

Back to 52. And samba_dnsupdate is still broken, and the workstation cannot administrate the DC. Because, “The server is not operational.” Thanks, Samba, and thanks, Windows, for your immensely useful error messages.

Very, very discouraging and even a bit disturbing.

Error when applying group policies on a Samba 4 AD member

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Today I ran into the following issue:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>gpupdate /force
Updating policy...

Computer policy could not be updated successfully. The following errors were encountered:

The processing of Group Policy failed. Windows attempted to read the file 
\\YOUR.DOMAIN\sysvol\YOUR.DOMAIN\Policies\{31B2F340-016D-11D2-945F-00C04FB984F9}\gpt.ini
from a domain controller and was not successful. Group Policy settings
may not be applied until this event is resolved. This issue may be transient and
could be caused by one or more of the following:
a) Name Resolution/Network Connectivity to the current domain controller.
b) File Replication Service Latency (a file created on another domain controller
 has not replicated to the current domain controller).
c) The Distributed File System (DFS) client has been disabled.
User Policy update has completed successfully.

To diagnose the failure, review the event log or run GPRESULT /H GPReport.html 
from the command line to access information about Group Policy results.

The solution is simple:

samba-tool ntacl sysvolreset

Found in a mailing list post.

Mails appearing from d1stkfactory

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If you have a Debian machine and emails appear to be coming from hostname @d1stkfactory, edit /etc/mailname and set this to your actual FQDN. Another instance where I found it locally is in /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf, which is almost certainly not read by my installation of Postfix (which does explicitly refer to /etc/mailname in one place).

This appeared on a machine running on DigitalOcean, so I presume “d” refers to DigitalOcean, and “factory” refers to their internal disk image building service. That’s just speculation though.