Today I did some digging around and found a fwe things.  One thing I noticed in dmesg was this:

[ 42.256178] wlan0: deauthenticating from 38:60:77:84:3b:f1 by local choice (reason=3) .  While I don’t knwo if this is related it did spur me to do some more focused searches.  In the end I think I have a solution here that is working great as I just watched 9 streaming videos at a steady 500kbs without interruption.  It’s doesn’t even feel natural because it’s been so long since I’ve enjoyed uninterrupted video.  Anyways here’s what I did

Completely uninstalled network-manager.  I’ve read that simply shutting down the server isn’t enough, you need to take this fucker out all together.. I’ve been using WICD and disabling WIFI on the Network Manager but always kept it on just because it seemed that 1 out of 20 networks worked better with it.  Well I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it but from what I’ve heard getting rid of this alone is enough to solve most wifi issues

Second thing I did was to completely disable IPV6.  Now this is painful as I really want to be on the transition towards this protocol for many reasons but after doing a little research, seeing that it only has a .85% adoption rate I’m ok not using it for the time being.  So how to disable IPV6 you ask?  Well if I remember correctly I completely removed the module in the past so lsmod reveals no IPV6 related stuff but apparently this isn’t enough.  On top of that I commented out the lines in my /etc/host file that had to do with ipv6.

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
#::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
#fe00::0 ip6-localnet
#ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
#ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
#ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

The next thing I did was specify that IPV6 should be off in my /etc/modprobe.d/aliases.conf file like this:

alias net-pf-10 ipv6 off

You’ll probably have a line like this:

# alias net-pf-10 ipv6

and you’ll need to uncomment it and add an ‘off” to the end.  After that I restarted the machine and everything was dandy.. Hope that helps anyone else going through this crapola

Of course my first thoughts were that this was a linux issue as sound cards and linux don’t play so nice to say the least so I rebooted into windows and lo and behold the problem persisted.  I could see the volume levels going u pand down with the music I played but the laptop was dead silent.

It took me a while of working ins ilence and just assuming that my sound card was fried to think about unplugging the whole machine, taking out the battery and then turning it back on again.. After doing so I’m happy to report that I have sound again and the laptop is back up to being it’s spiffy self!  Huzzah!

But in the words of Lavar Burton: Don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself HERE

Some samples of their themes

Unsupported codec for output stream #0.0

At first I thought this was the result of my missing the libavcodec packages but upon closer inspection and a little forum reading I realized that the error I was seeing (#0.0 not #0.1).  #0.0 refers to VIDEO and not audio as I had previous thought and so installing the audio packages did nothing to resolve my issue.

So, how to solve this problem you ask? Well that’s as simple as adding a nice little switch and extra optino in there that looks a little bit like this:

-acodec copy

Solves the problem immediate.. From what I understand it just means that if the codec doesn’t exist to decode the video ffmpeg can use a copy of one instead.  Easy peasy lemonsqueezy

Oh and for anyone wanting to know how to extract audio from a video file it’s as simple as this:

ffmpeg -i inputfile.avi -acodec copy -ab 256 outputfile.avi

Today I finally decided to tackle it and it turned out to be easier than I thought.  All you need to do is go into Configure display settings where you can set your resolutions and such, I just changed the resolution and click on apply and it removed that additional desktop space and got me back down to the proper desktop size for one monitor.  Huzzah!

After fiddling with it for a bit I went into the WICD settings for that connection and specified static IP’s for the top 2 DNS entries.  Specifically 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 .  After reconnecting with those settings in place I was able to ping domains again(and consequentially write this post)

So as some of you may or may not know linux allocates memory a little differently than windows and it may be a little disconcerting at first to rely on ‘top’ for your memory usage breakdown as it starts to look like there is a big leak happening somewhere.  This isn’t the case and I’ll take a quick paragraph to explain how it works.

At the end of the day the way that RAM works is that if it isn’t being used it’s being wasted and linux being as amazing as it is has a strict policy about wasting as little as possible so it uses the ram extensively to cache nearly anything it can get it’s hands on.  What ends up happening is that after a program is run the output or information from that program are cached so that every subsequent time it’s run the information can just be pulled out of the cache which is stored in RAM instead, giving it about 1000x increase in read speed for future executions.   Pretty cool eh?  Yea, well unless you don’t know this, setup a new production server in linux, turn it on for the first time and sit there watching top report your free memory going down and down and down and down until it reaches a read out like this:

Mem:   8197228k total,  6219696k used,  1977532k free when just 2 hours ago the same server running on FreeBSD was reporting 90% of it’s ram being free.

The thing to note of course is how big the Cache is.. In my case here it’s about 4.8GB large, meaning there’s all sorts of data stored in there that apache is reloading over and over and over again that is lightning fast.  Already I’m loving this new Debian server

So how do I see my real memory usage?

#free -m

This nifty little command will show you the memory usage with and without caching taken into account resulting in something like this:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 8005 6078 1926 0 487 4675
-/+ buffers/cache: 915 7089
Swap: 11442 4 11438

Telling me that I actually am only using 915MB of ram, not 6GB of it and I’ve got over 7GB of my available 8GB of memory to spare!  At this point you can breath a sigh of relief and give thanks that you are running an OS that is taking full advantage of all this juicy RAM that you have, which would otherwise just be sitting there taking up space

1. Install screen – apt-get install screen
2. run your commands from inside screen.  If you need to search through 1000′s of lines of output you’ll probably need to adjust the output buffer size by adding this line to your ~/.screenrc: defscrollback 5000
3. After you’ve run your command(s) and it/they’ve spit out line upon line of output you need to go into copy mode to start searching through.. You do this with C-a [ .  I just did that to be a dick as I’ve seen it everywhere and no one bothers to explain what the bloody hell C-a is.  It means Ctrl+a , shorthand for those people too lazy to type the trl in Ctrl I guess..  Anyways press Ctrl-a and then [ and then you’ll be in copy mode
4. Search backwards by pressing ? and then typing in your search term.  You can then press ‘n’ to go to the next instance
5. Search forwards by pressing / and again n will go to the next instance

Easy peasy and way more 1337 than using ctrl-f .

PS – another really handy command in screen is Ctrl-a ? which brings up all the commands.  Enjoy and happy searching

NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown Relay access denied; from

After tonnes and tonnes of trial and error I narrowed it down to /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf , much thanks to this post : http://www.linuxmail.info/postfix-smtp-auth-dovecot-sasl/

In the end I needed

mechanisms = plain login

near the end of my .conf file so after the edit it looked like this:

auth default {
user = root

passdb sql {
args = /etc/dovecot/dovecot-sql.conf
}

userdb static {
args = uid=5000 gid=5000 home=/home/vmail/%d/%n allow_all_users=yes
}

socket listen {
master {
path = /var/run/dovecot/auth-master
mode = 0600
user = vmail
}

client {
path = /var/spool/postfix/private/auth
mode = 0660
user = postfix
group = postfix
}
}
mechanisms = plain login
}

Yay, hopefully this is the last of the problems with this mail server

1. Location       Result  min. rrt        avg. rrt        max. rrt        IP
2.  Singapore, Singapore:  Okay    189.9   206.1   245.7   65.39.222.41
3.  Amsterdam2, Netherlands:       Checkpoint temporarily not available    –       –       –       -
4.  Florida, U.S.A.:       Okay    76.4    77.0    78.0    65.39.222.41
5.  Amsterdam3, Netherlands:       Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
6.  Hong Kong, China:      Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
7.  Sydney, Australia:     Okay    183.2   183.6   184.7   65.39.222.41
8.  München, Germany:   Okay    187.3   187.7   188.0   65.39.222.41
9.  Cologne, Germany:      Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
10.  New York, U.S.A.:      Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
11.  Amsterdam1, Netherlands:       Okay    169.7   170.1   171.2   65.39.222.41
12.  Stockholm, Sweden:     Okay    0.0     0.1     0.1     ::1
13.  Santa Clara, U.S.A.:   Okay    25.4    26.1    26.6    65.39.222.41
14.  Vancouver, Canada:     Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
15.  Madrid, Spain: Okay    181.6   184.8   189.4   65.39.222.41
16.  Padova, Italy: Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
17.  Austin, U.S.A.:        Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
18.  Amsterdam, Netherlands:        Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
19.  Paris, France: Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
20.  Melbourne, Australia:  Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
21.  Shanghai, China:       Okay    162.4   163.4   163.8   65.39.222.41
22.  Copenhagen, Denmark:   Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
23.  Lille, France: Checkpoint temporarily not available    –       –       –       -
24.  San Francisco, U.S.A.: Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
25.  Zurich, Switzerland:   Okay    180.7   181.1   181.5   65.39.222.41
26.  Mumbai, India: Okay    287.9   288.6   289.4   65.39.222.41
27.  Chicago, U.S.A.:       Okay    0.0     0.0     0.1     ::1
28.  Nagano, Japan: Okay    131.0   131.2   132.0   65.39.222.41
29.  Haifa, Israel: Okay    247.1   247.8   248.3   65.39.222.41
30.  Auckland, New Zealand: Okay    185.1   185.7   187.1   65.39.222.41
31.  Antwerp, Belgium:      Okay    161.4   161.9   162.7   65.39.222.41
32.  Groningen, Netherlands:        Okay    184.5   185.1   185.8   65.39.222.41
33.  Moscow, Russia:        Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
34.  Dublin, Ireland:       Okay    160.0   160.6   161.3   65.39.222.41
35.  Oslo, Norway:  Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
36.  Kharkov, Ukraine:      Okay    204.0   204.0   204.0   65.39.222.41
37.  Vilnius, Lithuania:    Okay    206.8   209.4   211.0   65.39.222.41
38.  Bucharest, Romania:    Okay    194.4   195.2   197.2   65.39.222.41
39.  Bangkok, Thailand:     Okay    222.7   223.5   225.3   65.39.222.41
40.  Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia:        Okay    188.3   189.7   193.3   65.39.222.41
41.  Jakarta, Indonesia:    Okay    294.1   294.5   294.9   65.39.222.41
42.  Cape Town, South Africa:       Okay    298.8   299.3   299.6   65.39.222.41
43.  Glasgow, United Kingdom:       Okay    150.5   150.9   151.3   65.39.222.41
44.  Lisbon, Portugal:      Okay    188.3   195.4   200.1   65.39.222.41
45.  Chicago, U.S.A.:       Okay    0.0     0.0     0.1     ::1
46.  Dallas, U.S.A.:        Okay    65.2    65.6    66.1    65.39.222.41
47.  Buenos Aires, Argentina:       Okay    204.7   204.9   205.7   65.39.222.41
48.  Istanbul, Turkey:      Okay    205.9   206.5   206.9   65.39.222.41
49.  Gdansk, Poland:        Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
50.  Beijing, China:        Okay    748.6   991.9   1,303.0 65.39.222.41
51.  Belgrade, Serbia:      Okay    159.6   177.6   196.7   65.39.222.41
52.  Toronto, Canada:       Okay    61.5    61.9    62.4    65.39.222.41
53.  Novosibirsk, Russia:   Okay    275.4   275.9   276.9   65.39.222.41
54.  Athens, Greece:        Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
55.  Frankfurt, Germany:    Okay    0.0     0.0     0.0     ::1
56.  Sofia, Bulgaria:       Okay    200.3   200.8   201.2   65.39.222.41
57.  Budapest, Hungary:     Okay    177.3   177.9   178.9   65.39.222.41
    So naturally I floundered around for an hour or two before putting two and two together and than in all of my zone files for the domains on the server I have this: @      IN      AAAA    ::1
    This is something I no doubt saw in a tutorial and just implemented.. Well it;s the cause of all of the grieve..   Removing fixed it right away but I’m still curious as to what the heck this is.  It is as I guessed the IPV6 record for the domain and obviously what was in there was a mistake.  So I could spend the time and learn about hwo to properly implement IPV6 domains but after checking on where the adoption rate is( around .40% according to http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics/) I don’t feel the pressing need to dedicate more of my life to this, although I certain will in the future.