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27. May 2014

Debian Linux: Update packages automatically

Filed under: Linux,Server Administration — Tags: , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 20:50

Here is how you configure automatic (security) updates on Debian:

aptitude install unattended-upgrades

Here you can configure it:

nano /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

This could look like this:

Unattended-Upgrade::Origins-Pattern {
        "origin=Debian,archive=stable,label=Debian-Security";
};
Unattended-Upgrade::Package-Blacklist {
// add packages here that need manual steps like this:
//        "vim";
}
Unattended-Upgrade::AutoFixInterruptedDpkg "true";
Unattended-Upgrade::MinimalSteps "true";
Unattended-Upgrade::InstallOnShutdown "false";
Unattended-Upgrade::Mail "root";
Unattended-Upgrade::MailOnlyOnError "true";
Unattended-Upgrade::Remove-Unused-Dependencies "true";
Unattended-Upgrade::Automatic-Reboot "false";
Acquire::http::Dl-Limit "200";

Now create the following file:

nano /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/02periodic

With this content:

// Enable the update/upgrade script (0=disable)
APT::Periodic::Enable "1";

// Do "apt-get update" automatically every n-days (0=disable)
APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";

// Do "apt-get upgrade --download-only" every n-days (0=disable)
APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages "1";

// Run the "unattended-upgrade" security upgrade script
// every n-days (0=disabled)
// Requires the package "unattended-upgrades" and will write
// a log in /var/log/unattended-upgrades
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";

// Do "apt-get autoclean" every n-days (0=disable)
APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "7";

Of course the server needs to be able to send mails so it can send mails in case of problems.

You can test it like this:

# mail -s test mail@example.com
My testmail
.
EOT

Hope this helps somebody.

Update: Some updates caused dpkg questions about changed config files and therefore failed.

For example php5-fpm did ask this:

Setting up php5-fpm (5.4.4-14+deb7u10) ...

Configuration file `/etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf'
 ==> Deleted (by you or by a script) since installation.
 ==> Package distributor has shipped an updated version.
   What would you like to do about it ?  Your options are:
    Y or I  : install the package maintainer's version
    N or O  : keep your currently-installed version
      D     : show the differences between the versions
      Z     : start a shell to examine the situation
 The default action is to keep your current version.
*** www.conf (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ? dpkg: error processing php5-fpm (--configure):
 EOF on stdin at conffile prompt

This caused PHP5-FPM to stop and all PHP sites to show an Internal Server Errror…

So you don’t run into this problem, create /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/local with this content:

Dpkg::Options {
   "--force-confdef";
   "--force-confold";
}

This tells DPKG to keep the old config file. It will create .dpkg-dist files with the package distributer’s version. More information on this can be found here.

Recommendation

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16. May 2014

Inkscape: Dialog windows do not open on multi-screen setups

Filed under: Windows — Tags: , , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 17:06

I am using a multiscreen setup with one small landscape screen and one big portrait screen.

When I try to open a dialog like the Inkscape settings or the document settings in Inkscape, it does not open. Or more precisely, I cannot see it because it is positioned outside the visible area. I have this problem with current Inkscape 0.48.4 on Windows 7 Professional 64bit.

The bug is known for some time but unfortunately not fixed.

But I found a great and easy workaround which I want to share with you here: Whenever you cannot see a window because it is offscreen, press [Windows-Key] [arrow-up-key]. This shortcut maximizes the current window and you can use it normally. This probably only works on Windows 7 and newer.

You can also use the left or right arrow-key to position the window on the left or right half of the screen.

Happy drawing! 🙂

9. May 2014

Updating to PHP 5.4 causes missing Text

Filed under: PHP,Server Administration — Tags: , , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 14:29

After updating from PHP5.3 to PHP 5.4, on some sites text was missing. No error could be found in the error log so I had to dig into the code to find out what was going on.

The root cause is that with PHP5.4, the default character set expected by htmlentites(), htmlspecialcharacters() and html_entity_decode() changed from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. So if a script passes ISO-8859-1 characters like German “Umlaute” (öäüÖÄÜß) to one of these functions without specifying the charset with the corresponding parameter, these functions will return an empty string. And unfortunately, with PHP 5.4, they also removed the error message that PHP 5.3 recorded in the logfile in this case. This makes finding the problem a lot more difficult.

So what can you do about it? You could

  1. Use PHP 5.3 😉
    Here is a blog post on downgrading to PHP 5.3. on Debian Wheezy
  2. change the used charset to UTF-8
    This might require changing the character set in files, databases or config files, depending on what is used on the site.
    I explained in a blog post how to change the charset in Typo3 to UTF-8 back in 2012.
  3. Provide ISO-8859-1 as a parameter to all calls of htmlspecialcharacters() etc.

So for the third option, what you have to do is find places like this:

htmlspecialchars($string);

And replace them with something like:

htmlspecialchars($string, ENT_COMPAT | ENT_XHML, 'ISO-8859-1');

The problem is that it’s hard to do this automatically. What is easy to do, is replace all htmlspecialchars()-calls with calls to htmlspecialchars_PHP5-3() etc. and place these functions there:

function htmlspecialchars_PHP5-3($string, $ent=ENT_COMPAT, $charset='ISO-8859-1') {
    return htmlspecialchars($string, $ent, $charset);
}

function htmlentities_PHP-5-3($string, $ent=ENT_COMPAT, $charset='ISO-8859-1') {
    return htmlentities($string, $ent, $charset);
}

function html_entity_decode_PHP-5-3($string, $ent=ENT_COMPAT, $charset='ISO-8859-1') {
    return html_entity_decode($string, $ent, $charset);
}

So just do a search & replace over all files and make sure that all scripts have a file included that contains these functions.