Solution : Skype stays always online - issue due to "cloud chats"

skype

Long story short, I was told that my Skype account is online even when I am totally sure it is not. Couple monthes I was living with that issue, while I've got some time to make an investigation

According to Skype forums this issues appeared with introdution of "cloud chats" (and new client apps, when all old clients "were banned"). Cloud chats from some clients by some means "keep your online status". In my case it was a online sessions from my Android Skype client.

Solution

Go in chat with anyone (doesn't matter who) and type this command:

/showplaces

(it this shows all your current "online" session, for me it was 3 of them !)
If you see more than one session there, then type

/remotelogout

it will logout all sessions except current one.


Ansible 1.6.7+ issue : quote variables with equal signs

I have noticed that on Ansible 1.6.10 my old stable playbooks are not working. It shows an error :
A variable inserted a new parameter into the module args. Be sure to quote variables if they contain equal signs (for example: "{{var}}").

There is a huge conversation on GitHub around different appearances of this isssue.

Solutinon

  • Rollback to Ansible <= 1.6.6 (you can find .deb packages here).
  • Or change your playbook and ad quotes around all shell string that contain "=" sign (atleast I've got such understanding while searchin the solution).

It appears that you can't do something like this now (combine actual shell command and some shell module arguments like creates)

    - name: Configure ZSH (Install oh-my-zsh)
      shell: "{{ item }}"
      with_items:
        - creates='/home/vagrant/.oh-my-zsh' su - vagrant -c 'wget https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/raw/master/tools/install.sh -O - | zsh'
        - sed -i 's/ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell"/ZSH_THEME="jreese"/' /home/vagrant/.zshrc

So with_items now strictly for typical operations with same "template". And in case like above we will need to write separate task for each step (yes I agree that was a mess doing like that... but I liked it for a quick Shell -> Ansible convertation).


Read more ...

Free site up-time monitoring services

uptime

uptimerobot.com

  • Monitors : 50
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  • Types : http(s), keyword, ping, port
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That's my choice. Atleast this blog is monitored by uptimerobot.com :)

site24x7.com

  • Monitors : 5 (from 1 location)
  • Interval : 10 min

monitor.us

  • Monitors : unlimited
  • Interval : 30 min

Free uptime monitoring via Google Docs

Very interesting trick with Google Spreadsheets scripting, not sure how long it will be available, so can't rely on it for 100%

Also there are a lot of server performance monitoring sytems with trial/limited features where simple ping uptime monitorung could be optained for free, but that is an overkill at my point of view.

If you have more free or even better services, please write it here in comments !


Linux Mint 17 "Qiana" released. How to update from Linux Mint 16.

linux mint logo

Linux Mint 17 is already released for a long time and I have just recently updated Mint 16 to 17.
Very similar as for previuos release.

sudo sed -i 's/saucy/trusty/' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo sed -i 's/petra/qiana/' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo sed -i 's/saucy/trusty/' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list
sudo sed -i 's/petra/qiana/' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list
sudo sed -i 's/saucy/trusty/' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get upgrade

Dont forget to remove gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable repo if it was enabled previuosly.
Pretty good fly so far , nothing broken (except Plank, but there was some workaround in the web) :)


Ievgen
Kuzminov "iJackUA"
Web Team Lead
at MobiDev (Kharkiv, Ukraine)
Code in Ruby and Elixir, but still love PHP. Explore ES6 and Vue.js. Explore databases, use Ubuntu and MacOS, think about IT people and management

Notes


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