Note to self: Always make a copy of your boot sectors using dd first. 
Note to world: These commands will only work if you have a separate boot partition. 



# take note of your Linux partitions (/dev/sde3 == /, /dev/sde1 = /boot in my case)

fdisk -l 

# Mount Linux partitions using your live installer cd / usb key: 

mount /dev/sde3 /mnt
mount /dev/sde1 /mnt/boot

# re-install grub to /dev/sda

grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/boot /dev/sda 

Source(s):
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Installing

While lineage claims that the update process is mostly automatic on the Galaxy S III (gt-9300i), I found that after downloading an update and rebooting I ended up in my TWRP boot screen, with nothing much automatic going on at all.

It took me a while to determine the storage location of the downloaded updates (that much worked I’m happy to report), and it seems that for me (LineageOS 14.1) they end up on the internal SD card in a directory called

/data/lineageos_updates

The trick was to use the “up one level” function in TWRP’s image selection to actually see the root level of the internal SD card.

Then, all I needed to do was to select the most recent update (it’s in zip format so you may need to switch the image / zip display in TWRP’s “install” screen, flash it (apparently you don’t have to wipe the cache for it to work), reboot the system and wait about 15 minutes, and hey presto!, here’s my most recent Lineage OS update running fine on my S III.

Caveat: During the initial migration from CM13 to Lineage 14.1, I found the system would not boot properly if I chose to select the “SuperSU” package as offered by the Lineage OS installer. Not choosing to install that package would allow the system to boot properly.

I hope this helps you updating and keeping current your beloved GT-9300i phone!

(c) stackhpc

Our openstack pike installation crashed after a couple of days with tons of error messages in /var/log/mariadb/maria.log in the form of

Error in accept: Bad file descriptor

Some googling  hinted at mariadb running out of open files, but I had some problems getting to grips how to set the number of open files for mariadb 10.1.20 (used by the rdo openstack-pike) on a CentOS 7 system, so here’s for posterity:

1)increase the ulimit in /etc/security/limits.conf as usual:

* hard nofile 1024000
* soft nofile 1024000

2) create the file (if it doesn’t exist, otherwise edit the existing file) /etc/systemd/system/mariadb.service.d/limits.conf 

and add the following lines

[Service]
LimitNOFILE=1024000

2a) reload systemd

# systemctl daemon-reload

3) restart mariadb

# systemctl restart mariadb.service

4) check the results

# mysql -pXXXXXXXX mysql

MariaDB [mysql]> show global variables like 'open%';
+------------------+---------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+------------------+---------+
| open_files_limit | 1024000 |
+------------------+---------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

5) Enjoy a hopefully crash-free OpenStack Pike setup 😉

Getting letsencrypt to run on an ancient CentOS  or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 system (they still tend to appear in the wild from time to time) can be a major headache. I took some notes during the setup, I hope you find the useful (you'll need some basic Unix admin skills in order to follow this recipe, so caution is advised as you go through the procedure). 

Sources: 

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23548188/how-do-i-compile-python-3-4-with-custom-openssl



Important: You'll need to use Python 2.7.8, anything beyond that version will
die with an invalid certificate error during the certbot setup phase. 



# compile openssl from source:

mkdir -p /server/src && cd /server/src

wget https://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-1.0.1t.tar.gz


tar xvzf openssl-1.0.1t.tar.gz && cd openssl-1.0.1t

./config --prefix=/server/openssl-1.0.1t shared --openssldir=/server/openssl-1.0.1t/openssl


make depend && make && make install

# create a softlink for convenience 

ln -s /server/openssl-1.0.1t /server/openssl

# Get Python 2.7.8

cd /server/src && wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.11/Python-2.7.8.tgz


tar xvzf Python-2.7.8.tar.gz

cd python-2.7.8

# set up compile environment

export LDFLAGS=-"Wl,-rpath=/server/openssl/lib -L/server/openssl/lib -L/server/openssl/lib64/"

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/server/openssl/lib/:/server/openssl/lib64"

export CPPFLAGS="-I/server/openssl/include -I/server/openssl/include/openssl"

./configure --prefix=/server/python-2.7.8

make && make install

# create softlink, adjust PATH

ln -s /server/python-2.7.8 /server/python; export PATH=/server/python/bin:$PATH

# install pip in new python version

wget --no-check-certificate https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py

python2.7 get-pip.py

# install virtualenv, wheel

pip install virtualenv wheel

# git-clone certbot (latest version)

 cd /server/src/ ; git clone https://github.com/certbot/certbot

# Request a certificate manually (certonly)

cd certbot; ./letsencrypt-auto certonly --manual -d my.server.tld 

# configuring your webserver of choice is left as an exercise for the reader.

I really don’t like web forums all that much, I think they all suck in one way or another and I really yearn for the good old USENET days when everybody was free to use their reader of choice… well, those were the days.

With “vBulletin” being a vey prolific and widespread software for many forums / fora / forae I visit regularly, I wanted to bring some comfort back to browsing them by adding some simple keyboard navigation using some javascript I freely “borrowed” from the web sites out there.

Here’s the result:

“n” – Search for new posts

“g” – go to the first post in the list of new posts

“j/k” – navigate forward / backward in the pages of a thread and / or search results

Cut & Paste the script below and save it to a location of your choice, then you can use the  “tampermonkey” extension for Chrome and other browsers to enable these features (chrome stopped accepting non-store based extensions a year ago for whatever reasons they saw fit, tampermonkey helps to get chrome back under the user’s control)

Add the URLs of your favourite forums to the script and import it into tampermonkey (some niftier form of configuration may be on the cards, but I’m lazy so feel free to add it yourself if you want to).

I hope you find this script useful, enjoy keyboard navigation in vB! 😉

VBB “What’s new” user Script

// ==UserScript==
// @name VBB Show new posts
// @namespace http://www.schuerkamp.de/greasemonkeyhacks/
// @description Adds a "whats new" search link and some shortcuts to vbb forum pages
// @description Download URL: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1983539/isi_whatsnew.user.js
// ##### ADD THE URL of your vB forums below ##################
// @include http*://*isiforums.net/*
// @include http*://*www.bmsforum.org/*
// 
// ==/UserScript==

var EuropeanDateFormat=1; 
var newlink = document.createElement('a');
var todays_posts = document.createElement('a');
newlink.href = 'search.php?do=getnew&contenttype=vBForum_Post';
todays_posts.href = 'search.php?do=getdaily&contenttype=vBForum_Post';
tn = document.createTextNode(' Show new posts ');
newlink.appendChild(tn);
tn2 = document.createTextNode(' Show todays posts');
todays_posts.appendChild(tn2);

var footer = document.getElementById('footer_links');

if (footer) {
 footer.appendChild(newlink);
 footer.appendChild(todays_posts); 
}

// quick hack to set a default email address
from = document.getElementById('it_from_3');
if (from) {
 from.value="beta-applications@imagespaceinc.com"; 
}

if (EuropeanDateFormat == 1) {
 var dates = document.getElementsByClassName('date');
 for (var i = 0 ; i < dates.length ; i++) {
 var post_date = dates[i].innerText;
 // check if there's a year string in the -2012 notation (will stop working in 2100 ;-) 
 if (post_date.indexOf("-20") != -1 ) {
 year = post_date.substring(6, 10);
 month = post_date.substring(0, 2);
 day = post_date.substring(3, 5);
 var new_date = ""; 
 dates[i].innerText = year + "/" + month + "/" + day; 
 }
 } 
}

// stolen shamelessly from userscript.org's facebook key navigation
// Thanks to Droll Troll

function OnKeyUp(e)
{
 var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
 for (var i = 0 ; i < anchors.length ; i++) {
 var href = anchors[i].getAttribute('href'); 
 if (href) {
 if(href.match(/goto=newpost/)) {
 break ; 
 }
 }
 } 

 // do a search if we cannot find the "next page" link
 next_page_or_new ="search.php?do=getnew&contenttype=vBForum_Post"
 for (var i = 0 ; i < anchors.length ; i++) {
 var next_page_href = anchors[i].getAttribute('href'); 
 var title01 = anchors[i].getAttribute('title'); 
 if (title01) {
 if(title01.match(/Next Page/)) {
 next_page_or_new = next_page_href
 break ; 
 }
 }
 } 

 prev_page_or_new ="search.php?do=getnew&contenttype=vBForum_Post"
 for (var i = 0 ; i < anchors.length ; i++) {
 var prev_page_href = anchors[i].getAttribute('href'); 
 var title01 = anchors[i].getAttribute('title'); 
 if (title01) {
 if(title01.match(/Prev Page/)) {
 prev_page_or_new = prev_page_href
 break ; 
 }
 }
 } 

 key_map = {
 "N" : "search.php?do=getnew&contenttype=vBForum_Post",
 "G" : href,
 "K" : next_page_or_new, 
 "J" : prev_page_or_new, 
 "T" : 'search.php?do=getdaily&contenttype=vBForum_Post'
 }

 if (String.fromCharCode(e.keyCode) in key_map && 
 (typeof e.target.type == "undefined" || (e.target.type != "text" && e.target.type != "textarea")) && 
 !e.altKey && !e.ctrlKey && e.keyCode <= 90)
 {
 window.location.replace(key_map[String.fromCharCode(e.keyCode)])
 }
}

window.addEventListener("keyup",function(event) { OnKeyUp(event); },false)