Stefan Helander

VMware ESXi 5.5 guest freezes randomly [solved]

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On a VMware 5.5 ESXi host I suddenly experienced guest machined that hanged or froze. I had to reset the guest machine to get it up and running again. In the Events tab I could see entries like below at the time of freezing.

Lost access to volume 51d15c1a-17706da4-0ae6-001f29e5c998 (datastore1) due to connectivity issues. Recovery attempt is in progress and outcome will be reported shortly.
info
2018-10-11 04:03:50
datastore1

Device mpx.vmhba1:C0:T0:L0 performance has deteriorated. I/O latency increased from average value of 69864 microseconds to 4383213 microseconds.
warning
2018-10-11 04:03:50
localhost

I started to check my disks and raid as I suspected a failing disk, but the disks and raid was in working order.

It turned out that the problem started around the time I did a guest snapshot. The datastore had about 14 GB free space out of it’s 924 GB capacity and this seems to be to0 little. After deleting a couple of snapshots the problem disappeared.

When the snapshots had been deleted, I also had to consolidate some of the virtual machines disks.

Stefan Helander

APS package installation_task stuck in ISPConfig3

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When trying to install an APS package on a ISPConfig3 system, the package was never installed and the status “installation_task” remained for the site I tried to install a package.

Investigating /var/log/ispconfig/cron.log revealed:

PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function curl_init() in /usr/local/ispconfig/server/lib/classes/aps_installer.inc.php:627

This problem can occur when curl is not installed on the target server, but that was not the problem in this case.

The server had been upgraded to Ubuntu 16.05 which runs PHP 7.0 instead of PHP 5. Curl was installed but the problem was that php7.0-curl was missing. The problem was resolved by:

sudo apt-get install php7.0-curl

The next issue that occured according to the logs was:

PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Class 'ZipArchive' not found in /usr/local/ispconfig/server/lib/classes/aps_installer.inc.php:106

This problem was resolved by:

sudo apt-get install php7.0-zip

After this nothing more had to be done. The ISPConfig cron now successfully installed the APS package automatically.

Stefan Helander

iPhone, iPad or Mac computers unable to connect to wifi network

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The Apple products, iPhone, iPad and Mac computers sometimes has problems when connecting to a wifi network where other devices have no problems. The problem seems to be in the encryption used.

Make sure the router doesn’t have WPA/WPA2 mixed mode enabled, i.e. set it to WPA2 only. If encryption is configurable, use AES (not TKIP or TKIP/AES).

You can also read more about Apple recommendet wifi router settings here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202068

Stefan Helander

Installing Samsung Kies 3 on Windows 10 – error message “Side by side configuration is incorrect”

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When trying to install Samsung Kies 3 on a Windows 10 machine, the error message “Side by side configuration is incorrect” was displayed.

The reason to this error is that the Visual C++ 2008 runtime is not installed.

To solve the problem you need to download and install Microsoft Visual C++ 2008.
Download it from these links (directly from Microsoft), install them and then retry the Kies installation:

 

 

Stefan Helander

No email or folders visible when using IMAP account with Outlook 2013 or Office 365

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The problem seems to be caused by two updates from Microsoft; KB2837618 and KB2837643.

There is a simple solution though:

  • Right click on the affected account in the left pane and select IMAP Folders
  • Below the list of folders, uncheck the box for “When displaying hierarchy in Outlook, show only the subscribed folders.“
  • Exit Outlook 2013 / Office 365 and restart it
  • At the next synchronization the folders and mail will (hopefully) be visible
Stefan Helander

10 years anniversary in supplying technical solutions!

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Today, august 14, the site celebrates 10 years of supplying technical solutions to tech nerds all over the world! The first post was written on august 14, 2008. Happy anniversary to nerdia.net!

Do you have technical solutions or other things you find would be suitable to publish here – send me a message through the contact form.

Stefan Helander

Windows 10 desktop disappeared

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A Windows 10 user contacted me because the desktop had disappeared.

The first thing to check is if Windows is in “Tablet mode” which disables the desktop.

  • Go to the Control panel
  • Search for “tablet” and click on “Table mode settings”
  • In the “When I sign in” change from “Use the apropriate mode for my hardware” to “Use desktop mode”
  • Log out and log back in again

If this doesn’t help the user profile might have become broken. In this case, the solution is (description below is just short notes taken from my memory):

  • Go to the Control panel and select accounts
  • Create a new account
  • Using a user with administrative rights, copy the content from the users folders like desktop, documents etc to the new user’s folder.
  • Log in using the new user
Ubuntu DesktopCanonical Ltd
Stefan Helander

Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04 and 17.04 Unity, Dash and Launcher missing

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If you end up missing the menu etc in Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04 and 17.04, i.e. you only see the desktop but nothing more. You can’t even restart the machine.

It can be resolved like this:

  • Right click on the desktop and select “Start a new terminal”
  • In the terminal window run the following commands;
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
    sudo apt-get install --reinstall unity
    sudo shutdown -r now

 

PrestaShop
Stefan Helander

Random product added to cart along with selected product in PrestaShop [solved]

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Using PrestaShop 1.6.1.18, this was an older shop that had been offline for a couple of years. It had been upgraded in steps from PrestaShop 1.4 via 1.5 to 1.6. While testing it before relaunch of the shop a problem was discovered. Sometimes when adding a product to the shopping cart, another random product was added. When testing the shop in incognito/private mode this happened more frequent.

It turned out to be a discrepancy between cart ID:s in the two tables ps_cart and ps_cart_product.

Solution:

  1. Use phpMyAdmin or similar to open your PrestaShop database.
  2. Go to the table ps_cart_product, make sure it is ordered by the id_cart column and go to the last page.
  3. Make a note of the highest id_cart value.
  4. Go to the table ps_cart, make sure it is ordered by the id_cart column and go to the last page.
  5. Compare this table’s highest id_cart value with the one you found in ps_cart_product. It will probably be a lower number and this is what is causing the problem. When a visitor puts something in a cart, a new row is created in ps_cart with id_cart value auto incremented but there is already a row in ps_cart_product with this id_cart value from a previous visitor.
  6. Add a new row to ps_cart and in the id_cart field enter the number of the highest value you found in ps_cart_product. Then save the row.
  7. You will probably see some error message about invalid or missing fields but that will be ok as long as the row is saved.

 

PrestaShop
Stefan Helander

How to move a PrestaShop 1.6 from one domain to another (resolving redirect problems)

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There are several descriptions online on how to do this but in one occasion, even though I followed the instructions carefully it kept redirecting me to the old domain name. In my particular case the culprit was that the site used file system cache which was active before the move.

The following procedure fixed my problem. The base of the instructions come from the PrestaShop site with my additions below.

  1. Put the site in Maintenance mode.
  2. Copy all files from the old site (domain) to the new using for example a FTP program.
  3. Dump the old site database to a file and import the database on the new server.
  4. Edit config/settings.inc.php and update the values for _DB_SERVER, _DB_NAME, _DB_USER, _DB_PASSWD and you might need to adjust _PS_DIRECTORY value.
  5. Using phpMyAdmin, go to the table ps_store_url and update the record regarding domain name and physical uri.
  6. Using phpMyAdmin, go to the table ps_configuration and find the records for column name with the records for PS_SHOP_DOMAIN, PS_SHOP_DOMAIN_SSL and __PS_BASE_URI__ and update the values corresponding to the new domain name and base uri.
  7. Using FTP (or other preferred method) clear all content except index.php of the ‘/cache/smarty/compile’ and ‘/cache/smarty/cache’ directories.
  8. Using FTP (or other preferred method) clear all content of the ‘/cache/cachefs’ directory.
  9. Log in to the backend and disable Maintenance mode.