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There is a vulnerability in the sendmail delivery agent of the
Mail gem that could allow an attacker to pass arbitrary commands
to the system.

Versions Affected: Versions 2.2.14 or earlier
Not affected: Any application not using sendmail delivery
Fixed Versions: 2.2.15 or later

More information in the original post here

Problem
Your Logitech Quickam doesn’t work with Skype in Mandriva.

Solution
Start your skype instance from the comand line using the following:

D_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so /path_to/skype/skype_static-2.1.0.81/skype &

Problem

When you try to run the console rails c in a new Rails 3.0.3 application, and when you use rvm, you get the following error:

no such file to load -- readline (LoadError)

Solution

It’s quite like likely that the readline libraries are missing from your installation. To find out which ones go to the directory that the error is indicating (ie):

cd ~/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.8.7-p299

and then to the following:

cd ext/readline

then run the following:

ruby extconf.rb

If you get something like:
checking for readline/readline.h... no
checking for editline/readline.h... no

then you are probably missing the neccessary header files for readline.
so install them in your system (ie in Mandriva):

sudo urpmi readline-dev,

In Debian you will need to install libreadline5-dev and maybe libncurses5-dev (apt-get install).

When the package is installed successfully run the following again:

ruby extconf.rb
make
sudo make install

You should now be able to go back to your project and run rails c with no errors.

Problem
You want to examine some big log files (ie Rails production files), on the command line in Linux but they are quite big.

Solution
You can use cat and grep to look for a specific part in the log files. You can also use grep with the A and B parameters to specify how many lines you want to include before and after the search text, but maybe you want to have chunks of the logs to examine. In that case you can use split to split them up in smaller files:

split --bytes=10M input_log_file.log [output_files_or_directory]

In that case you will be splitting your log file on size (–bytes variable), so you can decide depending on the total size of the log file how many files you want. The output files or directory is optional and if you leave it empty it will create the files in your current directory.

You can also split by the number of lines you want in each file like:

split --lines=15000 input_log_file.log [output_files_or_directory]

Problem
You are hosting your MySQL server in a shared host which is in a different country from your application’s local timezone, and you cannot change the MySQL system timezone, but you would like to use sysdate for date comparisons.

Solution
In your SQL query that you use for comparing with the system date/time, use the convert_tz function in MySQL, using the appropriate local time zone (ie Europe/London):
convert_tz(sysdate(),'SYSTEM','Europe/London')

Problem
You want to deploy your project in a server (dreamhost), that also hosts your git repository. When you try to do that by only setting the set_repository, you get errors like ‘permission denied, please try again’, even though if you try to checkout the git repository on your server works.

Solution
Set your :repository as a file in your host as in:
set :repository, "file:///home/username/git_on_server/projects/repo_name.git"

Then also set up your local_repository, as in:
set :local_repository, "user_name@server_domain_name:/home/username/git_on_server/projects/repo_name.git"

Problem
You want to deploy your rails application using Passenger in Dreamhost, but on a staging environment. It doesn’t work just changing your Capistrano recipe or your environment files, as the default environment for passenger is ‘production’.

Solution
Looking at the Passenger documentation here, there are four different ways of achieving that by changing the RailsEnv option. If you don’t want to change the Apache configuration files, and as long as the option AllowOverride is on (which should be on Dreamhost), then you would need to create an .htaccess file in your application’s public folder with the following:

RailsEnv staging

Problem
The video playback in mplayer (or any other media player), in Mandriva 2010.0 plays too fast.

Solution
According to the errata in the Mandriva website here you only have to add the following to your ~/.mplayer/config file:

vo=x11

Problem
You have left a message in a squirrel mail account in dreamhost for a long time and it gets archived by dreamhost. According to the dreamhost you should be able to get to your archived messages, by looking at the old-messages folder.
The problem is that just by logging in to squirrel mail the folder doesn’t get displayed on the left hand side.

Solution
Log on to squirrel mail and go to ‘Folders’ menu at the top.
In the ‘Create Folder’ put ‘test’ or anything that you would like in the text box, and make sure that in the dropdown box you select ‘INBOX.old-messages’, so your newly created folder is a subfolder of the ‘inbox/old-messages’ folder.
Create the subfolder, refresh the page, and in your left hand the old-messages folder should appear.

Problem
You want to add the Google calendar tab in your thunderbird but you don’t want to use the standard google mail calendar, but the one setup for your domain.

Solution
Install the Google Calendar add on in Thunderbird:

Tools -> Addons -> Get Add-ons and then search for Calendar (Google Calendar Tab)

The when thunderbird is restarted go and change the default domain for logging in to the calender in:

Tools – Add-ons -> Extensions

and select the Preferences in the Google Calendar Tab.

from there select the ‘Google Apps for your domain’ and then change the URL into something like:

‘http://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/your_domain_hosted_with_google