Talk Like A Duck

I'd just noticed the other day that my MacBook was no longer mapping the caps-lock key to control. Since I, always one to jump on the latest fad, had just been playing with zsh, I thought it was involved. However, it turned out to be a little Snow Leopard Feature. The Keyboard preference pane "modifier keys" dialog now has a drop-down selection list for which keyboard, and you now have different settings for each keyboard. In other words for a laptop you can have different settings for the internal keyboard and an external keyboard (maybe even different for a usb vs. bluetooth external keyboard) Not only that but it would appear that the settings for the internal keyboard can be different depending on whether or not the external keyboard is attached.

Just a brief article to announce that I've just upgraded this blog to Typo 5.3 to 5.2. I'd run into troubles with upgrading back when my development machine was running Leopard. I just got around to trying it again, since I'd completely rebuild ruby/gems etc. I'm not sure it will, but I've got my fingers crossed that this upgrade will solve the intermittent problem of the rss/atom feeds occasionally going berzerk and ignoring article boundaries.

Today was the day to upgrade the server running this blog to Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala".

Late in the upgrade, during the process of installing and configuring the Debian packages, the upgrade hung. I had just tried to stop bind9 and given an series of error messages indicating that rndc was unable to communicate with bind9.

After waiting a while I hit control-c and was warned that this might leave the system in an inconsistent state, but I figured I had little to lose, so I clicked ok. The upgrade continued, but didn't reboot, saying that there had been a problem

I tried to start bind9 manually, both with rndc start, and /etc/init.d/bind9 start but only got bad news.

So I then tried to start it while tailing the syslog, and noticed that I was getting an error about a failure to open /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf for read. This was strange since the permissions on that file allowed reading by anyone.

A little googling eventually revealed that I was running afoul of AppArmor, something I hadn't encountered before. It turns out that Ubuntu doesn't automatically include an AppArmor profile for bind9, not sure why.

The solution seems to have been to manually install the apparmor-profile package with apt-get.

After verifying that I could manually start bind9 and talk to it with rndc, I rebooted, and as they say "so far so good."