Having heard (and seen) much about Microsoft Office 2007’s new UI, when I had the opportunity to have a look at Office 2007, I popped in the cd to check it out. That turned out to be a small nightmare.Here’s the background: the system was my g/f’s, it ran Windows XP Pro and had Office 2003 Pro installed. It’s the laptop she got with her job. Wanting to have a quick, vague look at Microsoft Office 2007, I started the setup, not wanting to go any further then the setup, as this wasn’t a system I wanted to install anything on.

The setup took a long time to load. A very, very long time. Normally, I’d worry about it, or kill it. But over the years, I, like many others, had learned that long delays were not unusual for MS’s software. So I let it run. It didn’t say much, just “loading” or something like that, no explanation of what it was doing, nothing. All I had done was start the setup, it didn’t ever ask me anything. I considered killing the process, but I didn’t want to take the risk of it leaving unpacked crap on the system, as CCleaner wasn’t installed.

Apparently, Office 2007 had detected that a previous version of office was already installed, so it’d just upgrade it. My g/f not being a technical person, this was definitely not what I wanted, as the new UI would confuse her (even more so because the new UI isn’t as intuitive as the old one, IMHO).

No problem, I thought: I’ll just use system restore. That did vaguely restore it and removed Office 2007, but every Office 2003 application I’d try to start would give me an error message saying that it couldn’t find “powerpnt.msp”, and if I wanted to locate it. I searched the drive, but as there was no powerpnt.msp to be found, I closed the dialog. After that, the application closed as well.

You’d think that “powerpnt.msp” would only apply to powerpoint. Nope, it broke excel, word, powerpoint, etc., etc. Even Internet Explorer & Windows Explorer would give the messages, but they’d at least still start after I closed the error message. Yet another reason why everything being so tightly integrated into Windows is detrimental.
So I reinstalled Office 2007 temporarily, so that documents could at least still be modified, albeit with another interface. Office 2007 applications also gave messages about powerpnt.msp, but it’d still start, luckily.

After that, I went hunting for powerpnt.msp. I found many different versions of it, apparently depending on the service pack level. All versions were refused. Searching the ‘net didn’t turn up anything relevant, either. Posting in some forums didn’t help: the end conclusion seemed to be I had to reformat.

Reformat the operating system! For a malfunctioning office application! Besides that not being an option because of the system being a corporate one, that was a ridiculous thought.

After many fruitless attempts, I finally figured out a solution:

1. Install “Windows Install Clean up“. That didn’t go as planned - it kept complaining about not being able to access startMsi.vbs. Luckily, 7-zip was able to extract the archive, so I could start the installation manually.
2. Remove office 2003.
3. Install a “Product key recovery” demo. This only shows the first part of the key (as it’s a demo), but it shows the user & company name associated with Microsoft Office 2003 (I wanted it to completely identical).
4. Use “Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder” (a free tool) to view the complete key.
5. Download Microsoft Office 2003 Professional (this being a corporate system, I didn’t have installation cd’s) and install it using the information retrieved in steps 3 -4.
6. Install the “Office Compatibility Pack“, so Office 2007 file formats are supported (should be installed automatically through “Microsoft update”, IMHO).

This was a problem that never should have happened. First, Office 2007 failed (installed itself automatically). Then, Windows System Restore failed (didn’t restore powerpnt.msp correctly). After that, Office 2003 failed (none of the applications could start because of some powerpoint file missing). And if that wasn’t enough, Internet/Windows Explorer failed as well, as it didn’t gracefully handle a file missing from an optional package.

Anyway, I hope this blog post can help someone who’s experiencing the same problems out.

By default, Debian & Ubuntu use MD5 to hash your passwords. While this is relatively secure, using Blowfish instead is (much?) better.

As I’m not a cryptographer, I have no idea how much better it is. But switching is incredibly easy, and there are no downsides, AFAIK. Follow along…

First, you need to install libpam-unix2, the pam module which uses Blowfish. This is only an apt-get away…

Next, replace ‘pam_unix.so’ by ‘pam_unix2.so’ in /etc/pam.d/common-auth, /etc/pam.d/common-account, /etc/pam.d/common-session & /etc/pam.d/common-password.

In /etc/pam.d/common-password, you also need to change ‘md5′ to ‘blowfish’.

And while you’re at it, change ‘max=8′ (still in /etc/pam.d/common-password) to something higher, like ‘max=20′. It is my understanding that this limits the max size of your password. While you can still use a password longer than 8 chars, it’ll just ignore everything after the 8th char.

Those are all the changes you need to make your system start using Blowfish. You will need to create Blowfish hashes though (obviously), so the changes only apply to newly created accounts or when you change (or re-set) your password (using ‘passwd’).

I have only basic knowledge of pam, so some of these modifications may be redundant. Or there might be an even easier way to change it - I don’t know, but these changes will most certainly make it work.

Since I’m using Debian Sid (unstable), every now and then, some stuff gets broken. I have no problem with that — using Sid, it’s expected behaviour. However, sometimes I *really* don’t have time for a broken setup, so I quit upgrading for a week or so.

The problem will be clear already to most: what with security-wise vulnerabe packages? What if that SSH version I’m not installing in fact contains a fix for a remote root exploit I’m not aware of?

So I went looking for a solution, and thought I’d found one in the debsecan package. Here’s debsecan’s description, from Debian’s page of the package:

“debsecan is a tool to generate a list of vulnerabilities which affect a particular Debian installation. debsecan runs on the host which is to be checked, and downloads vulnerability information over the Internet. It can send mail to interested parties when new vulnerabilities are discovered or when security updates become available.“

However, that’s really all it does: it just reports the package. It doesn’t upgrade them. It doesn’t even only show packages for which updates are available. It also duplicates packages a lot in the list as multiple vulnerabilities apply to them, so without using cut/awk in combination with uniq, it’s not really easy to get a clear overview of what needs upgrading.

So I set out to write a small bash script which, with the help of debsecan, would simply upgrade what packages it can. Also, it won’t upgrade packages which are marked as “on hold”. For instance, I have an old version of ettercap installed, since I’m not used to the total functionality overhaul which happened somewhere post 0.6.b. I thought it’d interest other Debian/Ubuntu users, so here it is:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# BASH script created by Ludo <ludo dot aelbrecht at gmail dot com>
# released under the GNU General Public License version 2.

#set -x #for debugging output

function checkfile()
{
for i in "$@"; do
which $i &> /dev/null

if [ ! "$?" -eq 0 ]; then
echo "error: missing $i. please install it, or check its permissions."
exit 1
fi
done
}

checkfile debsecan apt-get #our dependencies

#we need a list of all the packages which security vulnerabilities:
pkgs=$(debsecan --format packages | uniq)
pkgs=$(for i in $pkgs; do echo -n "$i "; done)

#we need a list of packages which are marked 'hold' - i.e. not allowed to upgrade
hold_list=$(dpkg --get-selections|grep hold | awk '{print $1}')

#we remove the held back packages from the list of vulnerable packages:
for i in $hold_list; do
pkgs=$(echo $pkgs | sed -e "s/$i //")
done

apt-get install $pkgs

exit 0

Hope someone can use this. (For those who don’t know, just save this in a file, chmod +x it, and place it somewhere in your $PATH, e.g. /usr/bin.)

Edit: aww great, wordpress doesn’t even preserve the indentation when I use <code> tags. AFAIK this shouldn’t matter for bash script, though. I’ve gotta say I’m very, very dissapointed by WP (not just for this reason). Makes me wonder if Blogspot wouldn’t have been the way to go.

A few months back, the Alky Project was announced. It got quite some attention in the media, blogs, etc., like this digg thread for example. The idea was the following: convert Windows binaries, so they would run on Mac and, in a later stage, on GNU/Linux. It was claimed that those converters were mostly working already, the only thing left was implement the libraries. This, of course, is an enormous work. But looking in its forum, the progress seemed there - the coders were actively working on it. The promises from the project’s founder were great:

My goal for the next 5 years is simple: Any piece of software, any platform you choose.

Now, however, the Alky website is dead. Since at least a week, until yesterday, it redirected to an apache “It works!” message. I was hoping the website was just temporarily offline, but now I’m more and more convinced the project’s dead. Which is a shame, really. Of course, there was never much hope this would work, but imagine if it did…

(If anyone has information about the project, if it just changed names or why it died or whatever, feel free to share.)

I’ve received much more requests for the prebuilt package than I originally thought — apparently this problem affects many people. As such, I’ve put the .deb package online: you can get it here.

This does raise the question however whether a tora-oracle package shouldn’t be available in Debian’s non-free section, like seems to have been done with RPMs. I would think it doesn’t pose any licensing issues. Unless of course such a package includes some of Oracle’s library files, but doesn’t it only link against them? I could be way off here though.
Should the package give you any troubles, I’d be interested to know (see my ‘about‘ page for my e-mail address, or leave a comment). If it works, I’m also interested. Especially whether it works on Ubuntu as well would be interesting to know — although I don’t see a reason why not.

(For those who haven’t read my previous entry: it contains instructions to build the package yourself, if that’s more your thing.)

Update: I’ve posted a new blog entry which contains the prebuilt package I mentioned.

Doing this is a mess. Oracle is non-free (as in freedom, not as in beer) so it can’t be included decently into Debian. It took me a few weeks to do is (not non-stop, of course, but I had to try it a couple of times). It’s a very a frustrating process — at least it was in my experience.

Why you would want this: because Oracle’s SQLplus is ridiculous on GNU/Linux, and SQL Developer (the only decent alternative I’m aware of, besides TOra) uses Java, which makes it “sluggish” on my system to say the least. There’s also Andi Albrecht’s CrunchyFrog which looked *extremely* promising, but Oracle currently isn’t supported in the latest version (because of a rewrite). I hope the developer’s still working on it, because it seemed really cool. The site is down for the moment though. I still have the older version lying around somewhere which did support Oracle, but IIRC I couldn’t get it working. Didn’t spend a lot of time on it though. So: TOra.

The problem: while Debian provides a package for TOra, it doesn’t include support for Oracle (because of the aforementioned licensing issues). You can compile it from scratch, but chances are the compilation won’t work right away. Here, I’ll describe how to modify the Debian package so that it does support TOra. These steps can be applied to standard compilation as well.

The solution:

First of all, there’s also an easy way: you can e-mail (ludo dot aelbrecht at gmail dot com) me, I’ll send you my tora-with-oracle_1.3.21-3_i386.deb. Or if you have an AMD Athlon XP CPU, I even have an optimized deb file.

And here’s the hard way…

First: add Oracle’s Debian repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
#oracle oss repository, contains Oracle XE
deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free

Next, install these: oracle-xe and oracle-xe-client. See also http://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/Oracle_Database.html - you need to install libaio. I mention this because it seems to have been a cause of trouble for some people. It didn’t pose a problem on my box though.
To clarify: oracle-xe-client is *only* the client, oracle-xe is *only* the server. For tora, you only need the client, obviously. Unless you have a remote Oracle server at your disposure, you won’t get far without the server though.

apt-get build-dep tora #get the dependencies to build it from source
cd /some/dir/to/put/sources
apt-get source tora #this will drop the source into your current dir
cd tora-<version>/

vim debian/rules #or whatever you favorite editor is
Edit the ./configure line: add “–with-instant-client” to specify you want oracle. Make sure it also reads “–without-kde”, or it won’t work. Don’t remember the exact cause, but I believe you can find it in TOra’s forums or its mailing list archives. Though I’ve seen someone reporting a working TOra with KDE + Oracle, so this might just be an old bug or whatever. Feel free to find out yourself.
debian/rules binary #this command builds it, but it probably won’t work.

(Optionally see these 3 URLs about building it:
http://www.benpinter.net/article.php?story=20051208034638928
http://gudangberas.wordpress.com/2006/08/08/rebuilding-tora-with-oracle-support/
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=189381&page=2)

The ubuntu URL has the clue: we need to specify –with-oracle-includes & -with-oracle-libraries.

Go to Oracle’s instantclient download page for GNU/Linux.
Get these:
*Instant Client Package - SQL*Plus (instantclient-sqlplus-linux32-10.2.0.2-20060331.zip)
*Instant Client Package - Basic (instantclient-basic-linux32-10.2.0.2-20060331.zip)
*Instant Client Package - SDK (instantclient-sdk-linux32-10.2.0.2-20060331.zip)
Unzip them in some dir (all in the same dir). They will overwrite some files - it’s okay, we just want the extra files they provide.
Say you unzipped them in /usr/src/oracle, then now you have a dir called /usr/src/oracle/instantclient_10_2/ with all the files in.

Go back to modifying debian/rules’s ./configure line.
The line should look like this:
./configure --prefix=/usr --with-instant-client --without-rpath --disable-new-check --without-kde --with-oracle-includes=/usr/src/oracle/instantclient_10_2/sdk/include/ --with-oracle-libraries=/usr/src/oracle/instantclient_10_2 --enable-libsuffix=

We’re almost there.

You need an “/etc/oracle/tnsnames.ora”.
Mine looks like this for Oracle XE (express edition), which is the one you get for free (if you have another version, I suppose you know how that file works):

# tnsnames.ora Network Configuration File:
#!!!IMPORTANT: dax is my hostname, change it to yours.

XE =
(DESCRIPTION =
(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = dax)(PORT = 1521))
(CONNECT_DATA =
(SERVER = DEDICATED)
(SERVICE_NAME = XE)
)
)

EXTPROC_CONNECTION_DATA =
(DESCRIPTION =
(ADDRESS_LIST =
(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = IPC)(KEY = EXTPROC_FOR_XE))
)
(CONNECT_DATA =
(SID = PLSExtProc)
(PRESENTATION = RO)
)
)

You also need to set $ORACLE_HOME correctly. For compiling, you need to set it to the client’s dir, not the server.
Two options:
(1) Find the directory to set it to. Mine is /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/client, so I just run: export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/client
(2) Run this script: /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/client/bin/oracle_env.sh (or do a “locate oracle_env.sh” if it’s not there for you, and make sure you select the script from the client dir, not from the server dir).
Last (I promise!), you need LD_LIBRARY set correctly:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/client/lib/:/usr/src/oracle/instantclient_10_2/:/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
Then run ldconfig. (Yes, I know that that LD path is probably overkill, chances are only the first directory is needed, but after all I’ve been through to get here, I really don’t want to find out which dirs are optional. I frankly couldn’t care less. (Well actually I could - I’m a geek after all. I just don’t want to go through all the crap once more to find out. So if anyone knows, feel free to e-mail me.))

Now you can do a “debian/rules binary” to compile it. This should produce a .deb file.

It’s possible the compilation fails on producing an occi. Check config.log for the error. If it’s about clntsh: you need to symbolically link libclntsh.so to libclntsh.so.xx.x. Do a “locate clntsh”, and create the links everywhere the file appears. See also http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-list/2004-December/msg07767.html.

After fixing that, do another “debian/rules binary”. Everything should work now. If you still encounter problems, feel free to contact me.

Install the .deb and start TOra. Select Oracle as the type (obviously), and as the database name pick XE (unless you used something else in tnsnames.ora, I guess). Of course the Oracle daemon should be running by now, so if it isn’t yet, you should run /etc/init.d/oracle-xe to start it. Use “sysv-rc-conf” to make it load at boottime (or to disable it from starting at boottime).

Other stuff you can consult if it doesn’t work out, or for general information (there’s no logic in the order below, I’m just adding everything from my oracle / tora browsing session):

http://www.rittman.net/2004/02/24/has-anyone-got-tora-124-on-linux-working-against-oracle-database-10g/
http://st-curriculum.oracle.com/tutorial/DBXETutorial/index.htm
http://www.puschitz.com/
http://bits-and-bytes.blogspot.com/2005/10/frustrating-toraqt-bug.html
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?max_rows=25&style=ultimate&offset=25&forum_id=52737
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=2595
http://www.sage.org/pubs/13_oracle/
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/archived/Oracle-8-HOWTO/
http://rpmseek.com/rpm-pl/tora-oracle.html?hl=com&cx=2201:T:0 (Here you can find TOra RPMs with Oracle support - you can try converting them using alien, but I didn’t have much luck at that.)