Ubuntu and OpenVPN FQDN Problems.

I have been having some weird problems with OpenVPN on my clean Ubuntu 10.10 (desktop) install whenever I connect to a remote LAN using OpenVPN. The remote LAN hosts a number of servers, all located under the domain company.local (example). Even if it connects and I can ping the remote machine that is called testserver, I can NOT ping the same server through its fully qualified domain name (FQDN) testserver.company.local. Ping would fail with the following error:

ping: unknown host testserver.company.local

Trying to lookup the FQDN with nslookup works just fine! Strange!

Now it appears that the reason is something called a MDNS (Multicast DNS) which kicks in and handles (by default) all .local domains. Looking at the file /etc/nsswitch.conf I found a line that looks like this:

hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

Apparently the '.local' extension is not sent to the DNS server for resolution if the MDNS system cant resolve it. So I went ahead and changed the line to:

hosts: files mdns4_minimal dns mdns4

I went back to the shell and ran ping testserver.company.local again, and lo-and-behold it works!

Software used:

• NetworkManager
• NetworkManager-OpenVPN
• OpenVPN
• Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop

Ubuntu PHP, PDO and MySQL

Note to self:
In order for the PDO MySQL driver to get installed, you need to install the php5-mysql package.

sudo aptitude install php5-mysql

SVN Trouble

After upgrading to the latest TortoiseSVN I started getting trouble committing changes back to the server with the following error:

'\' is not a working copy.

Downloading and testing the latest SVN command-line client yielded much the same results, only with some different messages.

After much googling I got a sneaky suspicion that there was an issue with my working-copy actually being on the root of a drive; in my case U:.

Checking everything out again, but this time at U:\wc worked perfectly.

Versions used:

• TortoiseSVN 1.6.10, Build 19898 - 64 Bit
• Subversion 1.6.12

To sum it up: Don't upgrade if you have your working copy at the root of a drive and it is currently working!

Item Assistant v0.9.7

Item Assistant version 0.9.7 has just been released to the public. This is a pure bugfix release that hopefully fixes some compatibility problems on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Also included is a bugfix from Darkbane relating to the recording of org contracts.

From the changelog:

• Fixed org city output for CharacterParser integration. Does not dump contract message on zone since it doesn't contain anything useful anyway.
• Includes UAC manifest in EXE file. Hopefully this should make some compatibility problems with Vista and 7 go away.

AO Item Assistant v0.9.6

I have just released v0.9.6 of AO Item Assistant. This release is mainly a bugfix release and fixes some critical stability and compatibility issues.

Also included are patches from Darkbane to make the application output files that can be used by his tools.

Output of the files can be controlled by the Record Stats button on the toolbar.

Here is the official changelog:

• Changed link to AO Mainframe.
• Updated SQLite to version 3.6.22 to resolve some issues.
• Fixed database parser bugs. The symptom was that the application was unable to track certain items.
• Application now outputs files that can be opened with the CharacterParser application.