Evince on NFS Kills Ubuntu Desktop

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All the PCs here at the Fort­ress of Solitude run Ubuntu, so when I installed a new server it made sense to use NFS for file-sharing. I made that decision because NFS just works and is much easier to set-up than Samba Win­dows CIFS.

Everything worked well except for two bugs:

  1. Ubuntu Unity 2D would crash
  2. View­ing dir­ect­or­ies that con­tained many PDF files would freeze the desktop
The first bug had a fairly easy work­around but it took longer to track down a solu­tion for the second. Of course, I would have found the source of the prob­lem more quickly if I had just looked at the log on my cli­ent PC!:
[...] apparmor="DENIED" operation="sendmsg" parent=1 profile="/usr/bin/evince-thumbnailer" [...]
[...] kernel: [  708.816888] nfs: RPC call returned error 13

In other words, the evince-thumbnailer can­not cre­ate thumb­nail pre­views for pdf doc­u­ments because it is being denied access to the net­work by AppAr­mor. Which leads us to Ubuntu Bug #778638 where a fix has been released. See the bug report for the fix that can be applied manu­ally or by installing updated Evince soft­ware pack­ages from the Ubuntu Natty Pro­posed repository.

Microsoft Outlook and Network Stored PST Files Don't Work

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Out of service
Photo From nic­olas­nova

I was recently called out to a new cli­ent site to stop a Microsoft Out­look 2010 cli­ent from crash­ing every time email was sent or received. It took a while to dis­cover the cause of the prob­lem because the issue was related to a con­fig­ur­a­tion that has not been sup­por­ted by Microsoft since Exchange Server 5.0 was released in 1997. So, not some­thing I’d expect to find any­one still using.

Don’t Store PST files on a net­work share

Accord­ing to Microsoft, among the con­sequences of using a net­work share to store pst files are:

When you store .pst files [on a net­work share], shares may stop respond­ing. This beha­vior may cause sev­eral client-side prob­lems, such as caus­ing Out­look to stop respond­ing or freez­ing desktops on cli­ent computers.

There is some fur­ther inform­a­tion and ana­lysis over on the tech­net blog, includ­ing addi­tional prob­lems caused on the server side, from way back in 2007!

Hope­fully this inform­a­tion will jog the memory of future troubleshoot­ers or give them another place to look when try­ing to solve prob­lems with Microsoft Outlook.

Using SSH to Forward a Remote Port Locally

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A recent job reminded me that ssh can be used to for­ward a port on a remote sys­tem to one on the local cli­ent machine, like so:

ssh -L 8000:localhost:80 username@remoteserver

In that example, I could now visit http://localhost:8000 in a web browser to access the remote web server over the ssh con­nec­tion. This is use­ful for troubleshoot­ing or set­ting up ser­vices before allow­ing pub­lic access.