Skip to main content

you just have to be desperate

I recently setup a new ubuntu machine and  coincidently my company Jabber account stopped working on both new and old laptop. I was busy so didnt spent much time on it and sent it to ops and they said its an issue on my side. I was puzzled because how come it can be an issue on both laptops.

But using skype is a pain and its also not secure so I had to find a way to fix it.  Finally I found  that you can start pidgin in debug mode using
pidgin -d > ~/debug.log 2>&1


then I tailed the logs and immediately I saw

17:44:44) account: Connecting to account kpatel@mycompany.com/.
> (17:44:44) connection: Connecting. gc = 0x1fc9ae0
> (17:44:44) dnssrv: querying SRV record for mycompany.com: _xmpp-client._tcp.mycompany.com
> (17:44:44) dnssrv: found 1 SRV entries
> (17:44:44) dns: DNS query for '127.0.0.1' queued
> (17:44:44) dnsquery: IP resolved for 127.0.0.1

doing a dig on record shows it was correct

dig +short SRV _xmpp-client._tcp.mycompany.com
10 0 5222 mycompany-im.mycompany.com.


so I was puzzled


finally I saw that my proxy setting in pidgin was some how Gnome proxy. Changing it to no proxy fixed it. See screenshot.
 

I would have never tried to dig deep and load pidgin in debug mode but I was desperate to fix jabber client and had no other option. Today I learn a lesson that if you are desperate then you could venture into exploring even uninteresting things.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Killing a particular Tomcat thread

Update: This JSP does not work on a thread that is inside some native code.  On many occasions I had a thread stuck in JNI code and it wont work. Also in some cases thread.stop can cause jvm to hang. According to javadocs " This method is inherently unsafe. Stopping a thread with Thread.stop causes it to unlock all of the monitors that it has locked". I have used it only in some rare occasions where I wanted to avoid a system shutdown and in some cases we ended up doing system shutdown as jvm was hung so I had a 70-80% success with it.   -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We had an interesting requirement. A tomcat thread that was spawned from an ExecutorService ThreadPool had gone Rogue and was causing lots of disk churning issues. We cant bring down the production server as that would involve downtime. Killing this thread was harmless but how to kill it, t
6 comments
Read more

Adding Jitter to cache layer

Thundering herd is an issue common to webapp that rely on heavy caching where if lots of items expire at the same time due to a server restart or temporal event, then suddenly lots of calls will go to database at same time. This can even bring down the database in extreme cases. I wont go into much detail but the app need to do two things solve this issue. 1) Add consistent hashing to cache layer : This way when a memcache server is added/removed from the pool, entire cache is not invalidated.  We use memcahe from both python and Java layer and I still have to find a consistent caching solution that is portable across both languages. hash_ring and spymemcached both use different points for server so need to read/test more. 2) Add a jitter to cache or randomise the expiry time: We expire long term cache  records every 8 hours after that key was added and short term cache expiry is 2 hours. As our customers usually comes to work in morning and access the cloud file server it can happe
Post a Comment
Read more

Preparing for an interview after being employed 11 years at a startup

I would say I didn't prepared a hell lot but  I did 2 hours in night every day and every weekend around 8 hours for 2-3 months. I did 20-30 leetcode medium problems from this list https://leetcode.com/explore/interview/card/top-interview-questions-medium/.  I watched the first 12 videos of Lecture Videos | Introduction to Algorithms | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | MIT OpenCourseWare I did this course https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-interview I researched on topics from https://www.educative.io/courses/java-multithreading-for-senior-engineering-interviews and leetcode had around 10 multithreading questions so I did those I watched some 10-20 videos from this channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn1XnDWhsLS5URXTi5wtFTA 
Post a Comment
Read more