Fixing “MAC address could not be autodected” error from UUIDTools, Phusion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition

Posted by Sean 9 days ago

I’m using the UUIDTools 1.0.3 gem in a Rails 2.1 application to generate globally unique IDs. After migrating the site to run under Phusion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition I began encountering the following error:

StandardError (MAC address could not be autodetected.  Set the MAC address manually.):
    /vendor/gems/uuidtools-1.0.3/lib/uuidtools.rb:241:in `timestamp_create'
    /vendor/gems/uuidtools-1.0.3/lib/uuidtools.rb:229:in `synchronize'
    /vendor/gems/uuidtools-1.0.3/lib/uuidtools.rb:229:in `timestamp_create'
    ...

It seemed UUIDTools was trying to get the the network card’s MAC address (I’d guess to collect entropy), but couldn’t for some reason. I should also note that this is all running on an Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, 512MB slice over at Slicehost (yes, that’s a referral link, use it! :-).

It turns out that UUIDTools was trying to use ifconfig to read the MAC address, but ifconfig wasn’t in the PATH. Since the application is now running under mod_rails, the relevant PATH is Apache’s PATH, which doesn’t include /sbin by default.

So, a quick edit of /etc/init.d/apache2 to change

ENV="env -i LANG=C PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin"

to

ENV="env -i LANG=C PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/sbin"

and a sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart was all it took to get the app back up and running.

GitHub Invite Giveaway

Posted by Sean 5 months ago

I’ve got a few GitHub invites available if anyone is interested. I’ve started putting a few of my open-source projects up there as well and so far it seems pretty cool.

Email link is in the footer, so come and get ‘em!

Update to EnkoderTags Radiant Extension

Posted by Sean 5 months ago

I’ve updated EnkoderTags to allow HTML attributes in the enkode_mailto tag. The attributes will get passed through untouched into the resulting markup, so you can add CSS classes or IDs to use as styling hooks. For example, this code

<r:enkode_mailto email="example@example.com" link_text="simple email example"
    class="enkodedlink"/>

will produce the HTML 

<a href="mailto:example@example.com" class="enkodedlink">simple email example</a>

which will be obfuscated through the Enkoder as usual. Thanks to Nick Calladine for prompting me to add this feature!

Git Repositories for Rails Plugins

Posted by Sean 7 months ago

Having moved to git for managing my Rails projects and git submodules for Rails plugins and vendor/rails, I decided to create git mirrors for a couple of plugins whose maintainers use subversion.

If you have a Rails project in a git repository, you might do

git submodule add git://repo.or.cz/has_many_polymorphs.git vendor/plugins/has_many_polymorphs
git submodule add git://repo.or.cz/acts_as_ferret.git vendor/plugins/acts_as_ferret

and perhaps

git submodule add git://git.sanityinc.com/rails.git vendor/rails

followed by

git submodule init
git submodule update

Building Git 1.5.4 on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Posted by Sean 7 months ago

Wincent Colaiuta has some good, basic instructions for getting Git version 1.5.3.x built and installed on Mac OS X Leopard.

For Git 1.5.4, building git-gui will fail when it tries to build some localization files. The message I got during make prefix=/usr/local all was 

    GITGUI_VERSION = 0.9.2
    * new locations or Tcl/Tk interpreter
    GEN git-gui
    INDEX lib/
    MSGFMT    po/de.msg 371 translated.
    MSGFMT    po/fr.msg 371 translated.
    MSGFMT    po/hu.msg 371 translated.
    MSGFMT    po/it.msg 370 translated, 1 untranslated.
    MSGFMT    po/ja.msg 371 translated.
    MSGFMT    po/ru.msg 367 translated, 4 untranslated.
    MSGFMT    po/sv.msg 371 translated.
    MSGFMT po/zh_cn.msg 53 translated, 57 fuzzy, 253 untranslated.
    SUBDIR gitk-git
    GEN gitk-wish
Generating catalog po/de.msg
msgfmt --statistics --tcl po/de.po -l de -d po/
make[1]: msgfmt: Command not found
make[1]: *** [po/de.msg] Error 127
make: *** [all] Error 2

This is because Leopard doesn’t come with the GNU gettext utilities. While I imagine one could build and install gettext, there’s an easier fix. Just set the NO_MSGFMT environment variable to yes and the Git build scripts will use a simple (well, according to the source, “really stupid”) program that does the necessary work in place of gettext’s msgfmt tool.

So, just tack NO_MSGFMT=yes in front of your build and you’re all set.

NO_MSGFMT=yes make prefix=/usr/local all
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