name/radius/1 Error Server 0 ODBC client (DataSource 'my_odbc', Connection 8): SQLExecute failed: SQLState:08S01 NativeError:2006 ErrorText:[MySQL][ODBC 3.51 Driver][mysqld-5.0.21-log] MySQL server has gone away
name/radius/1 Error Server 0 Service odbc has no active remote servers available

Obviously, the MySQL server was still there, but after the wait_timeout expires, the server severs the idle connections. By default, the wait_timeout is set to 8 hours. This is obviously much longer than is usually necessary, but in our test lab, it caused problems every morning.

The fix is to set the KeepAliveTimerInterval in the Remote Servers configuration in Cisco Access Registrar. The value defaults to 0, which means no keep-alives are sent. When you set this value, remember that it is in milliseconds. If you forget, you are going to be send lots and lots of keep-alives to your database server!

One key feature buried in the Changelog is the ability to attach one disk to several virtual machines. This is especially useful in clustered setups where multiple machines share a single filesystem.

If you haven’t tried VirtualBox yet, I recommend it to anyone that has a need for a virtualized environment. It’s great for developers who need to support different platforms and system administrators who need a compact test environment.

The guys at Google have rolled out a few interface changes for Gmail users. So far, these changes have not been rolled out to Google Apps users.

New Look

The Gmail interface has been slimmed down to remove clutter and make it easier to find what you need. The result is less links in the left-hand navigation bar and less space used by the select links across the top of the mail pane.

Contacts

The Gmail Contacts application has undergone a major overhaul. One feature I’m going to love is keyboard shortcuts in the Contacts pane. Since you can now see all your contacts in a sort of spreadsheet view, keyboard shortcuts are going to make things a lot easier for me. Additionally, these shortcuts are the same as those found in Gmail.

For more details, check out the What’s New in Gmail page.

If you’re experiencing this problem, you might see something like the following in your log files:

org.x.startx[5001] Xquartz: bootstrap_look_up(): Unknown service name
org.x.startx[5001] giving up.
org.x.startx[5001] /usr/X11/bin/xinit:  Operation timed out (errno 60):  unable to connect to X server
org.x.startx[5001] /usr/X11/bin/xinit:  No such process (errno 3):  Server error.
org.x.startx[5164] font_cache: Scanning user font directories to generate X11 font caches
org.x.startx[5164] font_cache: Updating FC cache
org.x.privileged_startx[1606] font_cache: Scanning system font directories to generate X11 font caches
defaults[5191]
The domain/default pair of (org.x.X11, dpi) does not exist
org.x.startx[5164] xauth:  creating new authority file /Users/scott/.serverauth.5164
org.x.startx[5164] Xquartz: X11.app = /Applications/Utilities/X11.app/Contents/MacOS/X11
org.x.startx[5164] Xquartz: Starting X server: /Applications/Utilities/X11.app/Contents/MacOS/X11 --listenonly
org.x.startx[5164] dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/X11/lib/libpixman-1.0.dylib
org.x.startx[5164]   Referenced from: /Applications/Utilities/X11.app/Contents/MacOS/X11.bin
org.x.startx[5164]   Reason: Incompatible library version: X11.bin requires version 15.0.0 or later, but libpixman-1.0.dylib provides version 13.0.0
org.x.privileged_startx[1606] font_cache: Updating FC cache
org.x.startx[5164] font_cache: Done
org.x.startx[5164] waiting for X server to begin accepting connections

By the way, Snow Leopard users are not affected by this problem.

On a side note, Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook is supposed to upgrade automatically (although a reboot is necessary in Windows XP). For some reason, my version seems to be stuck at 1.7.318.115 and no automatic updating seems to be happening.

We just upgraded to Firefox 3.6.2 and already a critical security issue has been found. That one issue is the only fix in Firefox 3.6.3, so you better update as soon as possible.

Failed: Destination updated during synchronization

This error message is not very helpful at all. Newer versions of Unison indicate that running the command again with the -fastcheck option set to false should clear up the problem.

The VirtualBox gang has released version 3.1.6. You can get a list of all changes in the Changelog file. Check it out.

The time has come to upgrade to the latest version of Mozilla Firefox: Firefox 3.6.2. This version includes a fix for a critical security issue that could result in remote code execution. Additionally, other security and stability issues have been addressed. For all the nitty gritty details, check out the complete list of changes on Mozilla’s site.

I use labels extensively, and about 100 of these messages are labeled as either “security” or “cisco.” The emails in these labels need to be reviewed closely, so I’m going to go ahead and exclude them from this search. Therefore, the search below will find all unread messages in my inbox, unless they are labeled as “security” or “cisco.”

is:unread in:inbox -{label:security label:cisco}

This should be entered in the Gmail search box. The only really tricky things here are the curly braces ({}) and minus sign (-). The curly braces treat everything inside as if it was separated by a logical OR. In this case, it matches any message that is labeled “security” or “cisco.” WIthout the curly braces, a message would have to be in both labels to match. The minus sign lets Gmail know that I don’t want to see the results of that match in the final search results.