I’m publishing today this article that is some years old and was just collecting dust in my drawer. I believe it can still be useful to many. In particular the problem I’m going to solve is about the MySql error:

Connection failed: [08S1][MySQL][ODBC 5.1] Lost connection to MySQL server at ’reading initial communication packet’

Just paste the title of the post in a Google search box and you’ll get plenty of tutorials for how to set up Putty to do this.

The reason why I add something to the argument, is that after having used tunneling to connect to a MySQL RDBMS for some years, the day came when my settings didn’t work any longer. I used a fair amount of hours to find a solution to the problem and Google was only helpful to exclude other solutions. There’s no reason why you should do the same.

The error I got when testing the connection from the Connector configuration window was:

Connection failed: [08S1][MySQL][ODBC 5.1] Lost connection to MySQL server at ’reading initial communication packet’, system error: 2

If you google the Internet to find a solution to this error, you will probably come to the conclusion that something is wrong with your firewall settings or your network connectivity. Many times the solution given to solve problems that lead to the same error message, is to correct the server connect_timeout from the once default 5 (seconds) to a higher time span.

However this was definitely not the culprit in my case.

My setup

Now, before we go on to read about the mistake I made and the solution, I’d better add some details about the setup I’m working with. In a different setup you might have to use somewhat different settings.

I’m connecting to a MySQL server on a Linux box (Debian etch), from Windows XP / Vista.
The tunnel (port forwarding over SSH) is done using Putty.

What is important to notice for this text to be valid is the fact that MySQL runs on Linux and not on Windows.

The wrong tunnel configuration

The mistake is shown in this picture showing Putty tunnel configuration.

I had set the tunnel in such a way, to forward my local port to remote Linux box, port 3306 – writing the domain name, it could also have been the remote IP address. Now, this is not wrong in general and among the tutorials you’ll find on the Internet many recommend this setting. On the other hand the tunnel had been working fine for some years, and it would have gone on for more years if I hadn’t switched to a different server.

DSN configuration

Before we come to why this setting in fact is a mistake we’ll also have a look at another of the settings needed for the Access-MySQL connection to work, the DSN settings.

As you might know, here we set the data source as being the

local port (2306 in my case, different from MySQL default port 3306 to avoid conflicts with a possible MySQL for Windows installed on my PC) that we want to forward to the remote MySQL server. The setting under “Server” must be 127.0.0.1 in most of the cases. The reason is that your /etc/mysql/my.cnf file will have a line:

bind-address            = 127.0.0.1

This tells the server to only allow connection from the localhost, that is from users of the same Linux box, not connecting from outside. This line is default in a Debian distribution, and I believe it’s default in many other distros too. It avoids to expose the server to all possible connection attempts from black hat guys on the Internet. This is actually one of the reasons why we do SSH tunneling in the first place.

When you have logged into your server through Putty, your server is no longer remote, and that’s why 127.0.0.1 here doesn’t prevent the connection, and at the same time you comply with what is written in the option file (bind-address   = 127.0.0.1).  What happens is that all what you send to your local port will be transferred by Putty to the corresponding port on what “was” the remote server. MS Access or any other application using that port will never know.

This setting is shown correctly in all the tutorials, I have seen on the Internet.

Why the Tunnel configuration was wrong

However one could ask, whether or not we need to write the remote address or the localhost address in the tunnel configuration, not all the tutorials agree on this point. And in fact the answer is that we don’t need to write the remote address, or rather that we should avoid this: When Putty is establishing the port forwarding, it is already connected to your remote server, the connection happens between the two ports on the local and the remote server no matter if we write the local or the remote address in the tunnel settings, as long as it is a valid way of specifying it.

Putty doesn’t care, SSH doesn’t care, but MySQL does apparently care: as we have seen,

it will toss a: Connection failed: [08S1][MySQL][ODBC 5.1] Lost connection to MySQL server at ’reading initial communication packet’, system error: 2

To sum up

Summing up:

write the loopback address in the tunnel settings,

write the loopback address in the DSN setting

One last detail

Yes, one last thing remains to be explained and this is why on earth the “wrong” settings did work on my first server, and did no longer work when I used them on a new server?

Now, my explanation here is a fair amount more than plain guesswork, but still guesswork, however it makes sense to me and it is enough to let me sleep at night. It might satisfy you as well: I believe the reason is that on the first box (where the remote address didn’t hinder the connection) I had only one IP address on one network card. The OS was probably making its own translation of the remote address into the loopback address before MySQL received it. On the second box (where this setting stopped working) I had several IP addresses, and probably for this reason the remote address was no longer just translated by the OS into the loopback address for MySQL, and this triggered the connection error.

At least this will give you one more chance to find a solution to the problem, before blaming your firewall settings or network connectivity.

Recently I needed the WordPress plugin “Shortcode Generator” for one of my customers. Unfortunately I experienced the same as others: the plugin seems to work but when you go back and see your newly created shortcode, all you get is: “There are no generated shortcodes defined”.

With this post I publish a fix for the problem. I’ll do the same on some of the posts that report the problem on the WordPress website.

Why the plugin does not save codes

The reason is that the shortcode table in the database is not created when the plugin is activated. The table is not created because the table schema triggers an error due to one of the indexes being too large. You don’t see the error as WordPress suppresses it, however the table is not there.

To solve the problem you have to repeat the following steps, briefly put:

• add code to properly deactivate the plugin
• fix the database schema
• deactivate the plugin
• reactivate the plugin

Detailed step-by-step description

These four steps are easy to accomplish even for non programmers, just follow the  description below:

Open the plugin main file in a text editor. The file is located inside the folder wp-content/plugins/shortcode-generator/ and the name is shortcode-generator.php.

Inside your WordPress admin section, you can edit it from

plugins>editor>Select plugin to edit >Shortcode Generator >shortcode-generator/shortcode-generator.php

Find the “uninstall” function at around line 65

function uninstall(){

}

And change it into this:

function uninstall(){

    delete_option('scg_version');

}

Find the “install” function at line 43:

function install(){
    global $wpdb;
    require(ABSPATH.'/wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php');
    $installed_version = get_option('scg_version');
    if($installed_version == '' || $installed_version < SCG_VERSION){
        $create_table = "
        CREATE TABLE {$wpdb->shortcodes} (
        `ID` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY ,
        `shortcode` VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL ,
        `value` LONGTEXT NOT NULL ,
        `type` VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL ,
        UNIQUE (`shortcode`, `type`) ,
        FULLTEXT (
        `value`
        )
        )
        ";
        dbDelta($create_table);
    }
    add_option('scg_version',SCG_VERSION,'','no');
}

and change the definition of the “type” column to be 8 instead of 255. In this way Mysql will also have a better performance and since the types are only “wysiwyg” and “html”, both shorter than 8 chars, 8 is all you need.
The new “install” function looks like below:

function install(){
    global $wpdb;
    require(ABSPATH.'/wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php');
    $installed_version = get_option('scg_version');
    if($installed_version == '' || $installed_version < SCG_VERSION){
        $create_table = "
        CREATE TABLE {$wpdb->shortcodes} (
        `ID` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY ,
        `shortcode` VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL ,
        `value` LONGTEXT NOT NULL ,
        `type` VARCHAR( 8 ) NOT NULL ,
        UNIQUE (`shortcode`, `type`) ,
        FULLTEXT (
        `value`
        )
        )
        ";
        dbDelta($create_table);
    }
    add_option('scg_version',SCG_VERSION,'','no');
}

Then deactivate the plugin:

From your WordPress admin section

>plugins>installed plugins > Active

Click on “Deactivate”

Then reactivate

>plugins>installed plugins > Inactive

That’s it! The table should have been created and with it the ability to save your shortcodes.

JavaScript is the future

The future is pretty clear to me, JavaScript will be the one and only on the web.
And I mean both on the client side and the server side. Am I going crazy?
Just wait for node.js to be ready for prime time and let the YUI Library be finished with the application framework, then we start talking.

However, while we wait for the day of the grand merging of technologies, we still have to do some work and keep the code nicely organized. Smarty helps me to do that. I use Smarty templates to separate code from presentation and (among other things) Smarty plugins to organize my code.

In the meanwhile, get YUI and AJAX to work nicely with Smarty and PHP

When I started using Ajax it was with the help of Xajax. What I like of Xajax is that it allows me to target a single function right from the client code, and to control the JavaScript code from inside the PHP code. A pretty fine grained 2-way communication.

Now that I use YUI more and more, I wanted to get rid of the duplication of JavaScript code that is caused by having to load both the Xajax and the YUI JavaScript libraries. Anyone serious about JavaScript would have no doubt, I had to say goodbye to Xajax.

However, YUI is naturally slanted to the JavaScript side. With YUI you produce modules and stuff that encapsulate XHR transactions, and you pass a url to the transaction. On the server side you’re on your own for how to organize your code in a manageable way.

Manageable to me means among other things that:

• I can include my php files from wherever I want, especially from outside my server root
• I can have a one-to-one relationship between the page I’m showing to the user and the code that supports it
• I don’t need to create extra urls just to pull in responses to my JavaScript code
• I don’t have to reinvent a new set of conventions each time I write some JavaScript code

These are the things I felt YUI was making difficult to me.

To make up for this I’ve developed a set of two modules: inlineXHR(php), a lightweight PHP module, that works together with inlineXHR, a lightweight JavaScript module for YUI 3. With the two inlineXHR modules, I have re-established a fine grained 2-way communication between my PHP code on the server side and my JavaScript code on the client.

Now I can again target directly from JavaScript, PHP functions, class methods and Smarty plugins. All AJAX / JSON stuff is taken care of once and for all, the cursor is spinning when it has to, errors are logged to console or popped up in alerts, and I can write PHP code without even thinking about the fact that the output has to be sent through the wire, as JSON.

If you use YUI and PHP, and you too think that life is too nice to use time reinventing the wheel each time a JS code need to talk to your server, you might want to give it a try. It’s free, open source and BSD licensed.

Click to see usage instructions and working examples

You want to update to Debian Squeeze from Lenny. You don’t want to scour the whole Debian documentation just to be sure not to have overlooked details that apply to your situation. Here is a complete step-by-step tutorial for upgrading to Squeeze from Debian Lenny.

In 4 steps is listed here the procedure we’ll follow. There are quicker, more risky, procedures, however the time saved doing otherwise is count in seconds, who bothers.

1. minimal system upgrade, followed by
2. a kernel upgrade, udev upgrade and reboot, and then
3. (optionally) upgrade the packages associated with your critical services.
4. full upgrade

I spell out here all the preconditions that apply for this condensed but complete step-by-step tutorial for upgrading from Debian Lenny to Squeeze. You can easily find out if this is for you or not. For web developers that use Debian as a testing/production machine this will apply in 95% of all cases.

If you don’t meet all preconditions you’ll have to go read the full documentation.

Our Goal

The goal is to be able to update from a remote terminal with as little disruption and as few risks as possible, by risks meaning the need to resort to a local console to fix problems. However no guarantees are given. None at all. The only guarantee I can give, is that I have tried the upgrade myself on 3 different Debian boxes. On one it failed because I followed a different, shorter, recipe. Two were successful following this one.

Preconditions for the Upgrade

Your Debian Lenny is a pure command line installation (no GUI, that is, x-server and more). You are running some servers and other stuff, but you don’t have external users logging in their own /home directory to care of.

You have a Debian Lenny (version 5) that is up to date to the last update point. Otherwise

aptitude update

aptitude full-upgrade

should resolve any issues. Verify with

dpkg -l | pager

no packages should have a combination of h and fh as the first 2 flags in the output.

it might be bad if you have any other combination of letters. Here is an excerpt of mine.

ii  apt-utils    0.7.20.2+lenny2    APT utility programs
ii  aptitude   0.4.11.11-1~lenny1  terminal-based package ...
rc  aspell-en     6.0-0-5.1                  English dictionary for G...

ii is OK, rc is OK

From here on we’ll use Apt instead of Aptitude (it is officially recommended for a Lenny to Squeeze upgrade)

Other preconditions to “qualify” for blindly following this step-by-step recipe:

You don’t have third party packages (from repositories other than the official Debian Lenny repositories), if you do, remove them prior the upgrade and treat their upgrade independently.

“If you are using some VPN services (such as tinc) they might not be available throughout the upgrade process”

“You should not upgrade using telnet, rlogin, rsh”, you might loose connection, use ssh instead.”

“If you have configured APT to install certain packages from a distribution other than stable (e.g. from testing), you may have to change your APT pinning configuration. In this case you want to read the whole document on Debian org.

Let’s start

1 Minimal System Upgrade

Take a backup of

• all /etc
• the file ./curr-pkgs.txt after having done: dpkg --get-selections "*" > ./curr-pkgs.txt
• /var/lib/dpkg
• /var/lib/apt/extended_states
• /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates
• Any other files you care of (DB, web files, /home files etc.)

Do evaluate ”what if” in case you should be forced to reboot from the console terminal and the off/on button on your box.

If things go wrong this is the link you need.

Start doing your upgrade.

Change the sources to squeeze:

less /etc/apt/sources.list

Substitute any occurrence of lenny with squeeze. Don’t use stable, to avoid getting into troubles at the next version upgrade, write squeeze. Codenames are unique, category names are not.

Also remove sources for debian-volatile that are no longer used. Be sure to have all of main, contrib and non-free (for network cards firmware)

Here are my sources :

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian squeeze-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian squeeze-updates main contrib non-free

Ctrl-c
Y

Record your upgrade session with

script -t 2>~/upgrade-squeeze1.time -a ~/upgrade-squeeze1.script

When finishd you’ll stop recording typing: ”exit” Timing info is in the .time file, you can see all what happened and console messages reading the .script file.

Now enter:

apt-get update

apt-get upgrade

(we’re only doing a minimal upgrade now)

You might need to open an extra terminal during the upgrade to examine some situations as to be able to reply to questions posed to you by the upgrade process. To do so type

Alt-right arrow.

2. Upgrade Kernel and Udev

Upgrade the kernel
Start by finding a suitable linux kernel image

apt-cache search linux-image-2.6.

And choose one that suits your architecture and is equal or older to linux-image-2.6.26-2

apt-get install linux-image-2.6-<your flavor>

Although you had non-free among your sources you might end up into the following situation, due to bad handling of firmwares by the installer:

W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/tigon/tg3_tso5.bin for module tg3
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/tigon/tg3_tso.bin for module tg3
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/tigon/tg3.bin for module tg3

In this case install manually the nonfree firmware package:

apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree

And you google about it to be reassured that you’ll have the correct driver installed anyway.

In another case I got the corresponding message for another driver:

This system is currently running Linux 2.6.26-2-686 and you are installing Linux 2.6.32-5-686.
In the new version some of the drivers used on this system may require additional firmware files:
r8169: rtl_nic/rtl8168d-2.fw, rtl_nic/rtl8168d-1.fw

choose not to do anything, however I ended up anyway with a well functioning Debian, go figure it!

Install the new version of udev

apt-get install udev

stop the script recording by entering ”exit”
Reboot the system.

Restart recording in a different filename with

script -t 2>~/upgrade-squeeze2.time -a ~/upgrade-squeeze2.script

3. Optionally Upgrade Your Critical Packages

For extra control, on a production machine, upgrade some individual packages by their own.

apt-get dist-upgrade <package-name>

Go on doing the full upgrade

4. Complete the Upgrade

apt-get dist-upgrade

Do the various configuration as asked during the process, if you choose to upgrade to the configuration  (which is recommended) you can always retrieve the old configuration in the .dpkg-old version of your config files.

Enjoy your new Debian.

On the onStartup Linked In group someone posted what boils down to the question “what do you do when you realize that no VC would finance your startup”. Among the many “combat” answers, there was one that I picked up as the path I would follow in such case.

Some months later I have in fact been contacting some VCs and I’ve got a bunch of negative replies, directly or indirectly. I have understood the arguments and made some realizations. So I got back to that one answer and now I’m going to  follow that path.

1. Why did they turn me down
2. What did I understand and
3. What is the path I will follow,

you’ll ask? Well here it comes, but first comes the answer to another fundamental question:

0. Why did I spoke to VCs in the first place?

0. To try and get funds of course, but also and most importantly to come out of my comfort zone, to stop coding and start thinking, that is, to start relating to reality as it presents itself on the market place, VCs being a part of the market.

This means that I used VCs more like sparring partners than possible sources of funds. Of course, if they would have chosen my startup to invest in, that would have been an added bonus, however not getting funded has not been a complete failure at all.

Question 1. Why did they turn me down?

To make it short, among the different reasons they gave me, the fundamental one is that I’m out too early, the project is untested with real people so as things stand now, although lots of proof of concepts has been done on the critical technical aspects, the whole thing  to them is not much more than pies in the sky. (Other untold reasons deserve their own post, stay tuned for more).

Question 2. What did I get out of this exercise (speaking to VCs)

The fundamental result of doing this is that I had to prepare myself for speaking, that is I had to speak out my ideas, so people understand them. I saw the reactions on their faces when I spoke, I heard the arguments used to test my ideas. Still more important: I heard the many people I spoke with to prepare for speaking to the VCs. Further, each VC  wants you to present your idea in a different way, someone wants you to make an “odd presentation” that shows whether you’re able to stand out of the crowd, others want a 3 minutes pitch, others again want to see your exec summary first, while some wants to see the whole business plan, before engaging in any discussion.

Staying in good shape

This alone got me at work to refine my ideas and plans to make them viewable from all these different angles. It compelled me to cut down the fat and get to the essence of what is the product, what makes this different from others, what will make it or brake it.

It’s a heck of a lot of work to be doing for getting nothing, isn’t it? Yes, It ‘s a lot of work but not for getting nothing. What I got is very important. And I’m still glad I did this “too early”. The real outcome of this exercise is the cutting down, so that the shape of my business proposition is clear and explicable to many different people. Guys that not just listen politely to you, but that are there to question you and to doubt your skills and plans because they themselves have something at stake.

When you prepare to really try and convince such people your mindset changes. It is a big step closer to reality. Of course, as it is said, the biggest step is making the first person to open the wallet and pass over some money to you.  However, when that happens, you will want to know exactly why.  For an IT entrepreneur the exercise of speaking to possible investors is a more involving test than just putting up some functionality with a link to a payment gateway.

“No I don’t like coding”

The irony of this is that  one VC told me, “why do you do this, because you like coding, don’t you?” Well it was just a test from him, because he meets so many “business people”, programmers that put up a system because they like coding and they like what they code, no matter if this is what the market likes, and it would be lovely if someone would pay you for doing what you like instead of the other way around. And no, that was not the case, however he was still not so happy to hear that, “no, I don’t like coding for the sake of it, as a matter of fact I haven’t coded anything at all yet”. In the end he wanted to try the system out with some would be customers, while in the end I wanted to try my ideas out with him.

What now?

Now the one path to follow, remember? the answer I picked up on the group forum. The path is to think an MVP,  a Minimum Viable Product, cut down on dreams, functionality and – most important – time and cost, and bootstrap the whole thing, i.e. just doing by myself. This is what I’m working at now. The technical/design principles however are the same as I told you last time. As a demonstration of that I want to give you the promised goody, that is a preview and a tool that follows those same principles, having some elements of the described principles 2 – 4. For you that don’t bother reading the last post these are:

A free software tool

I will use this tool myself to wrap in my webapplication the day it will hit the market (keep your breath, it’s within view). You can use it too if you are skilled enough to understand how to bring it to good use. NB! It is not for everything or for everybody.

The tool is a 3 panes Split Desktop. You find it on its project page with detailed explanation for how to install and use it.

I would love to hear from you, either here on this blog or on the YUI Library forum for the SplitDesktop

See you soon, Paolo Nesti Poggi