Category Archives: Uncategorized

Accessing Samba on Manjaro: failed to retrieve share list from server

A few days ago I got my shiny new StarBook Mk V and installed Manjaro on it for the very first time. I have no prior experience neither with Arch-based distros not rolling releases. Anyway, soon after I installed it I realized that I can’t access my homemade NAS server over Samba. I have a samba network at home with a mix of Linux (Linux Mint, Manjaro) and Windows 10 (don’t judge me) computers. Samba has always worked well to connect to each other. But now, when opening smb://192.168.1.6 in Gnome file manager I get this error: Failed to retrieve share list from server: Invalid argument

After quick duckling I found the solution: everything you need to do is to add these two lines in the global section of /etc/samba/smb.conf file on the server

client min protocol = CORE
server min protocol = CORE

and then restart it:

sudo service smbd restart

Voila!

P.S. The solution is based on the original post on the Manjaro forums here.

My favorite programming quotes

“90% of coding is debugging. The other 10% is writing bugs”
Bram Cohen (the author of the peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol)

“The programmer who refuses to keep exploring will surely stagnate, forget his joy, lose the will to program (and become a manager).”
Marijn Haverbeke

“The more I learn, the more I realize
how much I don’t know.”
Albert Einstein

“Never memorize something that
you can look up.”
Albert Einstein

Add GIT branch information to Bash prompt

I’ve seen such as fancy Bash prompts on various tutorials and Linux examples over the Internet and I’ve always wondered how is achieved. I never really had a enough free time to learn more about it and explore the options. But being jobless for a month gave me opportunity to play with the thinks I like 🙂

My solution is pretty simple: when you navigate to git controlled folder, the bash prompt will show “@ branch” after the directory name. Nothing fancy.

Just open your ~/.bashrc configuration file with your favorite editor and add the following:

get_git_branch () {
git name-rev HEAD 2> /dev/null | sed "s/[a-zA-Z0-9]\+\ \(.*\)/ @ \1/"
}

than put this into your PS1 string:

$(get_git_branch)

so it become something like that

PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w$(parse_git_branch) \n\$\[\033[00m\] '

Restart your terminal or type bash to start new bash session. Navigate to git controlled folder to test. It should look like this:

bash-git

Generate huge JSON files with custom PHP >5.3 class

Lately, I’ve been working on transitioning XML feeds to JSON format on big video site.  We generate these feeds in order to feed external search service with results. It’s similar to sitemap, but it provides more detailed information about the pages.

This task is challenging because of the following problems that need to be resolved:

  1. The feed need to represent over 500 000 database entries i.e. videos. It’s just not possible to generate huge PHP multidimensional array with more than 500 000 elements and pass it to json_encode(). Obviously, you need to generate small JSON objects (chunks) concatenated with hand-coded strings and so build the full feed.
  2. The development and production servers we use are equipped with outdated PHP version 5.3.27. That means:
    – No meaningful error messages because json_last_error_msg() function it’s not available prior PHP 5.5
    – No JSON_PRETTY_PRINT, JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES, and JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE
  3. The code should be easy to test and maintain, so it should provide meaningful debug information and error handling.

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