Craig Mayhew’s Blog

This article details how to download and compile the latest bleeding edge build of Firefox on Microsoft Windows 7. The firefox build will be full of bugs because it is bleeding edge, so don’t use this for anything important :) On the upside you will get to play with new features long before anyone that waits for “stable” versions to be released. Here we go:

Install MozillaBuild, a package of additional build tools. Make sure you install this with a directory path that does not contain any spaces (e.g. c:\mozilla-build\). If you get a message saying this application did not install properly then you should see a windows dialog giving you the option to re-install with the ‘correct settings’. After that all should be well.

If you don’t already have Visual C++ 2008 then download and install the express edition from http://www.microsoft.com/Express/vc/

Download the windows SDK if you don’t already have it installed (If unsure install it anyway) from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=c17ba869-9671-4330-a63e-1fd44e0e2505&displayLang=en

We need to make sure that windows is using the SDK that we have just installed. Find “Windows SDK Configuration Tool” on your start menu, run it. Select “v7.0″ (or higher) in the drop down box and click “make current”.

Now we need to create your mozconfig file. This will contain various compile options for your custom build of firefox. Substituting {username} for your real username, you should find your mozconfig file here: C:\Users\{username}\mozilla-central\mozconfig

I recommend that unless you know what your doing or run into compile issues that are specific to your system then edit your mozconfig file to look like this:

. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir-ff-release
mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-j4"

#adding this to prevent it erroring about not being able to build for version 601000
mk_add_options MOZ_WINSDK_TARGETVER=600

#stop the atl errors
ac_add_options --disable-xpconnect-idispatch
ac_add_options --disable-activex
ac_add_options --disable-activex-scripting
ac_add_options --disable-accessibility

Hurrah, that’s all of the setup out of the way. Now we can try and compile firefox! Open a shell window by running: c:\mozilla-build\start-msvc9.bat. Even if you’re on 64-bit Windows, do not use the files ending in -x64.bat.

In the newly opened shell window type the following:
To get the latest source:

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/

To navigate to the mozilla-central directory:

cd mozilla-central

To start the build process:

make -f client.mk

Once compiled (It may take hours depending on your system) the firefox executable can be found in C:\Users\{username}\mozilla-central\objdir-ff-release\dist\bin

I recommend you create a shortcut to the executable and don’t open it directly. This way you can have it run from a different firefox profile and have it running at the same time as your standard firefox build while keeping the two completely seperate. This will prevent the addons etc from erroring about the unsupported firefox version. The short cut should be formatted as such: “Firefox.exe” -p “{PROFILE}” -no-remote (note: substitute the name of your profile for {PROFILE} or omit to launch the profile manger instead). I’ve set mine to “Firefox.exe” -p “nightly” -no-remote

If your still unable to compile firefox then please leave a comment, then try other resources such as https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Simple_Firefox_build.

Unfortunately the IPv6 issue is still at large in Karmic Koala and will effect just about every internet application.

The problem is caused by Ubuntu requesting everything by IPv6 first even if there are no IPv6 Interfaces configured and timing out each time when it doesn’t get a response.

The workaround in firefox is to go to “about:config”, just type it into the address bar and hit enter. Then change the value network.dns.disableIPv6 to TRUE.

The bug can be tracked here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/417757

Ubuntu 9.10 doesn’t come with VPN connectivity out of the box. So you need to install 3 packages to get it to work. Symptoms of these packages not being installed are grayed out “Add” buttons and grayed out “Apply” buttons in the VPN connection manager.

Here’s the command to install the 3 packages:

sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp network-manager-vpnc network-manager-openvpn

I have no idea why Ubuntu doesn’t include these packages by default. Looks like a great many people are having this issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager-pptp/+bug/107738

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu Karmic Koala and fully expected this to break my VMWare server install. Sure enough I got plenty of errors when trying to compile VMWare Server with the latest kernel. Here’s the solution:

Download VMware Server (2.0.1 or 2.0.2) – in gz format. You will also need a license key.

If you have tried to install vmware server already and something went wrong during the install, then do these two steps first:

first, delete the vmware modules

rm -rf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/

if needed (you’ll know if you need to do this one):

rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.31-13-server/misc/vm*

Install:

Run vmware-install.pl. Somewhere in the installation process you should be asked:
Do you want this program to invoke the command for you now? [yes]
you should answer: no

Then run the patch vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh.

sudo ./vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh

After this, run

/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

If the vmware-config.pl aborts, because it couldn’t shut down all vmware services then kill them manually and then rerun vmware-config.pl:

kill -9 $( grep -i vm | awk '{ print $2 }' )

And hopefully that should work!

Regular backups, we all know the score. If you don’t make regular backups then you will lose data.

In recent years more and more of the big players are releasing bigger and cheaper cloud solutions. e.g. Amazon’s EC2 or Microsoft’s Azure. Clouds offer incredible scalability allowing you to go from needing no processing power to thousands of CPUs or a few megabytes of storage to terabytes without ever needing to upgrade your server. Unfortunately sometimes proper backup solutions are not put in place. After all it is no easy task to backup an entire data centre in a timely manor that doesn’t impact upon the clouds performance. Even more than that the backup must be stored differently to the main cloud. For instance it’s not a good idea to backup an Amazon EC2 cloud to another EC2 cloud. If someone found an exploitable flaw in the EC2 platform that meant they could wipe the cloud or the cloud itself failed and erased all it’s data then the exact same thing could happen to the backup copy. A simple solution is to mirror your data between two cloud platforms. The perfect solution is to maintain a tape backup (or at least some kind of offline storage) of your data and keep it in geographically different place.

Cloud computers are not immune to failure, they are simply as good as the software running on them. Some good examples of massive irreversible data loss:

Upto 1 million T-Mobile sidekick customers lose their mobile data

100,000 websites wiped by hack attack