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UDP sockets broken again in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Some time ago, a regression was introduced into the 3.13 line kernel used by Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that broke UDP sockets when they were used in a certain way (e.g. like FreeRADIUS does). This bug was fixed in 3.13.0-67 and I hoped to never see it again.

Two days ago, I realized that one of our RADIUS servers was not working correctly any longer. I could not tell how long this problem had existed (the second RADIUS server still worked and in monitoring the primary one also worked, so the problem went undetected for a very long time).

After looking for the cause of the problem for quite some time, I remembered the problem described earlier and tried an old kernel version. Bingo! This fixed the problem. After looking at the changelog of the current 3.13 line kernel from trusty-proposed (that also fixes the problem) I found a reference to another bug report that describes the problem (don't be fooled by the bug's description, it also applies to IPv4).

As it turns out, the first regression had been caused by backporting an optimization regarding UDP checksum calculation from a newer Linux kernel. However, this change exposed a problem that had been fixed in the newer kernel but not in Ubuntu's branch of kernel 3.13. This regression was fixed by simply removing the patch again. This was okay because it was just an optimization.

Some time later, someone (who obviously was not aware of this regression) again thought that backporting the optimzation was a good idea, so it got reintroduced in 3.13.0-69. Now, it looks like they fixed the bug in 3.13.0-78 by actually fixing the underlying problem and not by removing the patch again. Therefore, I hope that we will not see the regression a third time. However, I am a bit annoyed that they did not do better testing when backporting the patch after there had already been a regression around it once. Maybe the Ubuntu team's decision to not use a kernel with long-term support and do maintenance themselves was not so wise after all.

Disabling the annoying "Visit ..." entry in the Firefox address-bar drop-down

I find the new address bar features introduced in a recent Firefox version very annoying. The suggestion of search terms can be disabled easily (does anyone really want to have everything entered into the address bar sent to an external service?), but this still leaves this annoying "Visit ..." entry at the top of the list of visited addresses.

This entry is annoying for several reasons:

  1. It does not add any functionality: Just hitting enter has (nearly) the same effect as selecting this entry.
  2. It can easily be selected accidentally when you actually want the top entry from the list of visited addresses.
  3. Typically, it does not suggest the address you actually want to visit for two reasons: First, it suggests visiting the top URL of the suggested site, even if you always visit a specific path. Second, it suggest a plain (HTTP) URL, even if the site actually only supports HTTPS and you never visited it with HTTP.

I have no idea, why they added such a stupid feature to Firefox at all (I suspect that it was originally designed for a different purpose that really only makes sense if you also enable the other features) and why they did not add an option to the UI for disabling it.

Fortunately, someone found out that it can be disabled by setting the browser.urlbar.unifiedcomplete option to false in about:config. Seeing how often the page with the solution has already been visited, I am definitely not the only person who is annoyed by this stupid new feature.