Happy New Year!

2019. The year of crazy! I thought there would be some sanity in the world, but boy was I wrong.

I hope that THIS new year will be great. That 2020 will bring you success.

That 2020 brings sanity! Ohhh, the insanity.

I hope you get to spend it with your family and friends. That the year treats you well.

I don't know what my 2020 will look like. Joy? 2019 sure had its share of emotions.

Well, I wish you all a Happy 2020.

Happy New Year!

Netscaler VPN client on Linux seems to have issues with libraries.

I have to use the Netscaler VPN client on Linux to do some work. However, I noticed that after upgrading to a newer version of Linux (via wipe/reinstall) the client now doesn't seem to work.

The error appears when you run the client on the CLI, otherwise you get nothing. It says:

./NSGClient: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.0.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Great! Let's install libssl. Oh, it's installed. Let's check what libraries it needs/are missing.

ldd NSGClient 
./NSGClient: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcurl.so.4: version `CURL_OPENSSL_3' not found (required by ./NSGClient)
linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffef68d9000)
libX11.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6 (0x00007f4a1b1b3000)
libssl.so.1.0.0 => not found
libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => not found
libcurl.so.4 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcurl.so.4 (0x00007f4a1b125000)
        ... <cut more output - all libraries present>
libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypt.so.1 (0x00007f4a17286000)
libgpg-error.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgpg-error.so.0 (0x00007f4a17263000)

Two things to note from that output.

1. libcurl.so.4 complains about CURL_OPENSSL_3 not found.
2. Two libraries are not found.

So I tried a couple of things all of which complained that the OpenSSL version of the library was needed. A search on my system came up with the steam directory containing the libraries I required!

Well, that's convenient.

I did the following in the /opt/Citrix/NSGClient/bin/ directory.

ln -s /home/user/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libssl.so.1.0.0
ln -s /home/user/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypto.so.1.0.0
ln -s /home/user/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcurl.so.4
ln -s /home/user/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librtmp.so.0

Job done. NSG VPN Client now works.

So, if you are in need of the right libraries for your VPN client, install Steam!

Server: WebProxy/1.0 Pre-Alpha errors? Are you tethering?

Today, I had to tether to my phone and run a few web requests top build a Raspberry Pi. However, the requests were failing. It would "sit there" and it didn't seem to work. I couldn't see anything wrong on the server, but I decided I would try a simple "curl -v" to see what would happen and to avoid TLS issues, I tried HTTP.

I was greeted with:

 < HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
 < Server: WebProxy/1.0 Pre-Alpha
 < Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 10:04:43 GMT
 < Content-Length: 0< Connection: keep-alive

What the heck? I knew my mobile provider had some proxies. I googled and noticed a few people complain about the same thing and then it occurred to me. I'm tethered, could this be my device? Would rebooting fix the issue?

So, since one of the troubleshooting tasks I'd suggest would be "Did you turn it off and back on" I decided to give it a whirl.

Guess what! That fixed the issue.

Kodi, inputstream.adaptive and Netflix not working...

In a previous post, I mentioned how I finally solved an issue with the Netflix add-on for Kodi and how items didn't play properly but sound worked fine. It was due to the Raspberry Pi not being powerful enough since it has to do software decoding.

However, I did an update from 9.0.1 version of Libreelec to 9.0.2 and for some reason, Netflix wouldn't even play the video.

Looking through the logs I could see that the /usr/lib/kodi/addons/inputstream.adaptive/ directory couldn't be found which lead to a lot of Googling and no answers. I tried uninstalling, re-installing inputstream.adaptive and tweaking with its settings, even changing LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to a different location... all in vain.

How did I solve it? I uninstalled the Netflix addon, and reinstalled it.

I removed all settings prior to the removal, but you might not need to do that. I just didn't want to have to deal with it not working and thought it might be a good idea.

So, there you go. Neflix not working on Libreelec (doesn't matter which version) on a Raspberry Pi. Uninstall the addon and add it back in! Why? Not sure... but at least it's working now.

Kodi, inputstream.adaptive and Netflix

One of the things I love about the latest version of Kodi is being able to use the Netflix add-on and being able to view everything in one place.

I had a problem that took me a bit to troubleshoot. Whenever I watch Netflix, I noticed that videos would start to play slower than the audio. In other words, the video would look like it was in slow motion while the audio played at normal speed.

After doing updates, downgrades, etc I finally found that people were discussing this issue but weren't able to reproduce, however, while looking at the issue myself, I noticed the videos that I was watching from Netflix were in 1080p quality. I went into the properties for inputstream.adaptive and changed the settings to the secured streams from MAX to 720p.

It worked! My Netflix streams are smooth like butter.