http://spiralbound.net a digital notebook of nifty things Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:56:35 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Well, after five years living in Vermont, and something like thirteen years living in New England, Courtney and I have gone and moved to Santa Cruz, CA. There are a lot of reasons for this; the very hard winters and extremely rainy summers in Vermont were starting to wear on ... http://spiralbound.net/2008/08/23/move-to-santa-cruz 36.96717515659478 -122.03887939453125 Several weeks ago we started seeing some pretty scary errors showing up on the main system disk for our Blackboard server. We had an extra server hanging around, so we decided to move all the data off the failing disk and onto our spare server. The only question was how ... http://spiralbound.net/2008/08/05/bare-metal-linux-restore Casey needed me to install APC cache for the Scriblio project. It's a PECL module, and pecl install apc gives an error. Here are some great instructions for getting it all to work. http://spiralbound.net/2008/07/14/installing-apc-on-centos We backup our Oracle databases using RMAN and then write the backup pieces out to an NFS share. This has always worked well, but RMAN started complaining that the NFS share was not mounted with the correct options when we upgraded to Oracle 10G. After some poking around in the ... http://spiralbound.net/2008/06/11/rman-10g-nfs-mount-options Creating a properly offset slab of disk for Linux systems on your CLARiiON is not just a matter of creating a partition using the default fdisk values. The reason for this is that disk management utilities for Intel based systems generally write 63 sectors of metadata directly at the beginning ... http://spiralbound.net/2008/06/09/creating-linux-partitions-for-clariion If you're running Solaris 8 or 9 and an upgrade results in broken SSH X11 forwarding, the problem may be Sun's socfs bug. The symptom will be SSH's failure to set the $DISPLAY variable and an error in your system log looking something like this: Jun 3 09:40:24 servername sshd[26432]: ... http://spiralbound.net/2008/06/03/x11-forwarding-broken-on-solaris All next week I'll be taking a cave diving class on my CCR down in North Florida. Cave diving has been a dream of mine since reading an article about Sheck Exley's exploration of the Nacimiento Mante cave system in Mexico. At a time in my life when I almost ... http://spiralbound.net/2008/04/24/darkness-beckons We just noticed that the time was very far off on our sparkly new VMware EXS 3.5 server. When I went to run ntpdate to bring it up to sync, I was suprised to find that it could not make a connection to the time server because outbound UDP 123 ... http://spiralbound.net/2008/04/09/vmware-esx-35-ntpdate-strangeness Below is a list of RHEL system configuration changes that Oracle 10G requires before it is installed. First, check the following kernel parameters using the commands below: /sbin/sysctl -a | grep kernel.shmall /sbin/sysctl -a | grep kernel.shmmax /sbin/sysctl -a | grep kernel.shmmni /sbin/sysctl -a | grep kernel.sem /sbin/sysctl -a | grep fs.file-max /sbin/sysctl -a | grep ... http://spiralbound.net/2008/03/17/rhel-system-configuration-changes-for-oracle-10g Earlier today I had a problem with some Macs that could not establish SMB connections to our Windows File Server. There was no quick error, so the problem really "felt" like a firewall issue but strangely I was able to make a CLI connection to the file server using smbclient: smbclient ... http://spiralbound.net/2008/03/14/when-mac-osx-smb-connections-fail It turns out that the sleeping little girl in Hillary Clinton's "Red Phone" TV advertisement is supporting Barack Obama. The Clinton campaign used stock footage of the girl who is now of voting age and calls "Red Phone" ad "Fear Mongering". I guess the Clinton crew should have thought about ... http://spiralbound.net/2008/03/11/girl-in-clintons-red-phone-ad-supports-obama Lots of small companies want to hire an IT department in a can... You know, the ones who hire only one person to run their Linux servers, code their websites, architect their networks, support their users and order more printer toner. It's a hard job, but it's pretty common to ... http://spiralbound.net/2008/02/26/sun-project-blackbox-datacenter-in-a-can For some time now, Innerspace Systems has been working on a Megalodon head called APECS 3 that supports integrated decompression. As with any major software / hardware engineering project, there have been some delays, which has Meg owners clambering for information about when it will come out. It's amazing how ... http://spiralbound.net/2008/01/23/who-cares-if-the-rebreather-has-integrated-deco Last week I had to upgrade one of our old RHEL3 servers in order to get it to address disks larger than 2TB. I did the upgrade from CD, and it went fairly smoothly, except up2date would not run after the box came back up. It gave me the following error: [root@x ... http://spiralbound.net/2008/01/22/rhel3-upgrade-to-rhel4-breaks-up2date At least in RHEL 4, the fdisk command does not support the creation of filesystems larger than 2TB. In order to get around it, you have to use the parted command. I found the basic info here, but this is the long and short of how to cut off a ... http://spiralbound.net/2008/01/11/how-to-make-gnarly-big-linux-filesystems Juan Manuel is my new hero, plain and simple! Since the Bell RocketBelt of the early 1960's, the world has been disappointingly devoid of this amazing invention, but no longer. Juan Manuel, a self-taught engineer from Mexico has been working diligently for nearly 30 years to develop a working rocket ... http://spiralbound.net/2008/01/09/i-can-finally-have-my-rocket-belt About a month ago, Courtney scored one of the new bubble gum pink Hello Kitty Stratocaster guitars from Squier (AKA Fender on the cheap). It's a very cool looking axe, and once I adjusted the truss rod and action, it actually plays pretty well. I was amazed to see, however, that ... http://spiralbound.net/2007/12/19/high-end-kittycaster-guitar Bill, our DBA, showed me this video of some hardcore base jumpers who leap off tall mountains and use wingsuits to fly within inches of the cliff walls on their way down. I was entertained that the guy with the white suit looks a lot like the Jesus action figure ... http://spiralbound.net/2007/12/18/wingsuit-base-jumping-video I started getting this error: X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication when trying to forward X11 applications from a Linux server to my Mac. I had been forwarding the display on this server for years, so I was a little unsure what could be causing it. In the end, it turned ... http://spiralbound.net/2007/12/17/strange-x11-forwarding-problem It's been a while since I last woke up from a deep sleep and realized that my arm felt like a big lump of wood attached to my body that I could neither move nor feel. I have, however, been suffering increasing problems with numbness and tingling in my hands, ... http://spiralbound.net/2007/12/14/why-did-my-arm-fall-asleep I needed to replace a string in several thousand files scattered all over the filesystem on one of our servers. I used find to create a list of files that needed to be changed, along with their complete path and called it "list.txt". It looked something like this: /path/to/file/one/fileone.html /path/to/file/two/filetwo.php /path/to/file/three/filethree.htm /path/to/directory with spaces/filefour.txt and ... http://spiralbound.net/2007/12/12/php-and-sed-for-string-substitution Getting Solaris 8 to light up a Qlogic QLA2310 Fibre Channel card using the SUNWqlc and SUNWqlcx drivers can be frustrating enough, but the headaches are only beginning if you want to connect it to a SAN and you don't have all the right packages installed. Last week, I installed the ... http://spiralbound.net/2007/12/10/solaris-8-san-frustrations Keeping WordPress up to date using the standard method of deleting old files, extracting the new ones and then running the database upgrade script is a bit cumbersome, but really not that difficult. Gallery2 uses more or less the same methodology, but it does not require you to delete your ... http://spiralbound.net/2007/11/30/managing-wordpress-and-gallery2-with-subversion If you dive rebreathers much, chances are you will have to repair or replace the Molex plugs and pins that connect your Teledyne R22D oxygen sensors to your head electronics. Many manufacturers are cool about sending you the parts so that you can do the repair yourself, but some, such ... http://spiralbound.net/2007/11/15/making-a-connector-for-the-teldyne-r22d-oxygen-sensor About a month ago, Courtney and I decided we needed a new car. She had previously driven a Toyota RAV4, which was not only old and falling apart, it did not get the kind of fuel economy we were looking for given the current price of gasoline. We settled on ... http://spiralbound.net/2007/11/13/toyota-yaris-review