Flying UNIX

Automated kickstart install of ubuntu

2010-08-19T18:44:00.002+01:00

Checklist:
Prepare the configuration server:
Install packages
Configure DHCP and TFTP to provide pxe-boot image files
Configure lighttpd to serve operating system files
Prepare kickstart configuration file
Start client; intercept boot and request net boot

Note: the steps below expect all servers (dhcp, tftp and web) to be on the same physical machine, here: 192.168.1.100. Both the installation server, and anticipated clients are Ubuntu machines.

----------------------
Step 1.
(a) Install dhcp3 server. This will provide the initial network boot, for the client's PXE start.

$ sudo apt-get install dhcp3-server

(b) Edit its configuration.
Add the subnet info, leave all other elements of the file as they are.

$ sudo vi /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf
ddns-update-style none;

# option definitions common to all supported networks...

option domain-name "example.com";

option domain-name-servers ns1.example.org, ns2.example.org;

default-lease-time 600;

max-lease-time 7200;

log-facility local7;

subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {

range 192.168.1.111 192.168.1.222;

option domain-name-servers 212.135.1.36; # your DNS server

option domain-name "internal.example.com"; # your domain name

option routers 192.168.1.254; # your gateway

option broadcast-address 192.168.1.255;

filename "pxelinux.0";

}

(c) Start dhcp server.
$ sudo /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server start

----------------------
Step 2.
(a) Install tftpd-hpa (and its super-daemon, inetd):
$ sudo apt-get install openbsd-inetd tftpd-hpa

(b) Modify the main tftp setup file, in /etc/default/tftpd-hpa, to have the content as shown.
$ sudo vi /etc/default/tftpd-hpa

TFTP_USERNAME=”tftp”

TFTP_DIRECTORY=”/srv/tftp”

TFTP_OPTIONS=”--secure”

TFTP_ADDRESS=”192.168.1.100:69”

The address above is the IP address of your tftp server.

(c) Start the inetd superdaemon
$ sudo /etc/init.d/openbsd-inetd start
Starting internet superserver inetd [ OK ]

(d) Check the tftpd is now active:
$ netstat -a | grep tftp
udp 0 0 *:tftp *:*

----------------------
Step 3.
Copy the netboot files into the tftp server. (Check lftp is there, if not – install it, with sudo apt-get install lftp).
$ sudo mkdir -p /srv/tftp/
$ cd /srv/tftp/
$ sudo lftp -c “open http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/lucid/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/; mirror”

----------------------
Step 4.
(a) Edit /srv/tftp/pxelinux.cfg/default and change string menu.cfg into text.cfg.
After the change, the file should look as follows:

include ubuntu-installer/i386/boot-screens/text.cfg

default ubuntu-installer/i386/boot-screens/vesamenu.c32

prompt 0

timeout 0

(b) Modify the /srv/tftp/ubuntu-installer/i386/boot-screens/text.cfg file to have the following content:

timeout 1

default auto

label auto

menu label ^Auto

menu default

kernel ubuntu-installer/i386/linux

append vga=normal initrd=ubuntu-installer/i386/initrd.gz

ks=http://192.168.1.100/ubuntu/ks.cfg -- quiet

----------------------
Step 6.
(a) Install lighttpd (may need to stop apache first, if running).
$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop # if running
$ sudo apt-get install lighttpd

(b) Ensure that the root directory is /srv/www (the default /var/www could be used, but we follow proper FHS rules here ;-). This will serve all installation files. The url directive in the kickstart file will direct the installation program to this web page.
$ sudo vi /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf
change the document-root directive to read as follows:
server.document-root = "/srv/www/"

(c) Start lighttpd
$ sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd start

----------------------
Step 7.
Populate the the web server with the installation files.

Here, we will get the installation files from the Ubuntu installation CD (assumes Ubuntu installation CD is in the drive on the server machine, and mounted).

$ sudo mkdir /srv/www/ubuntu
$ sudo cp -rv /dev/sr0/* /srv/www/ubuntu

(time for a cuppa)

----------------------
Step 8.
Create a text file called ks.cfg with the kickstart instructions, and place it in the /srv/www/ubuntu directory.
Notice that /srv/tftp/ubuntu-installer/i386/boot-screens/text.cfg is pointing at this file.

#platform=x86

#System language

lang en_UK

#Language modules to install

langsupport en_UK

#System keyboard

keyboard gb # not uk !

#System mouse

mouse

#System timezone

timezone Europe/London

#Root password

rootpw --disabled

#Initial user

user fred --fullname "Fred User" --iscrypted --password
$1$TbZtLDPw$YG89LpNillhOvTH4zeEse/

#Reboot after installation

reboot

#Use text mode install

text

#Install OS instead of upgrade

install

#Use Web installation - provide the URL of your web server

url --url http://192.168.1.100/ubuntu

#cdrom

#System bootloader configuration

bootloader --location=mbr

#Clear the Master Boot Record

zerombr yes

#Partition clearing information

clearpart --all --initlabel

#Disk partitioning information

part / --fstype ext3 --size 10000000 # --grow failed for me ;-(

part swap --size 512

part /lvm --fstype lvm --size 512

#System authorization information

auth --useshadow --enablemd5

#Network information

network --bootproto=dhcp --device=eth0

#Firewall configuration

firewall --disabled

#Do not configure the X Window System

skipx

%packages # comment out needed packages, or add new

openssh-server

# ubuntu-vm-builder

# libvirt-bin

# screen

%pre

%post

perl -pi -e "s/kickseed/myserver/g" /etc/hosts /etc/motd

perl -pi -e "s/ubuntu/myserver/g" /etc/hosts /etc/motd

cat > /etc/hostname <<>

myserver

EOF

cat >> /etc/hosts <<>

192.168.1.10 myserver.example.com myserver

192.168.1.11 yourserver.example.com yourserver

192.168.1.12 herserver.example.com herserver

EOF

# any other post-installation shell command(s) can go here

This concludes server configuration.

----------------------------
Step 9. On the client:

Boot, intercept the booting process and enter BIOS. Change the sequence of boot devices, and select network boot.

Ideally, you want to identify a separate key, like F12 on some machines, which request PXE boot without you changing the boot sequence. This will prevent repeated boots as the machine restarts after the installation.

How did Ubuntu speed up boot time?

2010-08-12T00:14:00.002+01:00

Fact: Ubuntu 10.04 boots significantly faster than any other desktop/laptop OS I have ever used. On the same machine (Asus), boot time went from about 75 seconds to less than 30. My Lenovo X201 takes approximately 25 seconds to go through full reboot cycle.

How come? Scott of Canonical, explained at LINUXCON.

When booting a Linux system, four distinct phases occur:
1.Load into memory the kernel and ramdisk
2.Load platform drivers
3.Start X-related stuff
4.Start the desktop

Ubuntu developers made a conscious decision to aim for target timing. Rather than tweaking existing sequence of events, they decided to invest time into redesigning the boot process, and aim for 2+2+2+4 seconds for each stage, respectively.

That would give a cold-to-desktop time of 10 seconds. Test base platform that was used was a Dell laptop (can't remember which one, but it doesn't matter, as advantages and shortened time will apply to most contemporary PCs).

How they went about it: first of all, they looked at the monolithic kernel content, and cleaned it up. This had a two-fold benefit: it allowed to remove some of the duplicity, where two (or more !) modules were doing the same thing, but also in the process, they managed to nearly half the footprint of the kernel image itself – a massive saving in resource and time to load.

Ramdisk savings are not that easy to achieve. You can't remove it altogether: ramdisk is essential, as it provides the hibernate/suspend functionality, LVM, RAID, filesystem encryption, etc. However, where the saving can be made is if you start performing ramdisk tasks asynchronously with the loading of mainline kernel. That, of course, relies on the CPU with multi-cores, but even on a single core the benefits are significant, as the kernel will schedule things more efficiently whilst waiting for hardware to return.

Other improvements:

1.
blkid process (relying on while/sleep) poll-style operation has now been fully replaced by libudev process (which instead of polling devices, it works on the “tell me when you are ready” principle. That alone saved 3.5 seconds off the boot time

2.
upstart – a total replacement to the init process; it allowed to eliminate 1000s of shell script code and replaced the sequential processing of the service startup with event-driven service initialisation. For example, in the traditional method, when got to mounting a device and the device wasn't up and running, it would miss out on being connected. With initupstart, device will be mounted when it announces its readiness

3.
ureadahead – a binary providing a method of speeding up disk seeks and reads; much more effective on SSD drives, because HDD disks are still prone to slow seeks, as disk geometry gets in the way; ureadahead is fs-independent, although it still can't cope with the fs metadata location problems
use light-weight desktops

4.
in future compiz will be replaced with faster alternative

Oracle take on Linux

2010-08-10T16:21:00.002+01:00

Wim Coekaerts was the first guest speaker at this year's Linuxcon, in Boston. Oracle are one of the event's sponsors, which in itself seems rather significant.

Considering recent acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, it's not surprising that Oracle's presence here is important.

I'm not going to transcribe the talk. Few comments only: the indication of where Oracle stand on Solaris and Linux is apparently in the fact that they are at present hiring professionals in both of these.

According to Wim, more than 20% of Oracle installations run on Linux. His closing comment was:

"Linux is here to stay, also at Oracle"

That was to say - nobody argues the place of Linux in today's IT, and that has nothing to do with Oracle, no individual or organisation can change the momentum Linux has. However, Oracle are declaring their full embrace for both Linux and open source in general.

Creation time in UniX? Yes - in ext4

2010-07-14T20:10:00.003+01:00

The ext4 file system has now been available for a while, but so far Ubuntu is the only distribution installing it by default.

There are significant differences between ext4 and its predecessors, and amongst them is extent mapping (instead of the traditional indirect block mapping), the new 1 nanosecond date resolution capability, date limit pushed back till 25/04/2514, and for the first time in UNIX i-node that stores five file timestamps (i-node width defaults to 256 bytes in ext4).

In addition to the traditional atime (a=access), mtime (m=modification) and ctime (c=change of i-node), in ext4 we now also have crtime (cr=creation) and dtime (d=deletion).

It's this creation time that many people insisted on having... So we now have it. There is one problem, though. Standard Linux tools can't yet deal with this sophistication!

Normally, we would use tools like stat or find to read file attributes from their i-nodes, but at the moment, they are not extracting any more information from ext4 than from ext2 or ext3.

This is where debugfs can help. First, check which partitions are formatted with ext4:

# mount | grep ext4

/dev/sda1 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro)

Here, the root file system is ext4. To see all know timestamps on a file in this file system (for example, for /etc/hosts file):

# debugfs -R 'stat /etc/hosts' /dev/sda1

Inode: 133370 Type: regular Mode: 0644 Flags: 0x80000
Generation: 1995841318 Version: 0x00000000:00000001
User: 0 Group: 0 Size: 250
File ACL: 0 Directory ACL: 0
Links: 1 Blockcount: 8
Fragment: Address: 0 Number: 0 Size: 0
ctime: 0x4c080d16:0bf9435c -- Thu Jun 3 21:14:14 2010
atime: 0x4c3da303:c11dd858 -- Wed Jul 14 12:44:03 2010
mtime: 0x4c080d16:0bf9435c -- Thu Jun 3 21:14:14 2010
crtime: 0x4c080d16:0bf9435c -- Thu Jun 3 21:14:14 2010
Size of extra inode fields: 28
EXTENTS:
(0): 557470

Alternatively, check its i-node number (with ls -i) and run debugfs aganist it (notice the compulsory angle brackets if using i-node number):

# debugfs -R 'stat <133370>' /dev/sda1

Inode: 133370 Type: regular Mode: 0644 Flags: 0x80000
Generation: 1995841318 Version: 0x00000000:00000001
User: 0 Group: 0 Size: 250
...

At last!

BTW, I'm being told perl can extract the crtime from the i-node, but haven't tried it yet...

Update your SSL certificate for Citrix

2010-07-01T23:04:00.004+01:00

Some time ago I wrote in this blog a little tutorial on how to install and configure a Citrix client in Linux. The solution worked then, and still works today (I am now on 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04).

However, some weeks ago, I started getting "You have chosen not to trust..." message when connecting. Unfortunately for me, it coincided with a new laptop build, and I have assumed that my configuration has gone awry. My new system was built from scratch, but the home directory was restored from an rsync backup of my old laptop. That managed to confuse me, in that I suspected that some of the start-up files imported from the old (32-bit) laptop conflicted with the new (64-bit) system. It kept me going! I have repeated my own instructions several times, trying other browsers, googling if others had anything similar issues. The overwhelming set of instructions kept referring to the lack of the certificate in the correct ICAclient location. I have double and treble checked that part of the setup, and all seemed well, but the problem persisted.

Having spent several hours on dissecting the problem and getting nowhere, I suddenly relised that all proposed solutions refer to a couple of certificate authorities, whereas my error message referred to something totally different. Went to their site, and it turned out that my certificate that, I had been using for years, has been updated (even though it was meant to be valid till 2020). Anyway, a new download of the certificate into the keystore:

(an operation that in itself took about 15 seconds) and the problem was sorted.

Fixing sound in Ubuntu

2010-06-29T12:18:00.002+01:00

Several installs later, I have noticed a recurring issue. You install base OS (in my case Ubuntu, currently on 10.4), and although system sound is OK, I wasn't getting any sound from video clips, youtube, BBC iplayer, etc. Having been through all sort of attempts to fix it, from simple alsamixer adjustment, to installing new drivers, nothing would manage to fix it.

Then some time later I would try to play an .mp3 track stored on the hard disk, and a pop up screen would suggest installing missing plugins, provided by gstreamer. I followed the instructions (all GUI), and sound works in every application and situation. It's only when this happened again, I think for the third time (same sequence of events when installed 9.04 and 9.10 before), when I clicked it's a 'proper' fix, that seems to work for me consistently. Moral of the story - if youhave problems with sound, see if you can play 'standard' music. If not - with any luck you will be guided how to fix it, and you should be in business in a tick!

BTW, I deliberately missed my hardware spec and setup here, as this has occurred on more than one machine.

A gap year ?

2010-03-15T16:59:00.003Z

I blame my machines going up and down for the silence, and spending every last computing moment on backups, rebuilds, re-installs.

Some of it is my own fault, pushing the hardware to the limits, experimenting with virtualization, tuning the CPUs (one of the crashes was my incorrect use of the taskset command, another trying to modify udev to read my camera in a particular way).

But the worst disaster was when on a dual boot Windows 7 partition crashed, causing a wonderful blue screen of death. I kept the snapshot of this, for those that don't believe...

Anyway, I'm back, trying to catch up. I'm nearly there, abandoned dual boot (will have all other OSes in VMware), and running with Ubuntu 9.10 again. Getting ready for the new LTS (Long Term Support), the 10.4 version out soon...

Booting from CD/DVD inside VMware guest

2009-06-25T16:24:00.002+01:00

We are now using CentOS 5.2 in VMware. Last time we tried to boot from CentOS 5.2 DVD (to experiment with its rescue image), it flatly refused. I'm still relatively new to using the VM setups, so it took time to sort it out...

It turned out that there were two issues:

1 - the accessibility of the CD/DVD from the guest
2 - the booting sequence in the guest BIOS

Below are the steps resolving both.

First enable CD/DVD visibility in the guest:
1. Power off the guest OS
2. In "Devices" tab (right-hand side of the screen) select CD/DVD(IDE)
3a. Tick "Connect at power on" and
3b. Mark "Use physical drive"
3c. From the drop-down list select "Auto detect"

Now fix the BIOS boot sequence (in the guest). Notice that you have to change the focus into the guest screen before you can do anything (CTRL-G)
1. Power on guest OS
2. Intercept the boot - hit CTRL-G followed by hit F2 *quickly* - it doesn't hang around for long!
3. In the BIOS menu, identify the boot sequence screen, and change to place CDROM before the hard disk
4. Save and continue boot...

Forcing Solaris 10 to recognise network interface

2009-06-10T12:13:00.003+01:00

Installed six PCs with Solaris 10 (10/08). Only two out of of them installed with correct network configuration. The unfortunate four didn't recognise the card at all, no kernel module included.

Standard (well, for Solaris) tools like kstat -c net, or dladm show-dev had no network card information ...

Quite a bit of trial and error later (not forgetting googling), here is a working solution:

1. Identify the PCI vendor/device information:

# prtconf -pv | more

Search for Ethernet paragraph (you can do it within more using /Ethernet) and identify its vendor/device data. On my system, it showed:

vendor-id 00008086
device-id 00001050

The last 4 digits of these two values is what we are after.

To find out which particular card this is, I googled for "pci8086,1050" and it's "Intel 82562EZ PRO/100 VE Ethernet"

2. Configure device database

# vi /boot/solaris/devicedb/master

Go to the section with pci8086 entries, possibly using vi's search:

/^pci8086

Insert the following line (ensure it goes in the proper numerical order of the vendor/device pairing):

pci8086,1050 pci8086,1050 net pci iprb.bef "Intel 82562EZ PRO/100 VE Ethernet"

3. Add a new alias to the card

# vi /etc/driver_aliases

Search for the iprb related section and insert the following line (in the right alphabetically place):

iprb "pci8086,1050"

4. Load the kernel driver module for the interface

# modload /kernel/drv/iprb

5. Perform a 'reconfigure' reboot. First initialise the reconfigure flag file, then reboot the machine:

# touch /reconfigure
# reboot

6. After the reboot, 'plumb' the card in and complete the configuration (here, I'm assuming IP address of 192.168.1.100):

# ifconfig iprb0 plumb
# ifconfig iprb0 192.168.1.100 up
# touch /etc/hostname.iprb0

Make sure that the hosts file under /etc/inet is fine. Mine has the following lines:

127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.qa.com
192.168.1.100 yogi yogi.qa.com loghost

Notice that on Solaris the main /etc/hosts file is a symbolic link to /etc/inet/hosts and in addition it will be replicated (automatically) into /etc/inet/ipnodes as well.

Time ticket with sudo

2009-06-02T18:06:00.002+01:00

The sudo facility has been available in UNIX for a long time. Often as an add-on, it provides secure and highly configurable mechanism for "delegating" tasks. It is meant to step in where the basic "switch user" command, su, leaves off.

In the sudo configuration file (/etc/sudoers) we define who can do what on which machines with whose identity. The configuration can be as complex as it is powerful, so a lot of the time administrators start with a basic facility, which specifies that a user can do every command, on every machine as any user:

fred ALL=(ALL) ALL

So how does that differ from login as user root in the first place? Well, with sudo you don't disseminate root's password. Users attempting to use the sudo facility will have to authenticate themselves by providing their own password (not the password of the 'target' identity!).

Once authenticated, the user can continue executing sudo commands for a default timeout (typically 5, 10 or 15 minutes). This timeout is known as the 'time ticket'. Once the time ticket expires, the user will have to provide his/her password again.

The default for the time ticket is not always appropriate. Depending on the job role, there may be a requirement to extend (or indeed shorten) the time ticket's length.

To do that, edit the /etc/sudoers file (using visudo tool), and add the line into the Defaults block of instructions (it actually doesn't matter where the line ends up, the suggested location is for clarity reasons only):

Defaults:fred timestamp_timeout = "X"

where X stands for the number of minutes you want the time ticket to last.

If you want for the timetickets to never expire (not really recommended - it defeats the purpose!) replace X with -1.

You can add a line for each user you want to modify, and you can replace the user name with ALL - meaning.... all users ;-)

Changing 'Places' in Gnome panel

2009-05-11T21:59:00.003+01:00

Distros using Gnome have pretty much standardised on the main panel's appearance and content. We get three main drop-down menus: Applications, Places and System.

Customising Applications and System is straighforward, and quite intuitive (right-click on either of them, choose Edit Menus, and have a play...). However, the same cannot be said for Places. By default, the top part of it gives a direct access to user home directory and their Desktop. But if you want to add another quick-access location, you need to realise that the Places represents a shortcut to the Nautilus Bookmarks.

So, to modify the list of directories accessible via Places you need to edit file manager's Bookmarks. Open your file manager, select the Places view for the left hand-side pane, then edit it by dropping or deleting directories into it (see the screenshot).

Test posting from e-mail directly into blog

2009-04-29T21:04:00.002+01:00

Just set up an "email2blog" account, and this is the test of the post.

Including an attachment picture (Barry flying LN over our garden).

Thank you http://www.linuxjournal.com/video/blogger-email for the hint !

Fixing MS in VMware keyboard mappings

2009-04-23T15:37:00.002+01:00

When using VMware (host: Linux, guest XP), keyboard mapping are not correct.

To fix, modify the VMware configuration file, by adding the following directive:

xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true

Add it to the configuration file relevant to your product. If you have VMware server - it's /etc/vmware-server-console/conf.

For you have Workstation or Player, it's /etc/vmware/config.

It's been reported (see: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/177321) that the local file, in ~/.vmware/config can be used for the purpose (not tested by me either).

Open Source Interoperability Initiative from Microsoft

2009-04-23T14:14:00.005+01:00

It's discussed at http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/interop/default.mspx. Great, isn't it?

I have written before about the current configuration of my main laptop (Dell XPS M1330): I am running Ubuntu 8.10, which is 100% adequate for all my personal needs.

However, for as part of my work I need to be able to edit Microsoft Office files (all our slides are produced in Power Point). Well, tried using Open Office - it can do just as good a job. However, the niggling and subtle (sometimes very subtle) style and font differences made it so frustrating that I gave up. I was spending far too much time converting between Open Office - Power Point and back.

That gave rise to the second best solution: install Crossover Office, a product based on Wine, allowing access to MS native applications. Again, this works the treat, at least in principle. Then I bumped into more hiccups, like font colour changing, or various boxes being over sized. In isolation, I would be totally satisfied with the solution, but I need to comply with company's strict branding and design style, and I can't achieve it with this setup (at least not without additional fiddling with the files).

So, (grudgingly) on to the next solution. I already have a license for VMware Workstation (6.5). I installed XP into it, added MS Office 2003, and thought that I might be able to get some work done, at last. No! MS Office working in VMware does not recognise any of the extended keyboard mappings. Arrow keys, Page Up, Page Down, etc, all either totally dead, or generate VM-associated actions.

So why is it that I'm wasting all this time just to stay afloat. This is like an engineer having to calibrate his meters or file his screwdrivers before every use.

Open source is meant to unite. If Microsoft truly opened their code, it would allow other designers to create applications that are workable and provide permanent solutions. Instead, these designers are still having to reverse-engineer, outguess, invent emulators and create work-around fixes. Fixes are never perfect.

Microsoft are boasting about interoperability: "... agreements between Microsoft and open source distributors. including Novell, Xandros, Linspire, and TurboLinux". That probably explains why my EeePC (Xandros) seems to have more robust drivers, character rendering and application selections, etc. But that is not what commitment to open source should be. If you are selective, you are still prescriptive and closed.

Unless you find a way of being only a bit pregnant.

Ubuntu training (and Spreed conferencing)

2009-04-19T00:17:00.001+01:00

Canonical have revamped their courses and certification paths. Sounds very sensible - there is so much entry level training, why not concentrate on distribution specifics and more advanced server issues achievable with Ubuntu. The Ubuntu Certified Professional programme is still based on the LPI 101 and 102, followed by LPI 199 exam (the later is Ubuntu specific) and the main difference is in the changed bias in the Canonical-authored courses, which now concentrate on the more advanced desktop and server configuration topics. Canonical have high aspirations for Ubuntu as a fully fledged desktop system, hence the Ubuntu Desktop Course in addition to the server courses (all described at www.canonical.com/training/certificationcourses).

To get the detail and the philosophy of the new training content over to the accredited trainer base, (as well as a fresh and original delivery approach) Canonical are holding several TTT (Train The Trainer) sessions. Considering that the number of people being trained is relatively small, and they are splattered literally all over the world, arranging the logistics for such a session was not trivial.

I have attended the event run 13:00 - 17:00 EST, which put it at 18:00-22:00 “my” time. I wasn't the worst off, there were people from US, Canada, but also from countries much further East than I am, so it was even later into the night for some of them. I was a bit worried, because the joining instructions, although very clear, involved configuring technologies either totally new to me, or ones that, regrettably, I have never made a proper use of.

The underlying conferencing engine was a product new to me, called Spreed. It impressed me straight away: it supports _all_ contemporary operating systems, including MacOS and Linux. Once on Spreed site, quick test confirmed that connection speed and other communication elements are suitable for conferencing. Patiently waited for an e-mail invitation to join and, once that arrived, a single click on the link and I was in. I understand this was the first time Canonical tried this particular conferencing method for the TTT purposes, so there was new grounds to cover for both the students and the moderators. But, with few (mostly humorous) hiccups the event went very smoothly, the time past surprisingly fast and my overall impression was very positive.

Although the product supports full audio and video from all participants, we didn't use cameras at all (something about Spreed and Flash 10 being incompatible - well, we had to have hardware incompatibility ;-)). Most of us stayed away from the audio as well, the interactive and real time “chat” pane provided more than satisfactory interaction. 10 points to the moderators for looking out for our comments and reacting to them swiftly. The whole experience was smooth, painless and very effective. Thank you EmmaJane, Belinda and Billy!

Bottom line - my resistance to these elaborate e-based methods of collaboration is well and truly broken, bring them on!

2009-04-03T11:02:00.000+01:00

Well, I have decided to take a plunge with the all new and shiny QA blog. Although it's only as new as my "new" 3-year old LPG car I bought recently. Xpertise had the blog designed and active well before the merger.

It is rather ironic, and indicative of the state of the game, that the blog is only expected to be accessed / updated from Windows and Explorer.

So, despite the fact that I haven’t used Windows for a couple of years, (and had used Firefox for years prior to that), it seems that the popular believe that life begins and ends with Windows is still there...

Luckily, Firefox 3 managed to overcome whatever the .NET or activeX components compatibility issues might be (I don't really know what I'm talking about here, so I'll stop speculating any further!). Opera 9 wasn't as helpful, and would not connect at all (although I could&#39ve tried changing its personality to Explorer in the setup)…

Filesystem with "relatime" attribute

2009-02-12T08:27:00.002Z

Many debates have been carried out on the subject of time wasting when writing to i-node table (i.e. accessing the disk) when a user performes file access. Many alternatives have been offered over the years to avoid this.

One of them is a filesystem attribute called relatime. It has been in existence for a while, but because nobody has been using it (by this I mean vendors rather than users), I never took sufficient time to remember how it works.

Well, Ubuntu now uses relatime by default. Time to learn...

Here is a quote from the best resource I found on the subject. It comes from an article posted by Jonathan Corbet on lwn.net:

"Another approach was added in 2.6.20: the relatime mount option. If this flag is set, access times are only updated if they are (before the update) earlier than the modification time. This change allows utilities to see if the current version of a file has been read, but still cuts down significantly on atime updates. This option is not heavily used, perhaps because few people have heard of it and many distributions lack a version of mount which is new enough to know about it. Using relatime can still confuse tools which want to ask questions like "has this file been accessed in the last week?"

Hint: if you want to exeriment with the behaviour, use the stat command. Read and modify a file few times, and observe how the atime (access time) is only updated if the last access was done before the last content change.

HPOfficeJet H470 in Ubuntu 8.10 over Bluetooth

2009-01-23T15:55:00.002Z

It was all working in Hardy, but a week ago I reinstalled my Dell M1330, no Vista anymore - just Ubuntu 8.10. Very impressed, added Crossover Linux (still need MS Office), and I don't think I'm going to look back.

Hardware recognition fantastic, my 3G dongle, which used to give me a lot of grieve before - now is running with a single click on the panel...

Bluetooth seemed fine as well (connecting to other laptops and exchanging files OK). However, got stuck on the HP H470 printer. It worked with Hardy, now, attempts to connect only showed "Pairing Failed". Checking Ubuntu forum confirmed that there is a known bug in Intrepid, and there is seemingly a disagreement between the forum members and the developer on how to handle this. Shame...

Never mind, time to get under the hood. The bug indicates that the gnome front end configuration is broken. Instead, one can use the CUPS web-based configuration, available through your browser.

First check that your CUPS daemon is running, is listening for tcp connections:

$ /etc/init.d/cups status

Status of Common Unix Printing System: cupsd is running.

$ netstat -a | grep LISTEN | grep cups

unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 62711 /var/run/cups/cups.sock

If not, you may have to (re)start the CUPS daemon (replace "status" with "start" in the first command above).

Now to the actual configuration:

1. First of all, identify the printer's number with the following command:

$ hcitool scan

Scanning ...

00:21:86:XX:XX:XX PIECORNERENG

00:1A:0E:XX:XX:XX Officejet H470

2. Now start your browser and enter the server's URL: http://127.0.0.1:631. This will point it at CUPS administration server (strictly speaking it is IPP - Internet Printing Protocol using CUPS).

3. Select Add Printer, then Continue

4. Enter values for Name, Location and Description, then Continue

5. In Device: screen select from the drop-down list HP Printer (HPLIP), then Continue

6. In the Device URI screen enter the protocol and the address for your printer, as identified in step 1. Notice no ':' characters used in the string below:

bluetooth://001A0EXXXXXX, then Continue

7. Complete the configuration with the:

Make: HP, then Continue

Model: HP Officejet h470 Foomatic/hpijs (en), then Add Printer

Hopefully, you are looking at "The Bluetooth printer has been added successfully"

8. Test the setup from the command line. Run:

$ lpstat -t

scheduler is running

no system default destination

device for Bluetooth: bluetooth://001A0E79AF32

Bluetooth accepting requests since Fri 23 Jan 2009 16:39:02 GMT

printer Bluetooth is idle. enabled since Fri 23 Jan 2009 16:39:02 GMT

From now on, whether you print from the command line, or from applications, the printer will work hard for you!

Handling MAC addresses in VM

2009-01-21T21:45:00.003Z

We are working on setting up all our UNIX and Linux courses as guests in VMware workstation. There are many advantages of taking this route, as there are some penalties. We setup a 'master' VM, then ghost it, which allows us to dump an image on demand. Once we have used this method for a while, I might elaborate a bit more, with more insight...

In the meantime, just a comment on preventing new images from duplicating original MAC address in Linux configuration. All this is new for me, but our techie in Swindon has sent me an e-mail documenting the solution. Thanks, Martin!

"If you don't do this before taking the image, each subsequent VM that you deploy will have the same MAC Address and you get that annoying "did you copy or move the VM" question on first boot......The fix is...

1. Delete the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules [in the guest]
2. Shutdown the VM
3. Find the .vmx file on the host (in this case, D:\VMRun\Linux C\Linux C.vmx). Edit it with Wordpad and look for 2 lines called uuid.bios and uuid.location. Underneath those 2 lines, add a line as follows:

uuid.action = "create"

4. Save the file and take the image"

Should Gnome-terminal read shell startup files?

2009-01-21T19:13:00.003Z

I say it should. If not by default, then at least users (ordinary users) should be able to set the capability permanently and easily!

It's very easy to set is for a session. Open terminal, go to Edit --> Current Profile --> Title and Command and tick the "Run command as a login shell" box.

Problem is, you have to do it every time you log in. Your first terminal never gets to see your environmental settings. We need permanent solution. Searched and googled, googled and searched. Found a wealth of information on the Red Hat site.

They definitely put me on the right track (and convinced me that I do need to learn xml after all!). However, the article omitted to mention one important bit of information. When you change the settings with the gconftool-2, you must stop the gconfd-2 daemon. I didn't, and had all sorts of desktop problems, including Nautilus crash.

So, to make every gnome-terminal a login shell (e.i. read your environmental files) first stop the gconfd-2 process. There may be a clean way of doing this in runlevel 5, I chose to go to runlevel 3, which is a full multi-user mode of operation, but without X (GUI).

Do the following steps only if you *don't* have any applications or users requiring GUI - you risk P45 or your tyres slashed otherwise.

Log in as root and enter:

# init 3

Press Enter (after few messages) - that will show the prompt again. Enter:

# gconftool-2 --direct --config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults --type boolean --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/login_shell true

Return to GUI runlevel:

# init 5

From now on, every user's terminal will source their startup files...

Kiosk mode in Firefox

2009-01-07T21:21:00.003Z

I had a few e-mails from my local Linux User Group (NLUG, Northants LUG). Somebody asked for help in fixing Firefox. His browser lost all toolbars. An answer appeared within minutes: "F11? (Toggles kiosk mode)".

Two thoughts went through my mind. First of all I remembered that I had the same problem some months ago, and never found the solution. In fact, it was at that point when I decided to investigate Opera (which I have been using ever since). Why didn't I ask the forum? I would probably have had the same answer within minutes!

The other thought related to a question a delegate asked me only yesterday about a "kiosk mode" in an application. I regret to admit, but my answer was a rather ignorant "don't know anything about your application, so can't comment" statement.

Will I ever learn? Not knowing anything about the 'kiosk' thing, I assumed the term was peculiar to the application the chap was talking about!

So I'm feeling rather depressed. Not only is this questioning my style in interaction with delegates, but also exposing massive gaps in my knowledge - everybody I mentioned the "kiosk mode" since then knew about it. It seems I'm the only person in the Universe that thought a kiosk is a type of detached cabin selling newspepars and cigarettes...

My first ever new year resolution

2009-01-03T00:07:00.001Z

Will mantain this blog more regularly!

Upgrading Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 - lesson learnt

2008-10-09T08:40:00.003+01:00

I never liked upgrades - so many of them had gone wrong for me in the past... But having now been using Ubuntu for so long, I have become comfortable with it, and although I tried to document all add-ons and changes I made to the system (and I have a full data backup), I didn't really fancy re-building the system from scratch, just to go a version up.

So, for the first time in ages - I decided to take a plunge. I went for the network upgrade, using the front-end software tool - which, coincidentally kept encouraging me to do just that at least once a day ;-)

I left it overnight - no point in watching and agonizing over every slow down or apparent freeze.

However, next morning it sat on a message " Generating locale... en_AU.UTF-8...". Clearly, that was it. The process was well and truly stuck. I ended up doing a hard restart - nothing else responded.

Having tried several things (that got me into a system without GUI) I could not progress the upgrade any further. What was worse, the fresh installation didn't work either - the hard disk was not recognised (that bit I still need to investigate!).

I left it for a few days, using my little toy EeePC as a stop gap (a pretty effective one too!). Last night I decided to do a bit of googling - and bingo - within the first attempt! The full discussion and the actual solution is at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=865679.

In summary: if you got stuck like me, reboot into the older kernel (-15 or -14) failsafe mode and run :

dpkg --configure -a

Then boot the old kernel (-15, proper, not failsafe), at GUI login screen select in Options Failsafe Gnome session, the run the dpkg command again:

sudo dpkg --configure -a

Next reboot - standard kernel and GUI session - all is well!

Lesson learnt?
Do your homework before embarking onto a major system upgrade/maintenance, etc. The problems with upgrade from the latest 7.10 kernel to 8.04 are very well documented, if I only looked...

CD to disk file transfer on HP-UX

2008-09-25T17:01:00.002+01:00

After a long pause, and several projects later, I'm back getting ready our uxheaven.com (our back-room of variety of UNIX boxes, that will be used for training multi-vendor courses).

Today, it's configuring HP-UX boxes: one is the B.11.11 U9000, the other B.11.23 on Itanium.

Had to look up some of my old posts to fix various network settings, and I reckon the /etc/rc.config.d/netconf file will now stay in my memory (sad - it takes few weeks and the detail is gone!).

Once the network was fine, needed to add software from CDs, to a central repository of documents and future depot files. For the time being, all I need is to have it all on hard disk. Quick refresher on the process:

1. Identify the special file for CD-ROM:

# ioscan -funC disk

showed it to be /dev/c1t0d0

2. Create mount point directory
I like the way Linux treats removable media, so my new mount directory became:

# mkdir -p /media/cdrom

3. Mount the disk:

# mount -F cdfs /dev/c1t0d0 /media/cdrom

4. Finally, create directory for the documents, and copy the CD content

# mkdir /usr/doc
# cp -rf /media/cdrom /usr/doc

Ready for use...

Citrix client on EeePC with Xandros Linux

2008-09-05T22:15:00.003+01:00

First of all, contrary to other postings, you do not have to become "root" to install Citrix client. Especially on EeePC/Xandros, where (although possible) you would not expect a multitude of different user accounts.

The steps for installing Citrix on EeePC are not that different from any other distribution:

1. Point the browser at: http://www.citrix.com/English/SS/downloads/details.asp?downloadID=3323&productID=-1#top
and download Linux ICA Client:
Version 10.6 English 6/28/07 1.8 mb .tar.gz (x86 client - requires OpenMotif 2.2.x).

In the Firefox download dialog, choose to Save to Disk. On the EeePC/Xandros, the default location for Firefox downloads is /home/user .

2. Press CTRL-ALT-T to gain access to the command line.

3. Setup the folder for the ICA client

/home/user> mkdir citrix

/home/user> mv en.linuxx86.tar.gz citrix

/home/user> cd citrix

4. Unpack the tarball file:

/home/user/citrix> tar zxvf en.linuxx86.tar.gz

./

./PkgId

...

5. Run the install script:

/home/user/citrix> ./setupwfc

Follow the instructions: choose Install client and the default directory (ICAClient).
Let the installation script create the ICAClient directory

6. Install the certificate
If you look at my earlier posting: "Ubuntu on XPS M1330 - Installing Citrix" (Monday, April 14, 2008), you will see the content of the certificate file.
Cut and paste it into a plain text file.
The file name for the certificate should be:
/home/user/ICAClient/linuxx86/keystore/cacerts/UTN-USERFirst-Hardware.crt

EeePC with Xandros - long live Asus

2008-09-05T21:28:00.003+01:00

I hate its keyboard. Horrible. And I don't mean the size, but quality. Most keys refuse to work unless you hit them with just the right amount of pressure, and jut the right angle. What a shame, because otherwise my new toy is an absolute treasure. There, there; got the bad out of the way.

Now I can concentrate on the good. To my mind the little EeePC is a perfect cross between a light, small, beautifully equipped sub-notebook with a perfectly selected set of simply presented open source operating system and applications.

Just been on two-week holidays, traveling across Europe. My "eepsy" did the trick - as a fast communicator (complete with video conferencing, thanks to the camera), storage device for photographs, work tool for quick write-ups, internet radio provider, and a source of endless penguin racing activity for a bored two-years-old, who had never seen the game before, yet was racing within seconds.

Xandros based EeePC might do more for popularising Linux that all remaining distributions put together - although admittedly for all the wrong reasons: many people will not even realise they have Linux! I have seen EeePC/Xandros being used by people who used to shiver at the mere sound of the word Linux.

What is best about it? Apart from the almost a pocket size and weight? Well, this is the first machine, Linux or otherwise, that had all facilities work out of the box. Totally intuitive, typical PDA-style front end, the easiest device to use by a mile.

Mind you, it took me two days to find access to CLI, but then again this was out of curiosity rather than necessity (press CTR-ALT-T, in case you wonder).

I'm probably being unfair to other distributions (like Ubuntu, which is my current favourite, for reasons I might explain separately).

After all EeePC/Xandros was fine-tuned for the specific hardware - a luxury that few distributions can afford...

HP drivers in Ubuntu

2008-07-17T12:48:00.002+01:00

Some off-the-shelf HP printers won't work in Ubuntu, until proprietary drivers are installed.

The quickest way I found is to use the existing hp-setup tool, provided in Ubuntu distributions. Just plug your printer in, and run:

$ sudo hp-setup

Couple of answers later (d for download and y for yes, I agree to the license terms), your printer is ready. Painless and quick.

As always, remember that if you are behind a proxy, you need to sort it out first (see several entries below regarding this).

Wobble your screen in Ubuntu 8.04

2008-07-17T09:30:00.002+01:00

I'm moving onto the new Ubuntu version, and many people around me are twisting my arm to start using the 3D effects brought to Ubuntu by the Compiz set of packages.

I can't imagine needing these effects long term (call me conservative and stingy), but having managed to get it work well (with some hints from our current resident whiz-kid, Lubo), I thought I'd document the process.

You need the graphics card capable of 3D acceleration, of course, but most contemporary cards will do. Beware, some machines require proprietary drivers, so you may need to do more prep work.

Ubuntu 8.04 comes with the main Compiz package already present and installed. You can recognize its presence by the slightly different feel to windows manipulation actions: different transparency, transitions, etc. But to get the full benefit of Compiz, so that you get to convert your screen into various shapes and bounce them on your terminal whilst the applications they display continue running, you need to install and enable a bit more.

Step 1 - only required if you are sitting behind a proxy (if not, move to step 2). If you use proxy, the likelyhood is that all you have configured so far is your browser. I.e. firefox can access the world through the proxy, but no other application. There are several ways (as always) of allowing other applications to get to the proxy, but for the purpose of this exercise, we will only instruct package management tools (apt) ...

First of all, identify what proxy address is being used on your site, and which port. Edit the apt configuration file: /etc/apt/apt.conf by running the following command (substitute proxy-address shown below for the proxy address and XX for the port number, often 8080) :

$ sudo echo 'Acquire::http::Proxy "http://proxy-address:XXXX";' >> /etc/apt/apt.conf

You may need to extend the stanza, if you use proxy user name and password. The entry would then look similar to this:

Acquire::http
{
 Proxy "http://proxy-address:XXXX/";
 ProxyLogin
 {
    "USER @";
    "PASS ";
 }
}

Step 2 - assuming you repository file (/etc/apt/sources.list) has been set up, which in 8.04 is done during installation, you should be able to continue with the Compiz install.

Rebuild the database of available packages, the check for compiz packages, and install the front-end tool for it:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-cache search compiz

...

compizconfig-settings-manager - Compiz configuration settings manager

...

$ sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Once done, follow the path:

System --> Preferences --> Advanced Desktop Effects Settings

for all your 3D setting delights!

Happy playing... (I'm moving to other things) ;-)

Atomic file system

2008-07-15T18:04:00.002+01:00

I had a discussion with a delegate about pros and cons of a journalling file systems. What is special about them, and what are their main characteristics - in other words, is it worth to upgrade to a journalling file system from a traditional predecessor.

First of all, why would anybody be still working with a filesystem that is *not* journalling. Long gone the days where administrator would be prepared to do a full system fsck, just in case there is a filesystem inconsistency.

The main characteristic of a journalling filesystem is the fact that it can maintain a log of all transactions. However, unlike "standard" system logs, which record transactions after the event, filesystem logging records intentions, before the operation is even attempted (although there are various methods of achieving this, and some - such as metadata-only journalling - are more efficient than others). Of course, there is penalty in logging: in both performance and disk space, so for that reason, some administrators switch the logging off. How crazy! This is the very feature that journalling filesystems excel at, yet for many admins the term journal, or log seems to be sufficiently off-putting to turn it off!

Therefore, when describing a journalling filesystem for the first time to, I tend to use another term as the main characteristic: I introduce these filesystems as "atomic filesystems", rather than journalling. Atomic transaction means it either happens fully, completely and successfully, or it doesn't happen at all. One can provide numerous illustrations why data transfers, file and directory manipulation or database transactions should have the atomic nature.

But the moral of the story is: once you turn the attention to the advantages of transaction atomicity, then the term journal is not that scary anymore...

Stallman on Microsoft on BBC site

2008-07-03T17:17:00.004+01:00

Our NLUG (Northants Linux User Group) have been discussing the article, by Richard Stallman, published on the bbc site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7487060.stm

Richard Stallman is writing about. Having read it, I agree with most facts pointed out by Richard Stallman.

However, I felt a bit uneasy reading it. I'm quite conversant with the terminology he is using, I'm familiar with technologies and legal events he is referring to. Would a typical reader be though? One of our group members said: "I think he is really preaching to the converted. We Open Source fanatics will agree; but the general public / PC users will probably not have a clue what he is talking about, they see the universality of Microsoft as an advantage."

I wholeheartedly agree! Most PC users genuinely don't care about any of this.

And I can't escape a thought that Stallman's powerful, albeit very eloquent, attack might end up being counter-productive as most people will not really understand what he is saying, instead, will interpret the article as a dogmatic expression of hate towards Microsoft.

Telnet is a no-no, but StarWars with Telnet?

2008-06-21T23:36:00.004+01:00

For more than a decade now, we have been indoctrinating our delegates that using 'straight' telnet is insecure, it transmits streams of clear text, etc., etc.

How can one deal with a delegate who in reply to that 'lecture' presents you with a telnet session to towel.blinkenlights.nl . ;-)))

Try it for yourself! What a feast of ASCII animation!

It helps if you have seen the original version (and the more traditional screening method) of Star Wars before running this telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl session.

apt-get behind a proxy in Ubuntu

2008-06-10T18:54:00.002+01:00

How amazing! I've now been using my little Dell with Ubuntu exclusively for many months, and I haven't realised until now that it didn't have the ssh server installed!

I used the client to connect out to various boxes all over the place, but clearly never tried to connect into it. Until now. Just tried from my HP-UX machine - failed. Once penny dropped what the reason for the "connection on port 22 refused" message was, quickly run the command to install it:

# sudo apt-get install openssh-server

only to realise, quite a while later, that it hang.

Of course! I'm sitting behind the classroom proxy, and although I configured Firefox, any application outside of it won't know. I could set a system wide parameter, but I settled for:

# export http_proxy=http://10.175.20.1:8080/

Run the apt-get again, and I'm in sshd business.

IP configuration in HP-UX B11.23

2008-06-10T18:15:00.002+01:00

Most of the start-up scripts in HP-UX are under the /sbin directory. You'll find the master scripts there, in the init.d, and you will find all run-level related directories, rc0.d, rc1.d, etc.

The /etc does have related stuff, in the /etc/rc.config.d, but this is only service start-up directives. Each file, corresponding to a service, contains relevant parameter definition. Guess what a file called netconf might contain? All basic network interface card configuration is here...

The file is rather large, with a lot of comments and explanation. I am after the 'meaningful' lines, those that contain the actual configuration. The following command line allows me to see those lines only, using grep to strip all comment lines, then sed to delete empty lines:

# grep -v '^#' /etc/rc.config.d/netconf | sed '/^$/d'

There are nearly twenty lines in total, the important one that I'm going to change are:

HOSTNAME="itanium.piecorner.com"
IP_ADDRESS[0]=192.168.1.43
DHCP_ENABLE[0]=0 # was 1 for true
ROUTE_GATEWAY=192.168.1.254

This is only for the time being, while I'm testing this in the classroom. Once the boxes go into the machine room, will have to revisit the settings.

Time for reboot and test.

When troubleshooting - work methodically....

2008-06-10T17:30:00.003+01:00

I am working on a brand new (albeit second hand) HP-UX (Itanium) machine. Never really configured it, all I've done with it was to interrogate it a bit, and I don't really know which known to me flavour of UNIX is going to be the closest to this one... So anything I do will require an element of investigation. All these wonderful HP-UX books that I've bought are sitting next to me, and no doubt will come handy at one point. In the meantime, let's play...

First of all, the machine booted into run-level 3, and seems to be defaulting to DHCP, whereas I am sitting in a classroom with fixed private addresses. I need to assign a static address:

# ifconfig lan0 192.168.1.43

Pinging the gateway and other machines on the network is working the treat. However, some 30 seconds after the IP address change, the machine starts to emit horrible, ear-piercing beeps. As if some application or a server got terribly unhappy with the new address. Rebooted the box, and repeated the exercise a couple of times - a very predictable sequence of events was reproduced every time. Eventually, instead of rebooting, I placed it into single user mode, for a quick look under the hood:

# init 1

First of all, find out how the rc (start-up and shutdown) stuff works: a look inside the inittab file is usually the best place to start:

# cat /etc/inittab
init:3:initdefault
...
sqnc::wait:/sbin/rc # system init
... :respawn:... # several of these and few more
...

The master rc scripts are, as expected in the /etc/init.d directory. The run-level related links, however, are under the /sbin location (rather than /etc in other version of UNIX).

# ls -ld rc*
rc rc.utils rc0.d rc1.d rc3.d rc4.d

Most of the multiuser runlevel work is done in the rc2.d directory (i.e as part of going into run-level 2). Run-level 3 introduces some of the network server start-up:

# ls /sbin/rc3.d
S100nfs.server S823hpws_apache S823hpws_webmin S990dtlogin.rc
S200tps.rc S823hpws_tomcat S823hpws_xmltools S999kwdbd

So the first test is to change the IP address in run-level 1, and see if anything gets upset:

# ifconfig lan0 192.168.1.43

Pinging the gateway and other machines is working OK again, and no alarm is heard! OK, then, let's push it one notch further, and switch into the basic multi-user mode (run-level 2):

# init 2

DHCP was attempted, but the message scrolled off before I could read it - will need to look at log files. I am surprised to see NIS being started here, but pleased to see SSH server started - should be able to connect from my laptop soon. Mail daemon took several minutes before timing out..., so did SNMP HP-UNIX Network Management Subagent.

Eventually, after excruciatingly long time , got the message "Transition to run-level 2 is complete". But the box is not talking to anybody else... The IP address reverted to the last known. My command line changes disappeared. Not sure if I am surprised, perhaps a bit. This was not a full blown reboot, my networking worked fine in run-level 1, so I didn't necessarily expected for it to go and come back again...

But, before looking closer at the configuration to see which script was responsible, I need to remember why I'm doing this: testing the impact of changing IP at the command line. I am now in run-level 2 – will the change in this state raise the alarm?

# ifconfig lan0 192.168.1.43

No problems, my ears are safe. So it must be something in run-level 3. Well, I don't actually need it at the moment, but when I'm ready to get the box on-line for our courses, I will need the NFS server running. That one is started in run-level 3, so I might as well sort it out now.

# /sbin/rc3.d/S100nfs.server start
starting NFS SERVER networking
...

So, this worked, and I think this is all that we will need long term. However, I can't stop yet – my curiosity won't let me. I need to know what the horrible noise was about.

Remember what is in run-level 3?

# ls /sbin/rc3.d
S100nfs.server S823hpws_apache S823hpws_webmin S990dtlogin.rc
S200tps.rc S823hpws_tomcat S823hpws_xmltools S999kwdbd

So, the next: try tps.rc. This is what starts X server in HP-UX.

# /sbin/rc3.d/S200tps.rc start

No problem. Somehow, I didn't think apache, tomcat, etc would be at fault, so went straight for the desktop (GUI) login script:

# /sbin/rc3.d/S990dtlogin.rc start

Bingo!

Quick – init 1!

Next – will need to find how to fix the IP address and see if it behaves without my command line changes...

Get on with it...

2008-06-10T14:46:00.002+01:00

I am so full of admiration for all those people who are maintaining their blogs regularly! How many times have I promised myself that I would be doing it properly, full of good intentions...

It is a fantastic resource, and I have regularly looked back at some of my earlier entries to find a fix to a problem I had sorted months and months ago.

However, my problem is that despite all these gadgets I keep buying and playing with, I'm still primarily a paper-log type person. I like writing in a book, and I don't like repeating myself. So I end up with bits and pieces in this blog, and bulk of my records in a physical, A4 (!) notebook.

On the other hand, I am beginning to grow tired of carrying these A4 books with me. So much travel, and all these paper-based material is just not on anymore...

So, my little on-line blog: all is forgiven, and I shall try my best and visit you more often ;-)

Collating info on HP-UX B.11.23 on Itanium

2008-04-29T20:25:00.002+01:00

Just got a new toy - a second hand Itanium 2 box. It came with XP 64-bit, but it is now running HP-UX B.11.23. Installation went smoothly; this being the first time I've done this particular combination, I allowed it to run with defaults (which were quite good, especially the partitioning).

Reboot, and the machine is up and running. How disappointing, though - the CDE wouldn't start, complaining about the lack of screens. Not sure at this stage if it is X11R6 configuration, hardware problem or perhaps driver issue! Will google for anything obvious (like unsupported card) later.

In the meantime, decided to brush up on the HP-UX system interrogation tools.

# uname -a
HP-UX itahpux B.11.23 U ia64 0376224781 unlimited-user license

# machinfo
CPU info:
Number of CPUs = 1
Clock speed = 1500 MHz
CPUID registers
vendor information = "GenuineIntel"
processor serial number = 0x0000000000000000
processor version info = 0x000000001f010504
architecture revision: 0
processor family: 31 Intel(R) Itanium 2 Family Processors
processor model: 1 Intel(R) Itanium 2 processor
processor revision: 5 stepping B1
largest CPUID reg: 4
processor capabilities = 0x0000000000000001
implements long branch: 1
Bus features
implemented = 0xbdf0000060000000
selected = 0x0000000040000000
Bus Lock Signal masked

Cache info:
L1 Instruction: size = 16 KB, associativity = 4
L1 Data: size = 16 KB, associativity = 4
L2 Unified: size = 256 KB, associativity = 8
L3 Unified: size = 6144 KB, associativity = 24

Memory = 1524 MB (1.488281 GB)

Firmware info:
Firmware revision = 02.31
FP SWA driver revision: 1.18
IPMI is supported on this system.
BMC version: v01.52

Platform info:
model string = "ia64 hp workstation zx2000"
machine id number = 166cbc0d-e4c5-11d6-8091-7d5ed3512273
machine serial number = TW23200111

OS info:
sysname = HP-UX
nodename = itahpux
release = B.11.23
version = U (unlimited-user license)
machine = ia64
idnumber = 0376224781
vmunix _release_version:
@(#) $Revision: vmunix: B11.23_LR FLAVOR=perf Fri Aug 29 22:35:38 PDT 2003 $
#
# ioscan -k
H/W Path Class Description
=======================================================
root
0 ioa System Bus Adapter (1229)
0/0 ba Local AGP Bus Adapter (122e)
0/0/0/0 graphics AGP Display (10de025b)
0/1 ba Local PCI-X Bus Adapter (122e)
0/2 ba Local PCI-X Bus Adapter (122e)
0/2/1/0 usb NEC USB Interface
0/2/1/0.1 usbhub USB Root Hub
0/2/1/0.1.2 usbhid USB HID Mouse(0)
0/2/1/1 usb NEC USB Interface
0/2/1/1.1 usbhub USB Root Hub
0/2/1/1.1.2 usbhid USB HID Kbd(1)
0/2/1/2 usb NEC USB Interface
0/2/2/0 sideba CMD IDE controller
0/2/2/0.0 ext_bus IDE Primary Channel
0/2/2/0.0.7 target
0/2/2/0.0.7.0 ctl Initiator
0/2/2/0.1 ext_bus IDE Secondary Channel
0/2/2/0.1.0 target
0/2/2/0.1.0.0 disk HL-DT-STDVD-ROM GDR8160B
0/2/2/0.1.7 target
0/2/2/0.1.7.0 ctl Initiator
0/2/3/0 lan HP PCI 1000Base-T Core
0/2/4/0 audio PCI Audio
0/2/4/1 audio Unimplemented Game Port
0/3 ba Local PCI-X Bus Adapter (122e)
0/3/1/0 ext_bus SCSI C1010 Ultra160 Wide LVD
0/3/1/0.1 target
0/3/1/0.1.0 disk FUJITSU MAN3735MP
0/3/1/0.7 target
0/3/1/0.7.0 ctl Initiator
120 processor Processor
250 ba Core I/O Adapter
250/0 ipmi IPMI Controller
250/1 tty Built-in RS232C
250/2 tty Built-in RS232C
250/3 acpi_node Acpi Hardware

# lanscan
Hardware Station Crd Hdw Net-Interface NM MAC HP-DLPI DLPI
Path Address In# State NamePPA ID Type Support Mjr#
0/2/3/0 0x00306E380A81 0 UP lan0 snap0 1 ETHER Yes 119

# bdf
Filesystem kbytes used avail %used Mounted on
/dev/vg00/lvol3 212992 160296 52344 75% /
/dev/vg00/lvol1 311296 61696 247696 20% /stand
/dev/vg00/lvol8 3670016 88608 3554104 2% /var
/dev/vg00/lvol7 3768320 2291768 1465048 61% /usr
/dev/vg00/lvol4 212992 8480 202920 4% /tmp
/dev/vg00/lvol6 2572288 1576840 987696 61% /opt
/dev/vg00/lvol5 32768 8472 24112 26% /home

Could carry on, but this should be sufficient to record the basic configuration.

Most importantly:

# ioscan -funC graphics
Class I H/W Path Driver S/W State H/W Type Description
=======================================================================
graphics 0 0/0/0/0 gvid_core CLAIMED INTERFACE AGP Display (10de025b)

Ubuntu on XPS M1330 - Installing Citrix

2008-04-14T09:49:00.002+01:00

Last time I tried Citrix on Ubuntu, it failed, reporting the lack of OpenMotif libraries. Having researched the dependency, I now realise that I need to install libmotif3 first. With the system up to date, and all repositories set up, I can now do it:

root@cherry:~# apt-get install libmotif3
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed
libmotif3
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 1283kB of archives.
After unpacking 3129kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get: 1 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/multiverse libmotif3 2.2.3-2 [1283kB]
Fetched 1283kB in 22s (57.8kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package libmotif3.
(Reading database ... 88954 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking libmotif3 (from .../libmotif3_2.2.3-2_i386.deb) ...
Setting up libmotif3 (2.2.3-2) ...
Processing triggers for libc6 ...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place
root@cherry:~# exit
alina@cherry:~$

Now for Citrix: go to Citrix download site: http://www.citrix.com/site/ss/downloads/ and follow the links for "Clients" then "Linux". Identify the tarball (.tar.gz file) for your architecture and download it. Unless you have modified the default browser settings, the citrix client should have landed on your Desktop. By the way, notice that the following steps are done as ordinary user. That means that I am talking here about the Desktop of the user you are logged on as, rather than the desktop of the user "root".

alina@cherry:~$ cd Desktop
alina@cherry:~/Desktop$ tar zxvf en.linuxx86.tar.gz
./
./PkgId
./install.txt
./eula.txt
./readme.txt
./setupwfc
./linuxx86/
./linuxx86/hinst
./linuxx86/linuxx86.cor/
...

The listing above has been concatenated, there should have been a lot more files whizzing in front of your eyes!

In the current location (wherever you were when you unpacked the tarball), there should be the setup script (setu
pwfc). Run it, and follow the prompts. If you accept the defaults (wise move!) then the whole process is relatively painless:

alina@cherry:~/Desktop$ ./setupwfc
Citrix Presentation Server Client 10.6 setup.

Copyright 1996-2007 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.

Citrix, Independent Computing Architecture (ICA), Program Neighborhood,
MetaFrame, and MetaFrame XP are registered trademarks and
Citrix Presentation Server, Citrix Access Suite, and SpeedScreen are
trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

Microsoft, MS, MS-DOS, Outlook, Windows, Windows NT, and BackOffice are
either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in
the United States and other countries.

All other Trade Names referred to are the Servicemark, Trademark,
or Registered Trademark of the respective manufacturers.

User install mode.

Select a setup option:

1. Install Citrix Presentation Server Client 10.6
2. Remove Citrix Presentation Server Client 10.6
3. Quit Citrix Presentation Server Client 10.6 setup

Enter option number 1-3 [1]: 1

Please enter the directory in which Citrix Presentation Server Client is to be installed.
[default /home/alina/ICAClient/linuxx86]
or type "quit" to abandon the installation:

The parent directory /home/alina/ICAClient does not exist.
Do you want it to be created? [default y]:

You have chosen to install Citrix Presentation Server Client 10.6 in /home/alina/ICAClient/linuxx86.

Proceed with installation? [default n]: y

CITRIX(R) LICENSE AGREEMENT

Use of this component is subject to the Citrix license covering the
Citrix product(s) with which you will be using this component. This
component is only licensed for use with such Citrix product(s).

CTX_code EP_T_A34320

Select an option:

1. I accept
2. I do not accept

Enter option number 1-2 [2]: 1
Installation proceeding...

Checking available disk space ...

Disk space available 117588256 K
Disk space required 4961 K

Continuing ...
Creating directory /home/alina/ICAClient/linuxx86
Core package...
Setting file permissions...
Integrating with browsers...

Integration complete.
Do you want to integrate the Citrix client with KDE and GNOME? [default y]:

Select a setup option:

1. Install Citrix Presentation Server Client 10.6
2. Remove Citrix Presentation Server Client 10.6
3. Quit Citrix Presentation Server Client 10.6 setup

Enter option number 1-3 [1]: 3

This *should* be it. Oh no, not yet! When I downloaded Citric client for RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), I was able to connect to the server at this point. Here, an essential SSL certificate was missing.

So, one more preparation step, to create a file under the keystore directory, that will store the certificate for SSL Citrix.

Edit a (new) file, called: ~/ICAClient/linuxx86/keystore/cacerts/UTN-USERFirst-Hardware.crt and paste into it the following lines (including those with BEGIN and END):

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----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-----END CERTIFICATE-----

Ubuntu on XPS M1330 - finishing touches (1)

2008-04-14T09:42:00.003+01:00

Our intranet is getting more and more comprehensive, and it is becoming more difficult to function without being able to access it. So, although I have resisted it for a long time, I have now accepted that I should be using Citric client, considering that we have a proper and well administered Citrix server farm setup. I have tested it in the past, on that occasion it was RHEL 4. Citrix client (rpm) for Linux worked first time, and I was talking to the intranet within minutes.

Tried the same on Ubuntu, and the first obstacle was the fact that RPMs and Ubuntu are not exactly best friends. Not to worry, there was a tarball (.tar.gz) file. Downloaded it, unpacked it and run the setup script - only to find that some essential libraries were missing. Well, this is what puts people off Linux - having to resolve these kind of dependencies! It transpires that Citrix Client management software requires OpenMotif installed. OpenMotif comes as one of the "x" libraries, and it is missing...

Before downloading the missing libraries (and as I am working on a new Ubuntu install - on a clean machine - without too many experiments) I decided to first update all the software, using Ubuntu's apt-get program.

Quick check for repositories revealed that none have been configured during the install. Could use the front end tool called Synaptic, but it's quicker to hack the configuration file. But first, I time to become the super-user:

alina@cherry:~$ sudo su - root

[sudo] password for alina:

Now navigate into the 'apt' directory: the default configuration template is there, it's the sources.list file, containing software repositories; it just needs tweaking.

Edit the sources.list file, to uncomment selected debian/ubuntu software repositories. I'm new to Ubuntu, and not entirely sure which repositories are best, so initially I chose the main Ubuntu sites, as well as some of the sites (such as universe and multiverse) mentioned a lot on the web.

root@cherry:~# cd /etc/apt

root@cherry:~# grep '^deb' sources.list

deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted
deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted
deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-updates main restricted
deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-updates main restricted
deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy universe
deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy universe
deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-updates universe
deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-updates universe
deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy multiverse
deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy multiverse
deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-updates multiverse
deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-updates multiverse

Before apt-get can be run to install anything, the new configuration needs to be kicked into action.

Run:

root@cherry:~# apt-get update

This will have synchronised your local apt-get program with the content and availability of the repositories declared in the configuration file. On my machine, I got the following output:

Get: 1 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy Release.gpg [191B]
Get: 2 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/main Translation-en_GB [21.3kB]
Get: 3 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/restricted Translation-en_GB [2395B]
Get: 4 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/universe Translation-en_GB [4405B]
Get: 5 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/multiverse Translation-en_GB [8133B]
Get: 6 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy-updates Release.gpg [191B]
Ign http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy-updates/main Translation-en_GB
Ign http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy-updates/restricted Translation-en_GB
Ign http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy-updates/universe Translation-en_GB
Ign http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy-updates/multiverse Translation-en_GB
Get: 7 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy Release [65.9kB]
Get: 8 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy-updates Release [58.5kB]
Get: 9 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/main Packages [1075kB]
Get: 10 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/restricted Packages [7664B]
Get: 11 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/main Sources [306kB]
Get: 12 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/restricted Sources [2120B]
Get: 13 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/universe Packages [4065kB]
Get: 14 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/universe Sources [1226kB]
Get: 15 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/multiverse Packages [158kB]
Get: 16 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/multiverse Sources [56.8kB]
Get: 17 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy-updates/main Packages [105kB]
Get: 18 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy-updates/restricted Packages [4263B]
Get: 19 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy-updates/main Sources [27.5kB]
Get: 20 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy-updates/restricted Sources [937B]
Get: 21 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy-updates/universe Packages [39.7kB]
Get: 22 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy-updates/universe Sources [7563B]
Get: 23 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy-updates/multiverse Packages [9215B]
Get: 24 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy-updates/multiverse Sources [1702B]
Fetched 7254kB in 2m29s (48.4kB/s)

Unavailable sites will be marked as "Ign", for "ignore". My update manager immediately reported "You can install 142 updates". At the risk that I might forget what the whole exercise was about (get the system to the state where I can install Citrix client to talk to my company's intranet from home), I decided to run the updates. After all, my install CD is rather dated now, and a lot of reported bugs may have been fixed by now. Generally speaking, a blank 'update all' approach may not be the best, but I haven't got the intimate Gutsy knowledge to make a judgement. So, a click on the "Install Updates" at the bottom of the recommended updates list.

[The time is: 12:26. Estimate for the update download time was 1h5m - on my extremely slow 60kB/s connection. The download actually finished at 13:37 - not bad, just 6 minutes out on the estimate...]

The answer is 42

2008-03-07T20:23:00.002Z

But what is the question?

Not sure why the discussion http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7283155.stm now? But fun reading contributions...

CentOS 5 on SATA drives

2008-02-07T10:30:00.000Z

Making SATA drives work in Linux still seems a bit of a dark art.

I had a failure yesterday, with CentOS 5 refusing to even enter rescue mode or install procedure, asking for the driver.

Many suggestions are posted on various sites, most of them indicating that changing BIOS settings from SATA to IDE, or even to RAID should allow to get past the problem. None of these worked for me. What did work, was giving all-generic-ide parameter to the kernel.

So, to entering rescue mode (one goes there usually to fix bootloader, such as grub, configuration problems), place you first installation CD (od DVD) in the drive, start the machine, and wait for the boot: prompt. Then type:

boot: linux rescue all-generic-ide

For fresh installs, just start up the machine just as described above, except that you will enter:

boot: linux all-generic-ide

Making the best of VESA drivers in CentOS 5

2008-02-05T16:54:00.001Z

Teaching in Edinburgh, on machines that flatly refuse to switch between CLI and GUI. Going into any of the CLI (CTRL_ALT_F1 - F6) is no problem, but restarting the X server or switching back from CLI gives random, hardly ever successful results.

Last week a couple of colleagues (Donald and Gary) were saying about dropping resolution, this week one of our techies (Stuart) found advice about vesa. Neither approach worked on its own, but put them together (albeit in a slightly modified way) and all is well.

If your GUI is working
Select:
System --> Administration --> Display (may need to put root's password if logged in as ordinary user)
Select Hardware tab
Configure "Monitor Type" to Generic LCD --> LCD Panel 1024 x 768
Configure "Video Card" to "vesa - Generic VESA-compliant video cards"
Do the OK three times.

I always check the config on RHEL/CentOS before restarting the GUI. Either look inside the configuration file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf, attached below) or check the System-->Administration-->Display-->Hardware settings (note that the vesa driver will be described as "Unknown video card").

To restart the GUI press CTRL-ALT-Backspace - all should be well.

If your GUI is NOT working

If the GUI is broken to the point you can't use the method above, you can hack the file directly, or enter the configuration screen from the command line. For that, log in as root on CLI (enter CLI with CRTL-ALT-F1), then enter:

# system-config-display

The system will use basic GUI settings to 'draw' the menus. Use the solution as provided above to complete the steps.

To start the GUI, the cleanest method I found is to 'recycle' runlevels: change into runlevel 3, then into runlevel 5.

# init 3
Several messages will be printed, when you see one fron "anaconda" hit enter. That will re-print the prompt. Now type:

# init 5

XWindows should start successfully!

===============================================
sample /etc/X11/xorg.conf using defaults for both the server and the monitor
===============================================
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "single head configuration"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "gb"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"

### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
Identifier "Monitor0"
ModelName "LCD Panel 1024x768"
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
HorizSync 31.5 - 48.5
VertRefresh 40.0 - 70.0
Option "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "vesa"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Making the best of VESA drivers in CentOS 5

2008-02-05T16:54:00.000Z

21 January - time to get depressed ?

2008-01-21T21:25:00.000Z

Today is meant to be the most depressing day of the year.

Considering that Inland Revenue admitted they owed me a lot of money, the sun showed it's shine over Sywell for the first time in weeks and I have managed to complete my dreadful paperwork for the last so-many months of expenses, I've not been doing too badly!

And then a colleague asked me for a couple of slides she wanted to include in her presentation. At this point I realised that my ambitious plans to convert fully to Open Office are flawed. It's the second time in two days I had to rapidly save an '.odp' file into the '.ppt' format, just so other people in the company could use it.

Time to admit defeat. And back to CrossOver Office. Got a professional copy, payed on-line and downloaded the .deb version. All went smoothly. Shame it doesn't allow Office 2007, but Office XP installed without a hitch.

Oh well, the "happy - depressed" balance restored ;-)

Moving to OpenOffice Impress 2.3

2008-01-11T16:57:00.000Z

Now that my laptop is fully Linux'ised, I am making a brave attempt to convert all my .ppt documents (mostly qa-iq course-related ones) into a Open Document Presentation format. Luckily, our printers use PDF format for printing. That means that it doesn't really matter which office suite I use for the design, as long as I can convert it into a PDF before it's sent to the printers. In fact I bet that nobody is going to notice that I no longer work with the .ppt format (just as nobody noticed that all my timesheets, expenses and all other paperwork is now done in OpenOffice - I just save it as a .ppt file).

On the whole, the compatibility of .ppt and .odp is good. Fonts are still rather dissimilar, and this is one area I will have to investigate (although the rendering of characters imported from .ppt file is sufficiently good for me not to loose sleep over the issue).

What kept me guessing for a long time is the method of setting the notes pages' header and footer. In PowerPoint this is done in Master View --> Notes. However, the .ppt imported into OpenOffice 2.3 treats these headers and footers as standard text boxes. So any change (like document version which we set in the Notes view footer) would have to be done for each page.

Well, in OpenOffice, text to appear on each slide is done in View --> Header and Footer. Once customised, select "Apply to All".

So far, there is just one feature I miss in the Open Office Impress - the style painter. It does now exist in the OpenOffice, but its scope is very limited and nowhere as useful as it is in Power Point.

The Dell saga continues

2008-01-08T19:16:00.000Z

What a see saw the last few weeks has been. I love my little new dell (some would say it's not so new anymore), and I love Ubuntu. Somehow however, they didn't like each other much. Having search various posts, I strongly believe that Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy) has been rushed out, and it clearly has bugs, mostly with handling SATA disks and networking.

After my last post, I was installing and fine-tuning various applications, hoping to arrive at the final (and perfect ;-)), of course) system configuration. Disappointingly, but I hit several re-occurring problems, which put the stop to these ambitions... Most of the issues have been well documented by others - inconsistent wireless recognition, many SATA warnings popping on the console (even though actual disk access was fine), very slow desktop start-up, cupsd taking up to 5 minutes to start.

The worst aspect of these problems has been the random, unpredictable nature of them, with problems virtually impossible to reproduce. I'm well used to fixing systems - you expect hiccups, and you anticipate having to dive under the hood of any new version or distribution. This is part and parcel of playing with UNIX or Linux. And one of the great historical attributes of UNIX has been its transparency - you can always get to the bottom of things. Not quite so with the new kernel releases. More and more traditionally user-driven hardware manipulation and control is delegated into kernel's functionality. It's great in some respects - faster, more secure and easier to tie down system. But for an average sysadmin, ability to debug and fix is becoming more obscure and complex, if not difficult.

Re-installing Dell XPS M1330 (Part 4)

2007-10-29T09:15:00.000Z

Well, the machine is ready for Linux. I have preserved the original software by installing it in a much smaller partition, allowing most disk space to be left for Linux.

Obtain installable Ubuntu CD-ROM
------------------------------------------------
Well, the system is ready for Linux installation. One little detail first - need to get the Linux software itself. I decided to go for the highly recommended Ubuntu, after the less than successful attempt with CentOS. No time to order a ready made CD or DVD, so need to download the ISO image (onto an XP box) and burn the CD disk. One reason for the choice is that this is the distribution that Dell use when pre-installing their machines with Linux.

1. Download Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon (ISO image).

There are numerous sites that will sell disks with the image on it. But if you have a decent bandwidth, it's cheaper to download your own. My bandwidth is useless, but it was still quicker than ordering disks and waiting for delivery.
I got the image from: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download. It took nearly 3 hours for the 712MB image (ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso) to land on my Desktop.

2. Download ISO file burning software (unless you already have it)

Many commercial programs exist. I used a freeware program: ISO Recorder v2 from http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm. Once the ISO Recorder is installed, "Copy image to CD" option will appear when you right-click in the ISO file.

3. Having inserted empty CD in the drive, locate the ISO file you have downloaded, right-click it, and select the "Copy image to CD" option. Follow the steps - it will take few minutes for the new disk to be written.

Boot from the Ubuntu CD and install it on hard disk
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Select "Start or install Ubuntu". Watch the little orange bar for a couple of minutes, then a blank screen for a minute or so, eventually Ubuntu starts the services. This will initially start Ubuntu as Live CD (i.e. run directly off the CD). Linux is at that point in memory (and using the CD). However, we will use this to install Ubuntu permanently into the spare partition on the hard disk.

Double-click the Install icon, to start Install program.

Welcome screen - press "Forward" (notice default is English)

Where are you? - Use the map to locate a city in your timezone (London for me).

Time zone is shown as BST (GMT+1:00) - press "Forward"

Keyboard layout - press "Forward" (unless you are not in the UK, in which case change it! )

Prepare disk space - select "Manual" (see Note 1 below for the rationale of my partition layout that I am suggesting) - press "Forward"

Prepare partitions - on my machine, the current layout showed:

Device Type ... Size Used
/dev/sda
/dev/sda1 fat16 ... 49 MB 33 MB
/dev/sda2 ntfs ... 42952 MB 14700 MB
/dev/sda5 154890 MB unknown
/dev/sda6 fat32 ... 2154 MB 50 MB

Highlight /dev/sda5 and press "Delete partition" - it should now show as "free space"

Highlight the "free space" line and press "New partition".
Fill the form with: - 150 MB ext3 /boot

Highlight the "free space" line and press "New partition".
Fill the form with: - 2000 swap

Highlight the "free space" line and press "New partition".
Fill the form with: - 5000 MB ext3 /

Highlight the "free space" line and press "New partition".
Fill the form with: - 10000 MB ext3 /home

Highlight the "free space" line and press "New partition".
Fill the form with: -10000 MB ext3 /usr

Highlight the "free space" line and press "New partition".
Fill the form with: - 1000 MB ext3 /var

Highlight the "free space" line and press "New partition".
Fill the form with: - 850 MB ext3 /tmp

Highlight the "free space" line and press "New partition".
Fill the form with: - 2500 MB ext3 /spare1

Highlight the "free space" line and press "New partition".
Fill the form with: - 2500 MB ext3 /spare2

Press "Finish", then "Ignore" (if you got it, see Note 2 below)

Migrate Docs and Settings - press "Forward"

Who are you? - fill in the form; press "Forward"

Ready to install

Note 1.
I never trust automatic partitioning tools - they never seem to split the disk in a sensible way.I want to share files with Windows, hence fat32 partition.

I'm of a traditional UNIX school, where a separate partition is used for just about anything ;-). I always have at least one spare partition, for rescuing data from broken partitions, experimenting, trying new or experimental filesystem types, etc.

This time I've ended up with 2 spare partitions, because one of them was going to be vfat type. This didn't work (see Note 2), but I will try changing the type later on, once the system is up and running.

Note 2.
Issues I had during the install:

When partitioning, after creating all partitions I wanted, I have then selected the rest of the disk and assigned the "don’t_use" filesystem type. What a mistake - the process crashed. Waited a long time hoping that the little timer indicating that something is happening would time out and allow me to continue. Nope. Had to cancel the whole procedure and start from scratch (all the way from double-clicking in the Install icon). Second time round tried fat16 instead of fat32. Same problem. Tried to "Ignore" it, but when the actual partitioning started, got a new message:

"Failed to create a file system: The fat 16 file system creation in partition #4 of SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) failed. Press "OK".

This put me back into the partitioner (but I had to select "Manual" again. However, at least the partition information was remembered. Just had to go through each one and allocate type and mount point. At this point, I have also given up on the fat partition, and set it to free space (by deleting it).

Once the complete partitioning process, you need to press "Finish". At this point, the Warning message popped:

"File system doesn't have expected sizes for Windows to like it. Cluster size is 2k (expected 1k); number of clusters is 24026 (47959 expected); size of FATs is 94 sectors (188 expected). I chose to ignore this message and pressed "Ignore".

Re-installing Dell XPS M1330 (Part 3)

2007-10-29T08:48:00.000Z

Using Dell MediaDirect (TM) 3.3 to partition disk
--------------------------------------------------
Before I move on, I need to give credit to another blogger, who published a quick howto about installing M1330 with dual boot configuration: (http://linuxevangelist.blogspot.com/2007/10/dual-boot-in-dell-xps-m1330-with.html). Without his information, it would've taken me a lot longer to realise that the MediaDirect disk is more than an application. It is a bootable CD, and is important for partitioning and making sure that Vista would be able to make use of the various media buttons the M1330 has (at this point I'm not sure if Linux will be able to use them ).

Installing Vista
--------------------------------------------------
Put Vista disk in the drive and restart the box. Follow the few simple instructions. No problem with the install, except I had to insert the disk several times before it started - I hope I don't have an inherent CD or drive problem! A quick reboot into Vista to confirm it worked - it did, after a fashion. What surprised me is, though, it started into 800x600 resolution! A quick adjustment (Start --> Control Panel --> Appearance and Personalization: Adjust Screen Resolution) and slide the resolution to 1280x800.

Worked fine, but I thought Windows do these things automatically. Hmmm.

Installing Drivers and Utilities (grey Driver and Utilities disk)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Insert the Drivers and Utilities CD disk in the drive. Select "Run..." in the AutoPlay pop up screen. Say "OK" to start. On my machine, the virus wizard showed a warning: "An unidentified program wants access to your computer". Not really knowing what it's about, I can only assume that driver setup.exe is regarded as potential virus. So, selected "Allow". A couple of more "OK" clicks and 30 seconds later the Dell Resource Disk printed a Welcome message with hardware, drivers and hardware utilities being displayed. Close this screen, and you will find that behind it the install wizard is waiting for you to press "Finish". Do that. Eject the disk (with the eject touch key above the main keyboard).

Installing Dell Webcam Manager (blue Driver and Utilities disk)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Insert the Drivers and Utilities CD disk in the drive. Select "Run..." in the pop up screen. Scroll to the bottom of the licence text and press "Yes" to accept the licence. Unless you have a good reason to change the default destination for the drivers to go to, accept the default location: c:\Program Files\DELL. Select the "Full Installation".

The "Dell Webcam Software" screen will be displayed, and this stage of the installation should take not more that 5 minutes.

Allow the laptop to restart (default action on "Finish"). The CD will be automatically ejected, and the machine will reboot.

Installing Dell MediaDirect(TM) 3,3
--------------------------------------------------
Insert the Drivers and Utilities CD disk in the drive. Select "Run..." in the AutoPlay pop up screen. Say

Another warning from the virus - press "Allow" again, Then "Enter" to start installation. First time round the disk got stuck again (you know when it happens, because it starts making repeatable noises). Had to eject the disk and restart the process. Not happy about it!

But eventually it all worked, and MediaDirect installed itself in a separate partition. Another reboot to confirm it's all installed and working from Windows perspective. Vista booted fine, all touch keys work OK (although I haven't really played any media with it - can't wait to put Linux on and see how it can handle the same hardware).

So, the next step is to obtain Linux - this time I'll go for Ubuntu - and install it in the free space.

Re-installing Dell XPS M1330 (Part 2)

2007-10-26T15:59:00.000+01:00

I only need Vista for MS for a few applications used at work. Other than that, everything I need can be done by Linux.

Also, I don't want *all* applications installed by default, so I had to start from scratch. As every self-righteous know-it-all techie, I threw the Vista install disk in, to re-install, clean up the disk and repartition it in the process.

Allowing your M1330 to boot from DVD
--------------------------------------------------
First little hiccup that surprised me was that CD/DVD is after hard disk in the BIOS booting sequence.

Not a problem: reboot the system, hit F2 as soon as the first Dell screen appears and locate under "System" the "Bootable Sequence" menu item. Scroll down to it, press <Enter>. Now, with the list of available bootable devices displayed, reshuffle them to have HDD after DVD. Nice to see that booting from a USB device is available: reassuring if not surprising.

There is some help at the bottom of the BIOS setup screen. I couldn't get how to actually move the entry. If up/down arrow keys are described as Up/Down arrows (to select the line), what could U/D mean (to move the entry)? Well, trial and error proved that U/D means Shift-Up or Shift-Down arrows. Obvious !?

My preferred sequence would be:

1. CD/DVD/CD-RW Drive
2. USB Storage Device
3. Internal HDD

That's for my personal use - security consideration may dictate different approach (not a good idea to allow booting from removable media in a commercial environment).

Once you have the correct sequence, do ESCAPE, then choose Save/Exit and Enter. That will accept your new setting and continue booting the system.

During my first attempt, I have followed this with a fresh install of CentOS 5. It kind of worked, however, no sound, Ethernet or wireless were recognised. Screen required adjustments, but was fine after that. However, on reboot, although Vista was shown (as "other"), it wouldn't boot - missing MBR!

Not very worried about any of this - I never expect my first install to work. But I decided to take a step back, and rethink my approach. A bit of googling didn't go amiss. There was a very useful blog entry from a chap who tried to achieve a similar configuration, and I took his advice. More in the next part...

Re-installing Dell XPS M1330 (Part 1)

2007-10-26T15:42:00.000+01:00

I have invested a few pounds ;-) into a gorgeous toy. I want to start playing with applications that require a dual core processor, have a bit more memory and disk. For one thing, I will be investigating virtualisation, first step: ESX from VMWare, now that we are the authorised training place for them. If anything, I need to understand exactly the Linux portion of the product (Linux for ESX administrators course will follow soon).

This is a great excuse to have a box with the spec:

System Info:
---------------------------
System: XPS M1330
BIOS version: A06 (09/03/2007)

Processor Type: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo processor
Max. Clock Speed: 2.2 GHz
Processor Cache: 4096 KB
Dual Core Present: Yes

Memory Info
---------------------------
Installed: 4096 MB
Speed: 667 MHz
Channel Mode: Dual
Technology: DDR2 SDRAM
Device Info
---------------------------
Primary Hard Drive: 200 GB HDD
Video Memory: 128 MB
Panel Type: 13.3" Wide XGA
Native Resolution: 1280 by 800

It's got all sorts of other bits and pieces, WIFI, bluetooth - of course, fingerprint recognition, camera, and a product called MediaDirect, which I haven't yet sussed out.

My first task is to reinstall it. I want a minimal install of the Vista the box came with, and Linux, which will take over most of the tasks. First quick reinstall has proven that RedHat derivatives couldn't cope. Very few devices were recognised with CentOS 5 or Fedora 6. So I decided to give the highly recommended Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy.

Well, I'm in business, incredibly impressed with Ubuntu. I am documenting every step of my attempts, and will be posting them in turn, as things progress.

The next post will cover the partitioning and preparing for Ubuntu install without losing any facilities and drivers used by Vista.

An example of using eval

2007-10-24T15:32:00.000+01:00

When learning (or teaching) eval, the first - and very valuable - example of it is to see eval's ability to evaluate the value of the last positional parameter:

$ set a b c d

$ eval print -- \$$#

d

We use eval it to force the shell to perform a double scan, when we need to find a value of a value. First scan will evaluate the $# to the number of available parameters (in this case: 4); the second scan will check the value of it (d). This is 'bread and butter' of eval application.

Other cases of using eval are a bit more obscure, and for that reason eval is often forgotten...

Here is an example that is not 'that' obscure - and possible quite useful. A delegate wanted to rename all files in a given directory, to change the character case from lower to upper. What he devised, successfully, is as follows:

for file in *

do

mv $file $(echo $file | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]')

done

This worked, until he found that some of the files contained 'unfriendly' characters: spaces. The script failed to cope with this.

This is where eval stepped in:

for file in *

do

eval mv '"$file"' \"$(echo "$file" | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]' )\"

done

In this case eval allows to insert an additional set of double quotes, which protected spaces embedded in file names.

ksh93 - test, test and then test a bit more

2007-10-17T07:57:00.000+01:00

Since ksh93 is now [1] available for most version of UNIX (and Linux), we have been tentatively moving our courses (especially scripting) towards the new syntax. At the moment the scripting course is still based predominantly on the pre-93 versions, but we now introduce a fair amount of comparisons, 'gotchas' and demos of new capabilities and syntax.

Truth is, months later we still find new idiosyncrasies.

Here is one I found today, whilst teaching... Imagine the following example, to illustrate the need for double quotes when creating and accessing variables:

If you want to assign a value that has leading or trailing spaces or tabs, you need the quotes:

$ address=" 6 Pie Corner"

Would you expect to see the leading spaces if you didn't use the quotes when accessing the variable? Of course not! Well, in ksh93 it works! Haven't checked yet if this behaviour is driven by any particular setting or switch, but in my CentOS 5 ksh (Version M 1993-12-28 r), the following worked out of the box:

$ print -- $address

<space><space>6 Pie Corner

[1] in the original posting this said 'not' - corrected 18/10/2007

No access to ntp source?

2007-10-15T18:07:00.000+01:00

When you install Linux on a PC, you may find that the hardware clock enforced the time. Normally, you would use the ntpd (network time protocol daemon) to synchronise the system (software) time with a selection of external sources.

However, what if you are not connected, or for some reason just don't have access to time servers (for example the ntpd port 123 is blocked)?

Well, unless you need to maintain a precise time (in which case you still need to find access to a reliable source), you can just use the good old date command and inform the hardware clock of the change.

# date --utc 101517052007.00

will update the system (software) clock and set the current time and date to: Oct 15 18:05:00 BST 2007.

The only problem is that system clock doesn't run when your machine is powered off. What does continue to run is the hardware clock. It ticks forever. External power present or not. Because on start-up the hardware clock is used, you need to flush the system date into the hardware clock, and as long as the hardware clock is accurate enough, your newly adjusted time will be persistent over reboots.

Use the hwclock tool to achieve this:

# hwclock --systohc

Do remember, though: this is 'quick and dirty'. If you require consistent and accurate time keeping, you need to synchronise the system clock with an external source...

How much do people pay for Windows software?

2007-08-18T22:43:00.000+01:00

There is a discussion brewing in our local LUG, to do with almost philosophical aspect of software theft.
The basis for the thread lie in one of the most interesting articles on the subject I have ever read:

http://tlug.jp/articles/Windows_Is_Free

As many before, it explores moral aspects of using "second hand" software, but less usually, it attempts to analise the implication of cracked software on the industry itself and how, ironically, the effectively free windows software distorts the balance of marketing power between windows, mac OS and linux.

Keyboard layout in Solaris 10

2007-08-18T22:38:00.000+01:00

If there is a way of setting UK keyboard during Solaris 10 installation - I don't know it! However, the /boot/solaris/bootenv.rc has a directive for that - just change US to UK.

A reboot, unfortunately is necessary...

Keyboard layout in Centos

2007-07-09T19:29:00.000+01:00

I have been playing with Centos 5, which is the community binary for binary version of RHEL 5 (with various elements, such as text and graphics depicting or referring to Red Hat replaced with Centos, quite legally, might I add). It's an excellent alternative, as long as you don't expect a 24/7 support, or automatic updates or any of the value added stuff that a formal contract from Red Hat provides.

Anyway, the install from the DVD onto my Vaio PCG-V505BP went without any problems. Selected "Gnome Desktop", "Server" and "Server-GUI" software, and the only other customisation was disk partitioning (I like my partitions to be done the old-fashioned UNIX style).

So, as I said, the installation completed successfully, and to my best knowledge all hardware was recognised OK (still testing, so can't be totally sure). One little surprise, though - the keyboard layout was the US, not UK! Well, it is quite possible that I messed it up myself (when selecting the keyboard during installation). Either way, I went to correct it by hand, and thought I'd document it. It's quite straightforward, but a thing to remember is that two different configuration files need to be changed.

For CLI (character interface screen, accessed through CTRL-ALT-F1 - F6) you need to modify the /etc/sysconfig/keyboard. Change the KEYTABLE line to read:

KEYTABLE="uk"

This will have immediate effect, and any new CLI session will assume the correct keyboard.

For GUI screen terminals, you need to change the Xorg configuration file: /etc/X11/xorg.conf. In the "Section InputDevice", identify the line with XkbLayout and modify it to read:

Option "XkbLayout" "uk"

Unlike CLI setting, this GUI change will only take place after GUI session is restarted. I have tried the standard CTRL-ALT-Backspace, to restart Xorg server, but it didn't work! Well, not for the first time. On many systems this is disabled.

I refuse doing a full reboots lightly, so I tend to 'recycle' GUI instead. First of all, make sure you don't have any GUI-dependent users or applications before you carry out the next step (they may not like being kicked off the system without a warning).

To 'recycle' GUI means switching runlevels to 3 than to 5 again. To do that: open a CLI session (press CTRL-ALT-F1), log in as root, and switch runlevel to 3 with:

# init 3

Once the 'anaconda' message appears on the screen - you are in runlevel 3, even though you see no new prompt. Hit "Enter", and the prompt will be printed. At that point, switch back into runlevel 5 with:

# init 5

Your new keyboard layout is now available to all users.

Default gateway in Solaris 10

2007-07-05T08:56:00.000+01:00

I'm spending a lot of time switching between different versions of UNIX and Linux, and the detailed syntax of the command line stuff keeps catching me out. So I will start documenting for myself (and any QA-IQ colleagues) some of the most popular things that are needed in our classrooms.

This week it is a turn of Solaris 10 (ix86), in our Swindon office. Our infrastructure is such that the 192.168.1.254 gateway requires an argument of 1 where the 'metric' value used to be. No rocket science - just the command line syntax, but it kept me unconnected for far too long (or am I getting too indoctrinated by the Linux syntax and the power of the ip command there?).

Anyway: to add the default gateway to the Solaris 10 :

# route add default 192.168.1.254 1

Then obviously adjust the browser settings to the correct proxy for your location (with port 8080 on QA-IQ sites). In the Mozilla version provided with Solaris 10 you can find the settings in Edit --> Preferences --> Advanced --> Proxies.

Get it back together again

2007-07-05T08:53:00.000+01:00

Had so many changes within the company - blog went onto the back burner. Things are getting calmer and easier again, and hopefully I can get on with it properly. With any luck, the postings will start coming out again...

Forcing hp2400 to print double sided

2007-05-06T23:16:00.000+01:00

Needed to print a set of labs for a new version of a course. Run out of time, and although the manuals are being printed, the labs documents had to be done by hand! So to save the Amazon, I managed to get my printer to print double-sided! Although this is specifically for the hp2400, the algorythm of printing sequence and which way at which stage should be useful for any printer...

1. Ensure all documents have an even number of pages

2. First print the even pages with the last page on top.

Select File --> Print...

- in "Print:" drop down menu select "Even pages" (default is "All pages in range")

Then select "Properties" --> Basics

- in "Page Order" mark "Back to Front"

Then press "OK" in Properties screen, and "OK" again in Print screen

3. Replace the paper

Pick up the freshly printed pages. Keep them together, in the same order they were printed and the same side up (i.e. printed side up). Rotate the whole bunch 180 degrees horizontally and insert in into the paper tray. Once in the paper tray, the orientation of the paper should be such that one can read the pages correctly, with the highest even page at the top.

4. Print the odd pages with the ultimate result having the first page on top.

Select File --> Print...

- in "Print:" drop down menu select "Odd pages" (default is "All pages in range")

Then select "Properties" --> Basics

- in "Page Order" mark "Front to Back"

Then press "OK" in Properties screen, and "OK" again in Print screen

The IFS mystery

2006-11-19T22:34:00.000Z

The IFS is involved in the parsing of the command line (word splitting) and in variable assignment during the read built-in execution.

But there is a side effect, which I have only discovered recently, by accident. If you assign positional parameters with set:

$ set a 'b c' d 'e f'

than using the * parameter we can get at the values individually or as one word. To illustrate, try the following:

$ echo $* "$*"

a b c d e f a b c d e f

However, if you 'nullify' the IFS variable:

$ IFS=""

then the behaviour of the shell when referencing the * parameter changes:

$ echo $* "$*"

a b c d e f ab cde f

This only works with the * parameter (not with @) and only if IFS had a null value (if you inset IFS altogether, then the shell will use a space to separate positional parameters.

Finally, I've checked this behaviour in ksh and bash - same (and documented in manual pages, at least in bash).

Quoting command substitution

2006-11-15T23:14:00.000Z

When we learn the inner works of a shell, we quickly realise the benefit of using double quotes with request for variable substitution.

For example, to assign a value to a variable (and preserve leading spaces), we would use:

$ address=" 23 Acacia Avenue "

A correct quotation is needed to recall the value complete with the spaces:

$ echo "<$address>"

The less known application of the quotes is when they are around the command substitution syntax. By default, POSIX shells remove trailing new-lines during command substitution. Double quotes change this behaviour!

Compare the output of the following commands:

$ echo $(ls)
log.1 log.2 log.3

and

$ echo "$(ls)"
log.1
log.2
log.3

Graphics problems...

2006-11-08T18:33:00.000Z

For all its maturity, problems with graphics with installs out of the box are still there... This time, trying to use RHEL4 on an HP machine with Intel 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset.

Seems fine, until you try to restart the X Window System with CTL-ALT-Backspace. The screen just goes blank, no message, no GUI - nothing. Log into a character interface, run level 5 is shown, and the startx command works well.

Just wonder, actually... Could it be a setting somewhere stopping the CTL-ALT-Backspace restart deliberately? Will need to do a bit of 'googling'.

Adjusting the kernel for Oracle

2006-11-07T17:34:00.000Z

In the golden old days, when installing Oracle on UNIX, a laborious kernel recompilation process was often needed, to adjust required memory parameters.

On Linux, the process is much simpler, as most of the significant parameters may be changed 'on the fly', effortlessly, and without as much as a reboot, let alone kernel compilation.

All current kernel parameters may be found in /proc/sys/kernel location. Explore it, to see that each parameter has its own file, with either a Boolean Yes/No (or 1/0) or a string value.

The set of parameters required for Oracle10g (only part of the list is quoted here) says:

shmmax  = 2147483648
shmmni  = 4096
shmall  = 2097152
shmmin  = 1
shmseg  = 10

There are different ways of implementing it: first of all, you can get the values directly into the memory constructs, for example:

# echo 2147483648 > /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax

This will adjust the value correctly, with the slight drawback - the value will return to whatever the default was after the next reboot.

Alternatively, for a more permanent modification, you can place the required definitions in the kernel configuration file: /etc/sysctl.conf.

kernel.shmmax=2147483648
kernel.smni=4096
kernel.shmall=2097152
kernel.shmin=1
kernel.shmseg=10

and inform the kernel of the changes with:

# sysctl -p

command, which will read the values from the sysctl.conf file and place them in the
appropriate files under /proc/sys/kernel.
Any subsequent reboots will also make use of these values.

Crashing Unix?

2006-10-05T09:41:00.000+01:00

What's that?

Having now worked so much with Linux, I have developed an unhealthy approach to file system care. Initially by accident, then by design - to test, now by habit, when I shut a Linux machine, I just slam the lid - generally just pull the power on it (I'm talking laptops here - not really advisible on servers, especially of a production, live variety).

Well, I've been waiting for some kind of corruption, longing for the fsck to be forced on me, waiting to sit there for the entire afternoon typing "yes", because I've forgotten to provide the -y option (and worrying that ^C would upset it further - which it wouldn't!).

Nothing! A bit of a delay on subsequent boots, but no disaster of any description.

This week we are working on porting our generic UNIX admin course onto SPARCs with Solaris 9 (I'm still not up to speed with the new Solaris 10 features, but that's a totally different story).

We are working at the brand new offices in Birmingham (on the verge of the China Town - wonderful, but that's yet another different story). The machines were shipped from London. Once connected - power on, and... three out of four boxes booted OK, the last one would not.

Guess what: had to do a manual fsck on the /var partition. Guess what: forgot to do the -y option. Except that I did interrupt it this time ;-)

Fsck declared the partition healthy - boot into runlevel 3 - no joy: utmpx file missing. Back to single user: it turned out that most of the /var partition is missing! Having recreated most of it by hand, the machine came up - eventually.

Now then - I might be totally unfair to Solaris at this point, but the corruption has no known history or explanation. The machines had been installed at the same time from a jumpstart (logs confirm it), then they were shutdown and shipped. Did the engineer pull the power? Very likely. Did the engineer remove by hand some of the /var tree - doubt it very much.

Well, at least I had a chance to reacquaint myself with the good old fsck !

I'll be back

2006-09-26T23:44:00.000+01:00

My blog has been awfully neglected lately.

The company's merger meant a new look at the portfolio, to integrate and merge the offerings. Quite exciting, as several new sites mean access to loads more kit, including some top spec Sparc machines, which will be employed very quickly for the new generation of administration courses. The breadth of the combined customer base is demanding several new courses, at either end of the spectrum. Linux for desktop at one end, and top level enterprise server stuff at the other.

Teaching trips to all corners of the world add variety and excitement, but do nothing to relief time squeeze ;-)

All in all rather busy times for us! But I have so much to document, that hopefully this blog might start flowing again soon...

Choice is wonderful

2006-08-27T11:03:00.000+01:00

There has been so much arguing about pros and cons of open source, I'm not going to start now. Developers and system architects having choice in selecting programs and having the Linus-given right to modify them and adjust them to their need is all truly great.

It may, however, give the rest of us headaches when trying to adjust our understanding of a command or program behaviour.

Take the login program. Originated quite early in the UNIX evolution. Linux implementation (look at the bottom of man login) refers to:
'BSD login 5.40 (5/9/89) by Michael Glad (glad@daimi.dk) for HP-UX.
Ported to Linux 0.12: Peter Orbaek (poe@daimi.aau.dk)'.

Both SuSE and Red Hat derivatives use this version of the program. However, if you are SuSE user, there is one more credit line you can see there:
'Added new features: ThorstenKukuk (kukuk@suse.de)'.

I have only realised that, when hours of trying and trying to make the /etc/securetty file work consistently failed, and I was reaching that well know to me desparation state.

In manual pages, under SPECIAL ACCESS RESTRICTIONS, where the behaviour of the two standard access files (securetty and usertty) are described, the behaviour of the securetty file is described, but on closer inspection, in the DESCRIPTION section it's stated:
'This login implementation does ignore /etc/nologin and /etc/securetty. You need to configure this in the PAM configuration file for login...' .

Why? Obviously the assumption is made that PAM ought to run at all times - a very sensible advice. But why force people? The worse implication to me is that if administrator decides to leave the PAM configuration out of the equation, the simple system access configuration is then missing altogether...

Apart of anything, it means that I cannot have an exercise in the 'generic' Linux course that can be done on both distributions. How annoying!

I'm not going to throw it out, though. It will act as a reminder for all of us, not to become complacent.

This is the beauty of UNIX and Linux - always keep you on your toes, make you test all solutions on every new platform, force you to test-run every script or program you want to port...

Which shell?

2006-08-01T11:25:00.000+01:00

Finding which shell you are currently using is not difficult, the ps command can tell you this easily. However, if you are using several shells, identifying the current one can be rather involving, may require ps -f, to make sure that you are looking at the last one executed. his method has one inherent problem - relies on human ability to deduce the desired result. Approach very much prone to mistakes!

Whenever possible make the system do the hard work for you. We know that the current process ID is stored in the environmental variable $. You can therefore always check what the PID of the current shell is with:

$ echo $$

PID itself does not tell you which shell this is (if you have a mix of ksh, bash or any other you are still nonthewiser which one of them corresponds to the PID). Yyou can find the name of the process name ellegantly by interrogating the /proc filesystem, which stores all process information (in both UNIX and Linux, but on Linux has also all sorts of other hardware information).

Still using a reference to the $ variable, look in the /proc for the name of the corresponding program:

$ ls -l /proc/$$/exe

lrwxrwxrwx . . . /proc/25541/exe -> /bin/bash

If this is something you need to execute regularly, you can always create a little function and place it in one of the environmental files...

Back in action

2006-07-24T11:32:00.000+01:00

I've spent last few months between holidays, teaching, flying and a combination of all three above. Rather busy and exciting times, and the QA-IQ merger put another layer of travel, presentations and meetings to this all.

Well, it looks like it's back to 'normal', whatever this may mean ;-)) - so back to Linux'ing, etc.

I've now moved to Linux almost entirely. The HP/XP laptop is now sitting on my desk at home most of the time, and is acting as a backup machine mostly. My old faithful VAIO V550 is back in action, with SuSE10 final beta.

I'm so impressed with it, that (backed up by the expressed needs of the public sector customers that IQ brought into the equation) I decided that for the first time Linux *IS* ready for the desktop, and consequently we need a Linux Desktop end user training. In the good QA tradition, will try to make it vendor (distributor in this case) independent, but will probably base it round Fedora 5 and Suse 10 installations.

Partition or not

2006-07-03T23:57:00.000+01:00

This entry is in fact a reply I posted earlier today on our local LUG.

One of our guys lost a lot of data, because he accidentally done the rm at a wrong level of the /var branch. Any recovery work was made very difficult through the fact that his entire system was on a single partition.

So, the discussion about best partitioning practice emerged. Here are my comments:

My rule of thumb has always been to separate 'dynamic' from 'static' directories.

Every branch which I regard as 'dynamic' (ie written frequently by users or applications)
would go onto its own partition.

Typically these would be:
/var - log and spool files; these days also web pages - adjust the size for that
/home
/tmp
/usr - (mostly because of /usr/local, but also because historically it used to be
separate partition)
/boot - this is to keep the kernel's disk small, away from other stuff, and as contiguous
as possible
/any-other-application

Anything that you don't place on a separate partition will end up being part of the 'root disk'.
Don't forget a swap partition, and consider any particular needs of applications you are installing.

There seems to be a new school of thought, which suggests doing swap and root only (perhaps /boot as well).
I have heard arguments supporting that approach, but they obviously didn't convince me, as I can't remember what they were ;-)

Command line and GUI operations don't mix

2006-06-19T16:06:00.000+01:00

When unzipping files (zipped originally under DOS) all permissions are messed up; notably the 'x' bit for shell scripts. That's nothing new really – always something to be aware of.

We have a set of Oracle installation (Linux) scripts that are stored on a Windows server. When needed, Dave "the NumbThumb" zips them up and sends them to us to play with. We are well used to adjusting access permissions, in fact we have a little script that looks after attributes of files that arrive from the dark side.

Today I've realised that mixing command line and GUI file manager is no good. Martin opened a GUI file manager and tried to run one of the scripts by double-clicking on the icon. Instead of running, an editor was opened. We quickly realised that the 'x' permission was missing. So I dropped into the command line, and did a quick:

# chmod +x *.sh

Run ls –l to confirm the change – OK. Martin tries to run the script again, but no difference: script didn't execute, but the editor opened again. Conclusion: if you have a GUI screen showing file icons, and change file attributes from the command line, don't expect GUI to take any notice.

The whole experience proves the very old recommendation of working with UNIX : when working on any particular task it’s best to stick to either the command line or GUI, don't mix them!

Playing cat and mouse with the cat builtin

2006-06-09T22:49:00.000+01:00

Teaching Fundies. Using cat. Straightforward, hey?

One example in the book says, that you cannot redirect file onto itself using cat.
What should happen is:

$ cat file5 > file5
cat: file5: input file is output file

Delegates try this - "Alina, it doesn't work!". What does happen is:

$ cat file5 > file5
$

Several minutes of experimenting, and one of the delegates shouted with satisfaction: "Got it - cat is a built in".

What? As surprised as I was, in the ksh-20050202-1 cat is a builtin, in addition to the standard /bin/cat.

$ type cat
cat is a shell builtin version of /bin/cat

It may be a builtin implementation of /bin/cat, but there is behavioural difference. Perhaps not because of changes to what or how the two cat versions work, but due to the fact that one (the builtin) is operating in the same process as the calling shell, the other (/bin/cat) gets its own process space.

This could have VERY serious implications for shell scripts!

Consider the following:

$ cat x > x
$ echo $?
0

Then try the same, this time using external version:

$ /bin/cat x > x
/bin/cat: x: input file is output file
$ echo $?
1

How many programmers use full pathnames in their scripts? If you are one of them – well done, and you will have no problems with this particular cat!

If not, however (admit it!), any script written in the past, that uses cat's exit status will fail when ported to this version of ksh.

OK, so why would you like to use cat for testing? I don't know – but that's not the point!

Amazing resource page

2006-06-02T09:51:00.000+01:00

When looking for an on-line IP subnet calculator during a class, we came across the site that managed to pull together a fantastic number of network and computer relating tools and resources.

The site itself is an American ISP. If they were in the UK, I would probably be talking to them about their services. Anybody who put so much effort and intelligence into creating this site would be worth considering...

A lesson to learn ;-)

Input redirection into a while loop

2006-05-18T23:59:00.000+01:00

I'm teaching shell scripting in Stamford this week. Earlier today we had a discussion about data redirection to/from various programming statements like if, while, etc.

The offered approach was:

while read -r
do
command(s)
done 0< file

One of the students asked if you could have the redirection specified before the while, i.e:

0< file while read -r
do
command(s)
done

My immediate thought was - yes, it should work. I didn't offer my opinion at that point, though. Instead I answered the question with another one. I asked them if the following would work (my favourite example illustrating shell scan):

$ 1> file < /etc/passwd cat 2> /dev/null

I was truly convinced that the original question is another exhibition of the same behaviour, which allows to specify the I/O redirection at any (sensible) point of the command line.

Well, whereas the cat command line above will work OK, the original construct does not work! I have tried various combinations, and deduced that any alias, function or external command can have redirection specified before the command itself. However, when you are dealing with reserved words (programming keywords) or built-ins, the mechanism is not recognised, with a "command not found" error message.

Curious... Need to investigate it further, unless Clive comes back with an answer before then ;-)

URL code/decode tool

2006-05-05T12:09:00.000+01:00

NLUG discussion on debugging htmp/php code lead to one of the participants quoting what I thought was an excellent tool for url decoding.

There are also very useful conversion tables.

Mac addresses in VMWare

2006-05-02T21:41:00.000+01:00

I have recently noticed that when booting RHEL 4 in VMWare 5 (on my HPnc6120 laptop) the eth0 card would not initialise, with an error "MAC address is different than expected - failed".

After some googling, one theme appeared to recur: hardware modules in the kernel problem. However, I was convinced this was not the issue in my case, since I also have FC 5 and SuSE, to compare the kernel config files against. To complicate the matter further, I went down the totally wrong way to start with, assuming that the correct value was one reported by ip neigh show from another machine on the same home network. How silly of me - that other host was looking at the 'front end' configuration, whereas my problem was sitting behind the VM...

Eventually I managed to fix the problem, but without really understanding the reasons. What was the fix?

Well, I noticed that the HWADDR parameter in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 had a different value than the one reported by the ip address show command.

I changed the HWADDR value to the one reported by the ip command, restarted the network with service network restart, and all was well. But I couldn't understand why (and how) the configuration file got changed - I could swear that I hadn't touched the parameter - ever! So I continued googling - and eventually went directly to the vmware site (another lesson learnt - should have gone there much sooner!) . The answer is well documented amongst their support pages, under "Maintaining and Changing the MAC Address of a Virtual Machine".

In a nutshell: virtual machine also means virtual MAC. The value assigned is unique, but is liable to be changed if you move the location of your VM.

This is exactly what happened to me. Since creating the RHEL4 VM, I have moved the "My Virtual Machines" folder (yes, XP) to a different drive - to fix XP synchronisation issues... But in turn , that messed up my RHEL installation.

Since my fix did the trick, I haven't studied the solutions they quote on their site - apparently you can tweak configuration files of VMWare itself to fix this.

I'm just happy that there was a 'good' reason for my problems. I hate fixing the unknown... It's just like replacing a blown fuse without knowing why it blew in the first place ;-)

Just a link... to a Microsoft blogger!

2006-04-25T21:03:00.000+01:00

I've come across a very interesting discussion, started by a blog entry. It comes from an MS enclosure, and is a rather adventureous and brave expression of individual's views.

In the world where corporates often attempt to control the expression of views of their employees - usually through the fear of the unknown - this blog entry is proving that given a chance, most employees are prepared to stand by their bread provider, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health.

So, whether you agree with the preaching, analisys and recommendations or not - it does make interesting reading.

Linux in the air

2006-04-06T16:17:00.000+01:00

Embedded Linux from LynuxWorks has been cleared for use in display, flight management and flight control systems in American commercial fleets.

"LynuxWorks becomes the first and only embedded operating system vendor to receive an Advisory Circular AC 20-148 acceptance letter from the FAA. "

See more at http://www.lynuxworks.com/corporate/press/2006/rsc-acceptance.php.

F-Spot - open source answer to Picassa

2006-03-10T15:01:00.000Z

There is only a handful of applications which ensured that I continue using Windows. Picassa from Google (picture and video editing and management program) has definitely been one of them. Personally, I could never understand why they resist releasing a version of Picassa for Linux, but resist they do.

However, Linux community responded, as usual, and equivalent tool emerged. It's name is F-Spot, and comes from: http://f-spot.org/ F-Spot can be used on a non-Linux platform as well - if you download a Mono-Live CD , which comes with all sorts of goodies, F-Spot included.

The current version, 0.1.10, is actually quite good and stable. I haven't tested it fully yet, but it certainlyy is usable. The only feature I'm missing is video clips management, but this is very early days for the project, and developer team is keen to hear of any "shopping lists". Versioning is good, editing less comprehensive than that of Picassa's, but on the whole the time of good by to Windows is nearer and nearer.

Any QA person reading this - relax, I will maintain a system for course design applications, at least until we get to use some portable standard ;-)

New phase in X server evolution

2006-03-07T10:06:00.000Z

For a while Novell seemed to head for the open source community doghouse, for working on the new X standard (Xgl) behind closed doors. They have also been developing a new window and composition manager called Combiz. Well, both of these products have now been released into Xorg repositories. So all is well. Is it? There are two issues that this has raised. One is the new wave of standard in-fighting that we are seemingly face. This is because as soon as the community accepted Novell's Xgl (or Xegl - OpenGL version) as the future for X11, Red Hat put the spanner in the works by promoting an alternative: aiglx (accelerated indirect GL X. Red Hat's argument would be sound - both Xgl and Xegl are brand new solutions, which would require a lot of work on the part of driver creators, whereas aiglx is just an extension to the existing X server standard. Hmmm. Here we go again... The other issue that occurred to me is more of the philosophical nature. It refers to the reasoning Novell offered in defense of the 'keep it behind the closed door' approach to the design. The "design by committee" concept is what most companies face, and have to deal with. Novell chose to go against the politically correct community involvement in the early stages of planning, spec'ing and designing. They are being slagged for it, but should they really. For one, I fully agree with Dan Winship's reasoning...

See: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-February/msg00115.html .

Boot from CD - a winner again

2006-02-20T08:52:00.000Z

Didn't expect to write anything whilst on holidays in Sydney. But couldn't resist sharing my joy of Knoppix saving me from a big row with the hotel staff.

Hotel I'm in is using a third party company to provide telecomms and broadband services. It's awfully expensive, but convenient, so I have subscribed.

So, to get online, you tune into channel 8 on your telly, choose the deal (9.95 for an hour, 44.95 for 3 days), then enter your room number - and bingo, a password is created for you. You connect your laptop and off you go. Except that the socket in our room was faulty. A very friendly manager allowed us to use another room (to test my laptop), using a password he provided for me. It worked (I never doubted my laptop). So, we move rooms altogether. Once moved, tried to connect and the fun started.

Tried the password I had generated before - error message saying - cannot activate: already active. Although the manager's password has expired, I could still connect to the Internet, and use exactly the same sites I did as part of the test, but no others. Tried clearing the browser's cache, reboot, clear the cache again for good measure, same behaviour over and over.

MAC address tied it in? Don't know, but booted from the Knoppix CD, connected the cable, punched in the password - straight in! On the same laptop, with the same hardware.

So, if not a browser's cache, not an interface number, what was it that tied my laptop to the servers information? Am I missing something? Or is the comms provider being naughty and captures more information that I would comfortably want to surrender? I left the question with the manager. Somehow, I don't expect to get any answers before we leave in three days time...

Moral of the story - Knoppix came up trupms again!

Allowing remote X sessions

2006-02-02T19:07:00.000Z

A couple of posts before, I have described how to use gdmsetup to enable (in conjunction with xhost + command) remote X applications on your machine.

I've been working with our engineers (OK, here goes the mention - Dave Williams, who is fast becoming a Linux expert, and Martin Pain - who, similarly is becoming Oracle and SQL ex if not expert), to update our various course setup documents. The fix for gdmsetup needed to be scripted. A simple trick allowed me to identify the configuration line that needed to be changed:

First save the current setting in a different file:

# cp /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf /tmp/x.$$

Then change the setting; run:

# gdmsetup

Select Security tab, and modify the setting for the "Always disallow TCP connections...".

Once done, just compare the two files:

# diff /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf /tmp/x.$$
191c191
< disallowtcp="true
---
> DisallowTCP=false

Bobs your uncle. A single line (or two):

sed '/DisallowTCP/s/false/true/' /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf > /tmp/x$$
mv /tmp/x$$ /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf

placed in an appropriate script, and X applications will now be accepted.

RPM package verification

2006-02-02T17:47:00.000Z

This post doesn't solve any problems, but is more of a record of the investigation to solve one.

I'm having problems with Fedora Core 4 GUI. Rather unpredictible X behaviour, with not being able to restart it, inability to start just some of the applications, such as xterm or firefox...

Handling X has always been my achilles heal. I resisted windows, of any description ;-), for as long as I could, initially regarding it first as pure waste, then unnecessary nicety. It's only relatively recently that I kind of resigned to the fact that resources are now robust enough to cope, and there exist applications that could not live without GUI.

Anyway, still don't really know what the problem is, but done some googling, and can see that I'm not the only one struggling with this strange GUI behaviour. Somebody suggested verifying X server packages - good idea. Run the rpm --verify on all packages to do with xorg, and got some result:

# rpm -V $(rpm -qa | grep xorg)
. . ? . . . . . c /etc/security/console.apps/xserver
S . 5 . . . . T /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/libvgahw.a

So why post this? Well, mostly to document the result, and to make a record of the file attribute characters.

The eight characters mean differences in:
S - size
M - file type or permissions (mode)
5 - MD5 checksum
D - major/minor device number
L - access path (read-link)
U - user (owner)
G - group
T - mtime stamp (modification time)

Between attribute characters and the file name, the file's type (as in "purpose") may be listed. In my output I got 'c' - a configuration file.

All I know now, that the checksum on the xserver file cannot be verified and that the module archive file has a different size, mtime and checksum (considering what type of file it is - hardly surprising).

So, have I learned anything - not really, but it gave me a chance to experiment with verifying packages ;-)

Working with UNIX 'epoch'

2006-01-16T10:04:00.000Z

An administrator friend was trying to find out on which date the last change of a password occured. He knew that this information was stored in the /etc/shadow file.

Well, the third field of the shadow file contains a number, which is equivalent to number of days from the epoch, which for UNIX was agreed to be January 1, 1970, at midnight, UTC.

So, let's see how we can convert this information into a meaningful date. For example, on my test machine I have:

$ grep root /etc/shadow
root:$1$.LbW0Bv2$keqd6WlAumjwvqRl2tu6U1:13117:0:120:7:::

The conversion is simpler that you may think - no complicated calculations, just yet another useful option of the date command:

$ date -d "1970-01-01 utc + 13117 days"
Wed Nov 30 00:00:00 GMT 2005

The above command means: show the date based on the given "string". The string used here says: use the epoch as the base date, and add to it the value of the 3rd field (for the user of interest) from the /etc/shadow file .

The unit at the end of the string is important! For example, consider the following:

$ date +%s
1137404710
$ date -d "1970/01/01 utc + 1137404710 sec"

Mon Jan 16 09:46:11 GMT 2006

In the above example we first convert the current date into the 'epoch' value, but expressed in seconds (notice that the +%s formatting is only available on the GNU-enhanced versions of date). We then used the date command to convert this number back into a proper date format.

You could use the output of the date command as part of the string used in the calculations. The following is for illustration purposes only, really. It's a long-winded way of finding the 'now' date.

$ date -d "1970-01-01 utc + $(date +%s) sec"

Mon Jan 16 10:02:54 GMT 2006

Finally, the same -d option can be used for creating any date stamp, for example:

$ date

Mon Jan 16 10:26:21 GMT 2006

$ date -d "+ 30 min"

Mon Jan 16 10:56:42 GMT 2006

$ date -d "+ 2 days"
Mon Jan 18 10:58:03 GMT 2006

xhost in RHEL4

2005-12-15T23:36:00.000Z

I needed to illustrate how an operator could send an X application from a server to a workstation in his office (I'm talking here RHEL4 boxes).

Simple, done it loads of times - on the workstation do:

# xhost +server-name

On the server run the application from the command line and direct the output to the display on the workstation:

# xapplication -display workstation-name:0.0

WRONG! It's not that simple on RHEL4! Here, you need to enable TCP first, which is done as part of gdm (graghical desktop manager) configuration.

Run:

# gdmsetup

Select Security tab and notice that the following setting is "checked":

"Always disallow TCP connections to X server (disables all remote connections)"

Take the 'tick' off, restart the GUI (CTRL-ALT-Backspace), and all is well - the method shown above will now work.

I'm still about...

2005-12-15T20:49:00.000Z

Anybody looking at this blog would be forgiven for thinking that I've given up...
No such luck. I'm still here, except that the project I've been involved in took me into a customer's environment where access to Internet is not easy.

How ironic is that! Internet has clearly become a victim of its own success. I still find it incomprehesible that one might be expected to work without access to e-mail and the web, yet most of large organisations don't seem to provide these facilities to visitor even or even contractors.

Time for 3G or similar?

Polish your Ingres in Polish

2005-11-03T20:45:00.000Z

Been looking for a book on Ingres, hoping to find something on r3.
Funily enough, couldn't (and din't) find anything on amazon, etc. There are some excellent HOWTOs, notably at www.tldp.org, but nothing recent - most of the documents are several years old. Something more contemporary could prove quite useful. Now, there is a thought ;-)

However, found a book in a Polish on-line technical bookshop!
http://www.ksiegarnia-techniczna.com.pl/modules.php?name=Sklep&plik=lista&nazwa=opis&kod=837101144X

OK, it isn't exactly up-to-date, as was published in 1994, but I still found it amusing that one exists! And at all of 6.50 zl (about £1.00), I decided to order it!

Ingres 3 - part 2

2005-10-28T14:26:00.000+01:00

Well, now that the software appears fully installed and configured, the daemons all hovering in the background waiting to spring to life, time to put some data in, and see if one can ever see it again ;-)

Logged in as user ingres, and off we go:

[ingres@fedora4 ~]$ createdb newone
Creating database 'newone' . . .

Creating DBMS System Catalogs . . .
Modifying DBMS System Catalogs . . .
Creating Standard Catalog Interface . . .
Creating Front-end System Catalogs . . .
Creation of database 'newone' completed successfully.

So far so good, now have a go at creating then selecting some data:

[ingres@fedora4 ~]$ sql newone
INGRES TERMINAL MONITOR Copyright 2005 Computer Associates Intl, Inc.
Ingres Linux Version II 3.0.2 (int.lnx/105) login
Fri Oct 21 09:49:07 2005

continue
* create table t1 (col1 char(20));
* insert into t1 values ('hello world');
* select * from t1
* \g
Executing . . .
(1 row)

┌────────────────────┐
│col1 │
├────────────────────┤
│hello world │
└────────────────────┘
(1 row)
continue
* \q
Your SQL statement(s) have been committed.
Ingres Version II 3.0.2 (int.lnx/105) logout
Fri Oct 21 09:52:46 2005

So, what's the conclusion? Well, I'm very impressed.

I suppose I will encounter some problems with the very installation I have just completed, as there are specific environmental settings, as well as kernel parameters that I did not investigate and adjust.

Another important issue a chose to totally ignore is that of user identity when performing the download and installation. This should also have been identified and used correctly. However, what the above exercise proved, is that Ingres for Linux is fine, and can be used 'out of box'.

Basic installation and configuration is simple - if the defaults are fine for you, that is!

Ingres 3 - part 1

2005-10-21T14:32:00.000+01:00

A customer of ours is planning an upgrade to Ingres3, whilst changing from Dynix to Linux at the same time. So I thought that I'd refresh my acquaintance with Ingres, since I haven't seen this version yet. I have had some experience of looking after a Linux system running Ingres, but this is the first time I'll be installing r3 myself.

At this stage I'm not even sure that what I'm doing will work. This is going to be what I call a dry run - I'm going to play it by ear, following the installation steps intuitively, rather than following any particular set of instructions - so, the following steps should be taken more as a log of events, rather than a tutorial. I had a look at www.tldp.net , which does have an ingres HOWTO, but it is a really old one, and although most of the document might be OK, I decided not to risk it ;-). At least this way I will have to use some brain cells.

You've been warned! To emphasize the point, here is a quote from the "Ingres r3 Getting Started" document (part of the downloaded documentation package):

"Note: Make sure you thoroughly understand the issues regarding system resources, storage locations, and other configuration parameters before installing Ingres. If you are not sure, have someone more knowledgeable in these areas perform the following tasks."

I have not even checked or tested that system requirements are good enough - here is the briefest of specs:
I'm using Compaq nc6120, with 2G RAM, inside a VMWare virtual machine with Fedora Core 4.

So, to the installation.

Step 1 ================================================================
Download the following files from CA site: http://opensource.ca.com/projects/ingres/

ingres-3.0.2-105-pc-linux-i386.tgz
ingresr3documentation.tar.gz

You will need to register with CA first.

Step 2 ================================================================
Prepare for the installation: create 'infrastructure' and unpack the tarballs.

# mkdir -p ingres/documentation

Unpack the documentation. I chose to separate the documentation (PDF files) from the installation software.
# cp ./ingresr3documentation.tar.gz ingres/documentation
# (cd ingres/documentation; tar xzvf ingresr3documentation.tar.gz)

Unpack the Ingres 3 software
# cd ingres;
# tar xzvf ingres-3.0.2-105-pc-linux-i386.tgz
# cd ingres-3.0.2-105-pc-linux-i386

Step 3 ================================================================
Perform the installation

Need to run the Licence scripts first, to accept the conditions. The main database installation script won't work until you do this one first. Trust me, I know this from experience ;-)

# ./ingres-CATOSL

Can now run the main Ingres 3 installation script.

# ./*install
INSTALL OUTPUT: Invoking RPM...
INSTALL OUTPUT: Preparing... ################################ [100%]
INSTALL OUTPUT: System user ingres has been created but no password has been set.
INSTALL OUTPUT: Please set the password to enable login for this user.
INSTALL OUTPUT: 1:ca-ingres ################################ [ 6%]
INSTALL OUTPUT: II_INSTALLATION configured as II.
INSTALL OUTPUT: 2:ca-ingres-dbms ################################ [ 12%]
INSTALL OUTPUT: Setting up Ingres Intelligent DBMS, this may take some time...
INSTALL OUTPUT: See /opt/CA/IngresII/ingres/files/install.log for more info.
INSTALL OUTPUT: 3:ca-ingres-net ################################ [ 18%]
INSTALL OUTPUT: Building the password validation program 'ingvalidpw'.
INSTALL OUTPUT: Could not compile ingvalidpw: Using executable from the distribution instead.
INSTALL OUTPUT: Executable successfully installed.
INSTALL OUTPUT: 4:ca-ingres-qr_run ################################ [ 24%]
INSTALL OUTPUT: 5:ca-ingres-abf ################################ [ 29%]
INSTALL OUTPUT: 6:ca-ingres-c2audit ################################ [ 35%]
INSTALL OUTPUT: 7:ca-ingres-das ################################ [ 41%]
INSTALL OUTPUT: 8:ca-ingres-esql ################################ [ 47%]
INSTALL OUTPUT: 9:ca-ingres-ice ################################ [ 53%]
INSTALL OUTPUT: Setting up Ingres Web Deployment Option, this may take some time..
INSTALL OUTPUT: See /opt/CA/IngresII/ingres/files/install.log for more info
INSTALL OUTPUT: ngres release 3 has installed successfully.
INSTALL OUTPUT: The instance will now be started...
INSTALL OUTPUT:
INSTALL OUTPUT: Starting Ingres, instance

So, the following Ingres packages have been installed:

# rpm -qa | grep ingres
ca-ingres-net-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-das-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-odbc-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-tuxedo-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-CATOSL-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-dbms-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-qr_run-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-c2audit-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-esql-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-jdbc-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-ome-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-star-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-vision-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-abf-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-ice-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-rep-3.0.2-105
ca-ingres-documentation-3.0.2-105

Service 'rc' file has been installed:

# ls -l /etc/init.d/ingres*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 7187 Oct 20 19:27 /etc/init.d/ingresII

Indeed: the service list in the runlevel 5 lists the following:

Ingres II name server (iigcn) - running
Ingres II recovery server (dmfrcp) - running
Ingres II DBMS server (iidbms) - 1 running
Ingres II Star server (iistar) - 1 running
Ingres II Net server (iigcc) - 1 running
Ingres II Data Access server (iigcd) - 1 running
Ingres II JDBC server (iijdbc) - not active
Ingres II RMCMD process (rmcmd) - running
Ingres II archiver process (dmfacp) - running

And, sure enough, loads of Ingres processes are running:

# ps -ef | grep ingres
ingres 25691 1 0 19:34 pts/1 00:00:00 /opt/CA/IngresII/ingres/bin/iigcn II
ingres 25805 1 0 19:34 pts/1 00:00:02 /opt/CA/IngresII/ingres/bin/iidbms recovery (dmfrcp) II
ingres 25925 1 0 19:34 pts/1 00:00:01 /opt/CA/IngresII/ingres/bin/dmfacp II
ingres 25935 1 0 19:34 pts/1 00:00:19 /opt/CA/IngresII/ingres/bin/iidbms dbms (default) II
ingres 26079 1 0 19:34 pts/1 00:00:00 /opt/CA/IngresII/ingres/bin/iigcc II gcc
ingres 26135 1 0 19:34 pts/1 00:00:00 /opt/CA/IngresII/ingres/bin/iigcd II gcd
ingres 26189 1 0 19:34 pts/1 00:00:02 /opt/CA/IngresII/ingres/bin/iistar star (default) II
ingres 26270 1 0 19:34 pts/1 00:00:02 /opt/CA/IngresII/ingres/bin/rmcmd II

That's all for this posting - next time, I'll see if my common sense approach worked. Chances are that many settings, variables, locations (possibly even additional libraries, etc) will have to be tweaked, adjusted, added...

Why am I so pessimistic? Well, it's just that it's been going too well so far! ;-)

Commenting out a block of lines in a script

2005-10-21T09:19:00.000+01:00

Everybody knows of the '#' character as the character allowing to comment out lines that are not meant to be interpreted by the shell in a shell script.

Well, how cumbersome and untidy it ends up sometimes! Imagine you have a block of code, perhaps a big for-do-done loop, or a complex if-elif-else-fi statement and you need to, temporarily, take it out of the script for some reason. Inserting hash in front of each line, and then removing it again when done with whatever test you wanted to conduct is just plain messy.

Ok, you could argue that this can be done nicely in vi :

First, identify line numbers with:

:set nu

Then:

:10,30s/^/# /

will insert the hash at the begining of line, on lines 10 through 30, but even this is long-winded, and if you are using another editor, then the method may not be available at all.

The alternative is to use a combination of the 'do nothing' command: the colon command, and the 'here document'. Imagine the following construct:

: <<>
....
....
....
BLOCK-OF-LINES-COMMENTED-OUT

You can easily move the two lines up and down the script, and isolate the blok of line you don't want to 'participate' at run time.

How does it work? The colon command means 'do nothing', but generate exit status 0, success. The way we are using it here is: 'do nothing, and whilst doing this ;-) use stream of data provided as 'here document'. This embedded data is not not interpreted by the shell at run time, so it hides our code!

The case in date

2005-10-17T11:14:00.000+01:00

Tha date command, one of the eldest tools in Unix has got one quirk that escaped me all those years. As usual with these things, it was a delegate who pointed this out to me, with a wry smile.

A bit of background first. If you need to extract hour and minutes from the date command, you'd probably use:

$ date +%H:%M
14:48

The little 'inverted polish logic' (is that why they keep telling me these things? ;-) ) is if you try to use the AM/PM indicator, achieved with the 'p' options.

Try the following:

$ date +%H:%M\ %p
14:49 PM

Then try:

$ date +%H:%M\ %P
14:49 pm

Don't know the background to this, but it does appear a deliberate tease ;-)

Pleasures of a tight-fit hangar

2005-10-15T22:17:00.000+01:00

A Pup (150) embracing a Robin (400)

Still the best kept secret?

2005-10-09T16:31:00.000+01:00

I'm amazed how many people are still not aware of what Linux is! And I don't mean any Fred (sorry to all Freds out there!) off the street. I mean IT professionals, who come and join our UNIX classes. OK, so it was a Unix Fundamentals I'm referring to in particular; but even then, I would expect a bit more appreciation of the players in the industry.

We give away a Knoppix disk on our UNIX/Linux courses. Frequently people ask - "what's that?". In itself, this is not an unexpected question, after all Knoppix is not a distribution talked about in board rooms. But when I answer: "it's a distribution of Linux, which...." and I still get a follow up "what's that?", then I do despair!

Playing with pdksh redirection

2005-09-29T11:21:00.000+01:00

We often test the understanding of the command line scan by asking if the following will work:

$ > /tmp/file1 2> /tmp/file2 (*)

This week, been faced with questions exploring this further. For example, notice that:

$ >log ( ps; who; df )

will work, so will

$ > log10 < /etc/hosts (while read -r line; do print $line; done )

(*) It will (as long as file exists). The shell opens all three files during the scan, and cat will be the only word remaining on the command line. In simple terms. the shell will look after the 'connectivity' between cat's I/O streams and the files.

SCO is fighing back ?

2005-09-21T08:45:00.000+01:00

I hear that SCO are teaming up with MySQL! Must check it out - should we await MySQL license requirement soon ? ;-))

Daily Hintlet
The ps command is one of the most underused tools! Experiment with -o, which allows you to format the output. For example, try the following:

$ ps -C ksirtet -o pid=

Obviously, if you are not currently playing tetris, substitute ksirtet for another active process ;-)

Terminal capabilities

2005-09-16T07:52:00.000+01:00

I remember going back years and years, having to use an application which was meant to be displayed on a Prestel terminal. Prestel is a simple screen protocol, of 40 columns x 24 rows, still used in some places (mostly in Europe). It's got some interesting features, such as fixed colours for certain facilities. Can't remember much of the detail anymore, but I'm sure that, for example, the background colour is like choosing an old Ford - any colour you want, as long as it is black. Quite peculiar.

This was the project, however, that tought me a lot about terminfo database and tools associated with creating and manipulating the terminal capability files. The terminfo database is in fact a collection of hundreds of individual files, each containing a description of one terminal type. These are data files, you can't 'touch' them with cat or more, but feel free (as root) to convert it into text with:

# infocmp /usr/share/terminfo/v/vt100 > /tmp/vt100.txt

If you needed to create a new terminal file, you'd pick up the most suitable (similar) existing one, modify it (using data from the hardware manual provided with your new terminal) and submit it into the terminfo system with the tic command (terminfo compiler).

These days one gets 'drivers' for every screen one can think of (and few more), but understanding of the terminfo still helps - as you can then implement scripts, menus, etc, using some of the more advanced screen control techniques.

For example, many people know of the tput command, that allows to manipulate the screen on an ad hoc bases. This command uses the capabilities file indicated by your TERM variable. To check, type:

$ echo $TERM

If you are looged into Linux, that is very likely xterm, and the file used is /usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm.

If you've never seen tput in action, log onto any Unix or Linux box, open any terminal session and type:

$ tput bold; echo hello world; tput rev; echo and again; tput rsg0

The fun starts when you begin to utilise some of the more obscure features, such a colour or placement control. Try the following:

$ red=$(tput setf 4)
$ echo "${red}$(tput cup 10 20)hello world"

The setf argument allows to control the character colour, whereas cup x y will send the cursor to column x row y of your screen.

DailyHintlet
To find out more about the screen capabiliites and arguments to tput look at the manual pages for terminfo, as well as tput. There is a lot more useful stuff there, for example there is an explanation of why setf 4 might mean red on one ocassion but green on another!

DailyHintlets

2005-09-15T08:07:00.000+01:00

I found that doing a decent write-up on any particular thought or a 'discovery', etc takes time, and for that reason I often delay posting, to the point that the thought is gone, and opportunity for recording it missed.

So, from now on, in addition to sometimes longer ellaborations, I will now have a snappy entry, called "DailyHintlet". They will usually be one-liner solutions, examples, thoughts, etc. Often they will be bits of information I've learned from the delegates!

Despite the name, I don't really expect them to be posted daily, just liked the title ;-)

DailyHintlet

In GRUB configuration, the scope of the password directive changes, depending on where it is applied. If applied in the general definitions section, it controls ability to edit the configuration file. If applied within a stanza paragraph, it controls the access to (ability to boot) that kernel.

(Ghanny from CompuCentre - thank you for correcting my lab solutions)

grep with -E option

2005-09-06T11:05:00.000+01:00

One of the most confusing things newbies face when learning Unix is having to grasp regular expressions. Having gone through the pains of learning the globbing (wildcards) and other shell specials, only a couple of days later we throw them all into air (characters, that is - not the delegates) and try to catch them again!

It's interesting to watch the delegates try to rationalise it all... What usually finishes them off, is the use of the counting mechanism, whereby one can specify how many instances of a character or a pattern is expected.

For example: to locate lines (in datafile) with at least 4 characters using grep could be done simply with (remember, in regular expressions dot means any one character):

$ grep '....' datafile

But if you want to locate lines containing exactly four characters, grep is taking on a bit more complex detail. The counting mechanism used needs to be 'switched on' with the use of the backslash.

$ grep '^.\{4\}$' datafile

The delegates are by this stage happy (ish) with the 'anchoring' characters (^ and $) and know that this means tying the pattern to the beginning and end of line, respectively. What freaks them out is that \{ \} notation.

I like using it, because it allows me to complete the explanation of the backslash usage in Unix - you use it to toggle a special-meaning of a character. We normally use it to turn the special meaning of a character off. In the counting notation of grep, we use it for the exactly opposite purpose. Here, it means turn the special meaning of the curly brackets on (and make it count the character specified in front of it).

But, I will have to find a different example to illustrate the use of the backslash; I just can't justify for much longer keeping quiet about the -E option one can use with grep. This allows the use of the set of extended regular expressions, in which counting is part of the default, and the { } notation is taken to mean counting without any additional measures...

Therefore, the last example could be re-written with:

$ grep -E '^.{4}' datafile

Much simpler, and less confusing...

Why sudden change of heart? Had an e-mail from a delegate along the lines of: "Alina, did you know that..."

Memory stick Duo and HP 6120...

2005-09-01T18:05:00.000+01:00

...do not work together!

HP 6120 comes with a fancy digital card reader port. It takes every card. Apparently. What was not documented very well, is that the new format memory sticks, such as the Magic Gate ones, do not (and will not) work. Indeed, some of the sites on the web warn you against using them, as you can corrupt the card.

So, I thought I'd get a PCMCIA card, with the memory stick adapter. Guess what! I have found a way of predicatably generating a blue screen of death on XP!

And that's after being convinced by many that this is now in the past. It actually is blue, even if it doesn't last long, not even long enough for me to read the info (not that I would really want to).

So, off to Jessops again, to get a USB external reader. More bits to carry.

Lack of standards is getting at me.

I'm back

2005-08-09T13:48:00.000+01:00

A gap, mostly down to my swapping the hardware, and spending ages on installing, re-installing and configuring machines.

I now have a brand new (QA's, I must add) HP6120, with all the spec necessary to run VMWare workstation 5, with RHEL4, Fedora 4, Solaris 10 and SuSE 9.3 running withing it.

Quite impressive! Of those listed above, Solaris 10 is having the greatest problems. Mostly because there isn't yet vmware-tools program for Solaris, which means that things like screen resolution, cut and paste and sharing directories with other virtual machines is at best limited, at worst non-existent.

But very impressive otherwise. The 2Gig RAM is a must for this kind of configuration, and with it you can have all guests open and running.

Good stuff!

Counting patterns in KSH

2005-07-21T10:58:00.000+01:00

I was explaining the pattern matching in the shell earlier today, and used a very unfortunate example for explaining the "exactly one" pattern:

if [[ $var == @([0-9])% ]]; then...

I have (correctly) explained the above pattern as exactly one digit followed by a percent sign. One of the delegates asked me: why use the fancy characters? Wouldn't the following:

if [[ $var == [0-9]% ]]; then...

be the same? And if so, what's the point of the additional characters! Got me going for a moment! The answer is in the poorly chosen example. Although it works, one would never use the 'exact one' counting in relation to a single pattern specification.

The @(...) notation is used when you need to 'count' alternative patterns, as in:

if [[ $var == @(+|-)[0-9] ]]; then...

Without the @ character, the brackets needed for enveloping the alternative patterns would not work:

if [[ $var == (+|-)[0-9] ]]; then...
ksh: syntax error: '==' missing second argument

And without the brackets altogether:
if [[ $var == +|-[0-9] ]]; then...

gives:
ksh: syntax error: '|' unexpected operator/operand

Bootable Knoppix

2005-07-20T17:09:00.000+01:00

I'm teaching the shell scripting course, and as usual I'm being asked if we have access to the Internet.

We normally don't allow the Internet in the classroom (unless it is needed for the course, of course). We just need to take away a temptation of browsing the net in the middle of a session, as we (the lecturers) are a vain lot, and can take such behaviour personally ;-)

Now, however, my approach has changed! This week, having asked Del to connect the class to the net, instead sending the deles to our Internet cafe's, I told them to reboot their boxes from the Knoppix CD, and use it for e-mail at breaks or lunch. The process of rebooting the machines is short enough to make it viable, but long enough to stop them from abusing it.

That means the best of both worlds! No interruption during lectures, yet they can access their e-mail. Will be recommending this method to our MS-Windows lecturers ;-))