| home | | fedora | | SVN | | Git | | minix | | selab | | me - selab | | nslu2 - notes | | random source | | tutorials |
GNU FontUtils Co-Maintainer
I am now the GNU FontUtils co-maintainer. We're planning a release for February after a long release hiatus. You can find out more at http://www.gnu.org/software/fontutils/.
Oracle Monitoring - Part #1
Ever needed to monitor Oracle components in a platform agnostic way? I have, so I wrote a small Perl script you can use on systemswith a working Perl installation and working Oracle Thick Client that contains the tnsping and sqlplus utilities. The first script monitors the Oracle Listeners using your tnsnames.ora file and the soon to come script in Part #2 will actually check your databases. You can find the first script here named lsnrnotify.pl. Enjoy!
Dell R710 - NEW RAM
We received the new RAM from Dell today after figuring out that if you order RAM after the system is shipped, say for an upgrade you have to call a seperate number for the RAM warranty folks at Dell instead of the server warranty folks. Just an FYI.
Dell R710 MCE HARDWARE ERROR
I installed new RAM into a DELL R710 recently (month ago) and today it decided to go belly up with a Machine Check Exception. Something along the lines of:
HARDWARE ERROR
This is not a software error!
The front panel displayed an error asking me to reseat the DIMM located in slot 4B. I did and rebooted. I then contacted DELL support which proceeded to inform me that I had to install BIOS updates and Firmware (iDRAC) updates and move the DIMM to another DIMM slot (switch it with another) to effectively rule out an error with that particular slot and the DIMM. If you want read about the outcome please look here.
EXIM Smart Host - Relay
I setup logwatch recently on a few systems where I required a relay. You can setup exim using a relay by adding a router with a route_list containing the relay host. For example, smart_host_relay:
driver = manualroute
route_list = !+local_domains 10.x.x.x
transport = remote_smtp
What parameters can I use with my new QLogic Driver?
If you're faced with upgrading your kernel on a RHEL or CentOS system and you're using a driver that has new (and different) options than the last driver you can check what's available by doing 'objdump qla2xxx.ko --full-contents --section=.modinfo'. That should help you figure out what you can put in /etc/modprobe.conf before you rebuild your ramdisk.
Check your disk!:
I posted a new script that only requires bash and awk to help you monitor disk usage locally or remotely. Hopefully you find it useful.
I call Bullshit:
I'm wondering what term should replace Community in the "Java Community Process" in order to rectify the recent ballot results here and here with reality? I think the answer is "Java Bullshit Process." There, that sounds better...
Replacing HTML Non-Printable Characters:
So I had a need to convert a non printable degree character in a HTML file from a windows machine: dos2unix source.htm && cat source.htm | tr "\302\260" '^' | sed 's/\^/\& deg;/g' > index.htm
Internet 3 - Not what I Expected:
Yeah! Hooray! Someone is creating the "Internet 3"...wait...but it's going to be a wired grotto and not really a trully free Internet 3. Ohh and no traffic agnostic wireless, cellphone towers or other 'put future technology here' connections to the Internet 3. Aren't you excited you get to wallow in copper connection wonderland? But hey! you're free aren't you?
Hard up for Free Software (08/02/10):
This article highlights a very real issue now facing most in the FOSS community. So what do we do?
Prediction (08/01/10):
So in light of this post let's think about Canonical, Ltd's true intentions. Matt Assay, the COO of Canonical, Ltd. plants the seed of what Canonical, Ltd. really wants, for Microsoft to port their applications to Linux. He doesn't openly say this, but the thought process is transparent. It goes like this... Canonical attracts a huge user base by sucking the life out of Debian, wrapping a bunch of proprietary drivers and software under the covers, making it super easy for companies to deploy proprietary solutions atop Linux. So instead of being part of the solution, Ubuntu short circuits the years and years of hardwork of Open Source developers and the greater community, bows to the pressure, and seemingly makes it easier for people to use their computers and to use Linux. But, what are Matt and Canonical, Ltd. really trying to do? Well I tend to think, and the above article tends to confirm this idea, that the ultimate play is to make Ubuntu the first Microsoft owned distribution. Why not? Microsoft already bought Suse/Novell, just not outright. The next step Matt mentions is for Microsoft to formalize this past decision and make Suse the mobile platform, then once the mobile piece is in place (after Windows 7 phone fails of course), the next logical step would be to port applications over to the Ubuntu platform, which is of course already ready for proprietary software to be mixed in, has a huge user base and is already accepted by millions of people worldwide. Then voila! we have the new MicroLinux (MonkeyBoy Linux). I know, a lot of people have been predicting this for quite some time. But consider this, Ballmer and co. are slipping up big time, and can't seem to break away from the Windows/Office duopoly. This is most likely because they can't relinquish control and let a "startup" or new product within Microsoft live on it's own and be different. It must be blue "through and through" and that means inheriting all the crap that goes along with being part of Microsoft, which ultimately also means it will fail in the face of a completely changed landscape. Ballmer, it's not the 80's or 90's (or even the 00's) anymore and you should listen to Matt. He and the Ubuntu folks want you, and most of us don't want them so once you do gobble them up like they want you to, it'll make it even easier for us to push them to the side. How's that for an idea folks?
Adobe Swissh Cheese (05/17/10):
Wow the latest US-CERT report really shows why Steve Jobs isn't too concerned about his relationship with Adobe. EEEK! Check it out here.
clevelandwoolery.com (05/06/10):
Yup, it's been a while! But I've been busy working on my Thesis and a few projects. You can track my progress at www.clevelandwoolery.com
Web Based Presentations (05/06/10):
Wow! Eric Meyer adopted the Opera presentation tool and I've startedusing it in favor of Impress and Powerpoint. Gotta love standards and portability! Check it out at his site.
ITunes is Apple's IE (04/27/10):
I just got what seems to be the third or fourth ITunes update in the last two months. I also hear about ITunes security holes on a semi-regular basis. Does anyone else think ITunes is Apple's IE? Seems like a good portion of what one does on a Mac is tied to ITunes as well as it being buggy and full of security holes.
Economic Disrupters (04/26/10):
Glynn Moody just wrote an interesting piece at h-online. I think a simplistic answer as to why established industries are fighting so hard against the "FOSS model" is power. The examples Glynn gives are of individuals or small businesses making money. FOSS is a power disruptor best optimized for small groups or individuals to make money. It can also work for small companies looking to be acquired. However, I believe this often overlooked point is valuable to think about when discussing the economic upsides of FOSS. FOSS is great for the people, but not great for big entities looking to control or dominate markets; it's simply not setup for it.
/etc/sudoers and ENVVARS (04/23/10):
The following might be useful:
Defaults env_keep = ALL
Playing with Sudo (04/23/10):
Sometimes it might be useful to run commands as another user, as well as inherit their environment and be able to do it repeatably without setting environment variables over and over. You can do that by setting a user alias in their profile like:
alias foocmd='sudo -k && sudo -i -u user ENVVAR=foo cmd'
The foocmd is the alias, the -k will expire existing authentication tokens, the -i will force the environmental pieces to run from the users login shell, the -u sets the user to run as, ENVVAR is an environment variable you want to set, and cmd is the command to run. You might also want to check our your /etc/sudoers file. I'll post that in the next post.
Hacking OpenBSD (04/19/10):
So as part of my thesis research I've started looking at how to participate in hacking on OpenBSD. I posted to the openbsd-tech list asking how to start. Overall it was a good idea but I should have known better and followed the motto "shut up and hack." You can read the thread if you want. I've started pouring over "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD". You should too! Here is a list of todo's to get to...http://www.blahonga.org/~art/openbsd/todo.html
Fork OpenSolaris (04/15/10):
Is it time to fork OpenSolaris? Check out this post.
Predicting Post Release Failures (04/15/10):
I just read an interesting paper on predicting post release failures using predictive metrics and failure reports. You can find the paper here. I never thought I'd read stuff published by Microsoft but I have to hand it to Microsoft Research; they've got a lot of money and a lot of talented people. Now only if that translated to a good portion of their products??? Hrm...
Tracking Linux Kernel Management (04/14/10):
I recently had to select a topic for a term paper and with a fellow student we are attempting to write a brief synopsis on the management of the Linux kernel development process since its' inception. We'll post it here when it's finished.
Writing Attempt (04/13/10):
In an attempt to get my creeky writing wheels going, and make my advisor happier, I'm going to try and write at least one entry here, and write some of my Thesis, every single day. That ought to be interesting, no?
Oracle and Zombies (04/13/10):
Note to the web...if you encounter dead processes (zombiefied) on your system that's running Oracle and there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason as to which process becomes zombified and you can't kill the processes b/c they're in an uninterruptible "D" state, I'd adjust your default scheduler to "deadline." Simply put "elevator=deadline" at the end of your kernel statement in grub.conf and you should be set. No more zombies for you sorry. The general idea here is that Oracle (and other DB's) are very I/O hungry and to that end, the CFQ scheduler and other schedulers can't service all requests in time. The deadline scheduler helps alleviate that problem by having to service each process at a specific time, at least giving each process a good slice of time.
UDEV and Multipathing (04/13/10):
If you want to have your local disks use a static device identifier I just used the following udev rule in /etc/udev/rules.d/10-local.rules:
SUBSYSTEM=="block", ATTR{size}=="570949632", SYMLINK+="localdisk"
Where ATTR{size} is the size information of the device gained by calling:
udevinfo -a -p /sys/block/sdm (sdm is the device I want statically assigned)
and SYMLINK+="localdisk" is the name of the device to be created: /dev/localdisk.
Help Save MySQL (12/13/09):
Please read the following and help save the database that helped build a lot of our careers.
OSS Tutorials (12/10/09):
I wrote some tutorials for Git, OpenNTPD, TripWire and VSFTPD. You can find them here.
RedHat are you smoking something? (12/08/09):
So I guess now that the "open" company is becoming popular they're now using flash on their site! Try to go here and you get a nice red page that says WARNING: Site Requirements not met (Javascript + Flash Player 8). Sweet! I know the link says swf in it but still...c'mon, do you guys really need to use flash?
Slow (but decent) Remote File Repo Duplicator (06/13/09):
Ever wanted an easier way to "wget" an entire URL? Well I created a way that will do it using a small script. You can find it here, but I will warn you it's a bit slow.
Free Linux Journal? (03/09/09):
Want to take a stab at a free 1 year digital subscription to Linux Journal? Check out this link.
Noteasaurus (01/12/09):
Tracking post it notes can be a pain so why not streamline your life and do it through an online webservice like Noteasaurus? Noteasaurus is a new web application from a group of friends. It's not officially launched yet, but we're getting there...
Testpert (11/18/08):
You too can be a Python testing magician! I've started working on a dynamic continous Python test executor called Testpert. You can find the source here or soon on Google Code.
FUTURE APP (10/24/08):
I've started poking around with a component for DigiCo that I'm working on with Russ from iWouldRather. Stay tuned for a pre-alpha release in a few months...
NEW APP (10/24/08): ContextSwitch
I've posted the alpha-0.1 version of ContextSwitch. It is a very very basic task management application that I'm in the process of improving and securing. Currently you will not get an e-mail after you sign-up but I should be adding that this coming weekend (10/25/08).
UPDATE (10/24/08): Mixpy
Mixpy is a take off of KernelMaker but will most likely be written in Python. I will be doing the same stuff with KernelMaker in Mixpy but also ideally adding on a feature to auto-detect hardware (as best as possible) and enable you to "auto-select" features from the kernel config file and build an "optimized" kernel for your box.
UPDATE (10/24/08): Site Design #1
The first iteration of the redesigned site is up. I'm going to make more adjustments on the home page and in other areas soon.
TIME PASSES (10/24/08): Life Adjustments
Because of life changing events like Odin Nicoli's arrival in March 2009 I've had to scale back my work with Fedora. In fact I feel bad that I haven't posted updates to Mrxvt or Astyle for a while, but that's how the cookie crumbles I guess. In the mean time, I will be working on my thesis "Mixpy" for the forseeable future as well as awaiting the arrival of our first born.
FACELIFT (10/06/08): FaceLift
When I get some time this coming week and weekend I'm going to start working on a re-design of this site. Fun stuff! In the mean time you can check out ContextSwitch.
UPDATE (10/02/08): Awesome Site
So while working on a school project late at night I stumbled upon an awesome site very similar to an idea I had a while back and had no time to act on. Thank goodness someone else is working on making the world a better place one step at a time. Check it out!.
UPDATE (08/19/08): Hooray for Phenom Tri-Cores
Long time no update. The machine this site was running on died a while back, *sniffle*...but now it's finally back up! Hooray for phenom tri-cores being really cheap nowadays! I'm starting a site re-design so watch out for an update. Also, I took my blog down because ummm...blogs kind of suck.
UPDATE (11/28/07): mrxvt 0.5.3
Thanks to nirik in #fedora-devel@irc.freenode.net I was able to work through an issue with building the latest mrxvt. I was a dumb dumb and didn't follow the doc properly. Shame on me. Anyway, I'm super busy with stuff and right now, love Androids! Get the latest mrxvt here or be square!
UPDATE (10/10/07): littlehat-0.2
Well, well...littlehat is in the wild! I've managed to create my first "distro" of sorts and it's called "littlehat." littlehat will get much better but for now you can download it, boot to a prompt and use google as the root password. I will work on getting it trimmed down and will probably add a few other tweaks including a new package manager in the near future. I will publish build scripts soon too!
UPDATE (09/08/07): Blog and kernelMaker:
I installed my blog today. I also worked on my kernelMaker a little bit. Now I'm off to go work on an article, school and the frankencluster...
UPDATE (08/27/07): Debian Slug and Office Cam:
So I got my debian slug running and setup my cam in my office window.
UPDATE (08/26/07): Updates on summer tasks:
I'm going to start writing for LinuxJournal, now how cool is that?
I've written a small program to download and install new kernels for folks that are interested in helping test new kernel builds. It's not totally done yet, but it's quite close. I've called it kernelMaker. The need for such a program sprung from a speech Andrew Morton gave at LinuxWorld 2007 this year, so I figured I'd throw my hat in the "ring" to see what I could do with Perl.
I've also started to write a testbed monitoring and deployment utility using usbip.
UPDATE (07/30/07): iPhone vs. OpenMoko and Fedora Update:
mrxvt and astyle are both in Fedora updates as of a few weeks ago. I will be posting an update for mrxvt soon, depending upon when the development team releases their next tarball.
The people at FedoraUnity.org thought up an ambitious idea: "...if data access rates are good enough (usb 1.1 right now) we are going to work on putting a xen guest on the neo and booting the xen guest on a remote (over usb) hypervisor to have a "traveling" virtual machine." That would be wicked once it gets working!
I'm planning on interviewing someone special today for OB1, a local Cleveland technology show. In the mean time, you can checkout my developing iPhone vs. OpenMoko review.
UPDATE (07/07/07): astyle:
Weee!!! I've finished with getting astyle into F-7 testing! I've also managed to build astyle for FC-6, and F-8.
UPDATE (07/04/07): akamaru:
I've built a set of RPMS for akamaru.
UPDATE (07/04/07): createBuildEnv.sh and astyle:
So I built a neat little rpm tool. It's a simple shell script that let's you specify where to place your RPM buildroot, what group and owner you want to have on the directories, create your buildroot, delete your buildroot, and also install and remove rpms related to building rpms. You can clone the git-repo or download the tool. Please let me know what you think!
Evidently, I might also be a co-maintainer for the astyle RPM. I've updated astyle to 1.21.
UPDATE (07/03/07): Updates on summer tasks:
UPDATE (06/03/07): Updates on summer tasks:
UPDATE (05/21/07): I'm working on a few things this summer:
UPDATE (01/14/07):
I've added a flag to livecd-creator that you can use to dictate where to build your livecd. Of course this will not eliminate the actual iso being generated in your present working directory. If you do not specify the --build-dir flag when you call livecd-creator it will use the old default of using /var/tmp/livecd-creator. The main improvement, beyond the addition of the --build-dir flag is the space check. This new version of livecd-creator will verify you have at least three gigabytes of free space before continuing. If you don't it will quit and ask you to add more space, or specify a different directory. Have fun!
You can find the new (and unofficial) version of livecd-creator here: livecd-creator .
The current git diff.
UPDATE (01/14/07)
CANCELLED: Fix the kernel module "bug" in livecd-creator and find out how to dynamically generate a list of kernel modules to include.
Potential Bug: Apparently the livecd-creator script doesn't totally cleanup after itself. We need to look at the teardown() method and see why it is failing. This occurs using the original and my modified livecd-script.
I've created a few mrxvt rpms that include the recent patch. You can get the source rpm or the regular i386 rpm. If you have a need for other archs, please let me know! ( gnome (*a*t) dux-linux (dOT) o-r-g ) Enjoy!
Linux is trademark/copyright of Linus Torvalds.