From the notes of a system administrator

Compare list of files to identify files and directories

2012-01-19T14:53:00.002+05:30

Say xyz is a file with a list of files and directories. (The files and directories are all on the working system itself)
You need to print only the directories amongst them.

for i in `cat xyz`; do if [ -d $i ] ; then echo $i ;fi; done

will print out only directories among them.

Hp Openview Errors

2011-05-01T13:35:00.000+05:30

Last week, I had a few issues with bringing up the HP Openview Operations Manager. The snap-in wouldn't load .It just gave this error.

"The Console is unable to connect to the server. Please make sure that all services including the database are up and running."

Now on the services.msc in Windows, the database services and related services were all up and running. I could also connect to the db using the SQL studio. ( My DB is MS SQL 2005)

Then i tried to run this
C:\Program Files\HP\HP BTO Software\support\OVMigration\Binn\osql -E openview -S DBserverName\InstanceName

That too showed that things were running fine.

Next I tried running the command on the OVO server
vpstat -8

It showed that all services except OvEpMsgActSrv was running fine.

You can also use ovc -status to check the services.

Now this turned out to be failing due to a huge message queue file at this location.
"\Program Files\HP Openview\Data\Shared\tmp\queues"

Once that was dumped, I restarted the services with
vpstat -8 -r

and things were fine again. This is how a good configuration should look.

D:\HP\OM\support\OVMigration\Binn>osql.exe -E openview -s SERVERNAME\DBNAME
1>
2>
3>
4>
5> quit

D:\HP\OM\support\OVMigration\Binn>
D:\HP\OM\support\OVMigration\Binn>ovc -status
ovcd OV Control CORE (5624) Running
opcmsga OVO Message Agent AGENT,EA (2148) Running
opcmsgi OVO Message Interceptor AGENT,EA (6480) Running
opcle OVO Logfile Encapsulator AGENT,EA (428) Running
opcacta OVO Action Agent AGENT,EA (5580) Running
agtrep OV Discovery Agent AGENT,AgtRep (5776) Running
coda OV Performance Core COREXT (6456) Running
opcmona OVO Monitor Agent AGENT,EA (6576) Running
ovconfd OV Config and Deploy COREXT (9720) Running
opcwbemi OVO WMI Interceptor AGENT,EA (5572) Running
ovbbccb OV Communication Broker CORE (4424) Running
ovcs OV Certificate Server SERVER (1524) Running
ovtomcatB OV Tomcat(B) Servlet Container WEB (6128) Running

D:\HP\OM\support\OVMigration\Binn>
D:\HP\OM\support\OVMigration\Binn>vpstat -3
============================================================
running: D:\HP\OM\bin\vpstat.exe
version: A.22.0.56.30 on SERVERNAME
now: Sun May 01 11:01:25 2011
============================================================

============================================================
==================== Services Information ==================
============================================================

Configuration file: D:\HP\OM\data\conf\vpstat\vpstat.conf
Ver: 0.8.10.074
Date: Thu Jun 19 15:40:36 2008
Remark: HP Operation Manager - Performance.

Services on : LOCAL MACHINE

(NT Services) :

OK: All services : SERVICE_ACTIVE

D:\HP\OM\support\OVMigration\Binn>vpstat -8
============================================================
running: D:\HP\OM\bin\vpstat.exe
version: A.22.0.56.30 on UP-OVO01
now: Sun May 01 11:01:28 2011
============================================================

============================================================
==================== Processes Information =================
============================================================

Configuration file: D:\HP\OM\data\conf\vpstat\vpstat.conf
Ver: 0.8.10.074
Date: Thu Jun 19 15:40:36 2008
Remark: HP Operation Manager - Performance.

OK:ALL CRITICAL PROCESSES ARE RUNNING

D:\HP\OM\support\OVMigration\Binn>

PIX and SMTP troubles

2011-04-14T14:30:00.000+05:30

Twice in our current environment, we've had to face issues with PIX interfering with very specific SMTP communications. The first time, one of our users could not receive a particular type of pdf attachments from one source. After a hell of troubleshooting, it finally turned out to be that PIX ESMTP filtering was the source of the problem.

This time, there was another similar issue. Some domains with a big list of entries in the "ADDITIONAL SECTION" of the DNS response could not me sent emails. The error being

Delivery Failure
Attempted Delivery to: Unknown Error: 554 5.4.4 [internal] domain lookup failed

This error though was not correct, since the DNS lookups were successful in the nslookup utility on the messaging gateway.

Digging further in pointed to the issue being related to large DNS query responses which were being rejected by PIX DNS restrictions. DNS UDP Packets of size greater than 512 bytes were not allowed by PIX. So Once that was removed, things started working well.

Autocad network license manager error

2010-10-25T17:19:00.000+05:30

I was having a tough time with the following error in many systems on a trusted domain within our network. The Autocad licensing server was on our domain and could be accessed without issues from the client desktop which was on the trusted domain, but AutoCAD wouldn't start. It just kept popping up this error

The network license manager was not able to get a valid license. If this problem continues, please contact your system administrator. Error [1.5.-18]

Turned out that, in the AutoCAD server license file, the server name provided was not accessible from the client desktop since it was not in a FQDN format. When the hosts file was modified to do the name mapping, it worked fine. I then created a host record in the trusted domain with the same name to point to the licensing server and it worked.

Anonymous users in proxy logs

2010-09-01T13:16:00.001+05:30

Ever since we installed a new Microsoft TMG server for proxy authentication and web filtering, we've seen random users being denied access for no good reason. The rules have been set to allow access to these users and it works for most of the other users.

The logs seem to show that the users, who are logged in as domain users still show up as anonymous accounts at the TMG server.

In one such instance, this step fixed it.
In IE-> tools-> Internet Options-> Advanced-> Security
Toggle the "Enable integrated windows authentication."

Kernel versions to RHEL versions mapping

2010-08-05T14:13:00.002+05:30

2.6.18-53.el5 (RHEL5.1)
2.6.18-92.el5 (RHEL5.2)
2.6.18-128.el5 (RHEL5.3)
2.6.18-164.el5 (RHEL5.4)
2.6.18-194.el5 (RHEL 5.5)

2.6.9-11.EL (RHEL4.1)
2.6.9-42.EL (RHEL4.4)
2.6.9-55.EL (RHEL4.5)
2.6.9-67.EL (RHEL4.6)
2.6.9-78-0.1.EL (RHEL4.7)
2.6.9-89.EL(RHEL4.8)

Update error on Websphere

2010-05-16T17:00:00.000+05:30

I was trying to update a WAS 6.0 server on linux with
6.0-WS-WAS-LinuxX32-RP0000002.pak

It completed successfully.

Then with the same IBM Update Installer for WebSphere package(6.0.2.0) I tried to apply the fix pack 6.0.2-WS-WAS-LinuxX32-FP00000013.pak to the server but it kept popping up the message

"Unable to find IBM WebSphere Application Server at a version that is greater than or equal to 6.0.0.0 and less than or equal to 6.0.2.0.".

The issue was that it had to be done with IBM Update Installer for WebSphere 6.0.2.7. So I moved the earlier updateinstaller directory to updateinstaller.old and then untarred the new version, moved the fixpack to the maintenance directory and ran updateInstaller and it worked.

Websphere uninstallation error

2010-05-10T15:58:00.000+05:30

Often when we remove the /opt/IBM folder manually to remove a Websphere installation (for reinstalling) this error pops up during the second attempt

Specify a different directory or perform a manual uninstall to remove all packages before reinstalling to the same directory

This happens because the WAS installation is stored in more locations than just the /opt folder. To clean up the system after you accidentally remove the /opt folder,(kill all java processes first)

1) rpm -qa |grep WS
and remove the rpms

2)remove the ~/.WASRegistry file.

3) remove vpd.properties.

Oracle Tablespace Check

2010-02-24T15:24:00.006+05:30

Here's a script that checks the tablespace utilization on a database, and sends a mail if it crosses a threshold

#!/bin/bash

# Tablespace check script 

# Author: Nabeel Moidu

# Website: nmkuttiady.blogspot.com

# Set threshold here

THRESHOLD=70

# Set the Oracle user here

ORACLE_USER=ora10g

# Set the mail id of the DBA

DBA="dba@organization.tld"



# Get output of tablespace usage on the database

su - $ORACLE_USER -c "sqlplus -s \"/ as sysdba\" < /backup/script/tablespace_usage.sql > /tmp/output.txt "

# Remove blank lines from file

cat /tmp/output.txt | grep -v ^$ | grep -v "no rows selected" > tablespaces.txt

# If no tablespace crosses threshold, the file will be empty. So send mail only if file not empty

if test -s "tablespaces.txt"



then



        # Prepare the mail

        echo "The following tablespaces have exceeded the 60 percent threshold" > mail.txt



        #Send the mail with the hostname in subject

        HOST=`hostname`

        SUBJECT="Daily Tablespace Check - "$HOST

        echo $SUBJECT

        mail -s "$SUBJECT" $DBA < mail.txt



fi

This is the SQL query to get the tablespace output

set pages 700

set linesize 1000

select t.tablespace_name,total_MB,round((total_MB-free_MB),2) used_MB, round(free_MB,2) free_MB,round(((total_MB-free_MB)/total_MB)*100,2) per_used,round((free_MB/total_MB)*100,2) per_free from (select tablespace_name,sum(bytes/1024/1024) free_MB from dba_free_space group by tablespace_name) f,(select tablespace_name,sum(bytes/1024/1024) total_MB from dba_data_files group by tablespace_name) t where f.tablespace_name(+)=t.tablespace_name order by 5;

VBScript for Telephone Extension verification by users

2010-01-26T16:47:00.016+05:30

This VBScript application identifies a logged on User, retrieves their login name, checks up their telephone number and asks them for a confirmation if its the correct number. If its wrong, it mails the corrected name and number to a particular user and also uploads it to a particular php script. I used this to migrate our users from Cisco Call Manager phone directory to an integrated Active Directory Address book.



Dim objADSysInfo,strUser,objUser,inputPhone,strEngInfo,strEngMsg,strAraInfo,strAraMsg,Result
Dim xmlhttp,httpURL,strDate,strMsg

' Function to display the retrieved information to a user and accept his modification
Function EnterExtension
'Collect AD information from system where the application is executed
Set objADSysInfo = CreateObject("ADSystemInfo")
'Retrieve username of the logged in user
strUser = objADSysInfo.UserName
'Lookup LDAP for other properties of the user
Set objUser = GetObject("LDAP://" & strUser)
'Display the retrieved information to the user
strEngInfo = "Your Name is " & objUser.CN & VbCrLf & VbCrLf & "Telephone Extension is " & objUser.ipPhone & "." & VbCrLf
strEngMsg = " If this is incorrect, enter your extension (only the last four digits Eg. 5159) and click OK. Otherwise click Cancel"
'Accept User's modified extension number
inputPhone=InputBox( strEngInfo & VbCrLf & strEngMsg & VbCrLf & VbCrLf )

End Function

'Function to Process the extension number entered by the user
Function ProcessExtension

'Upload the modified number and useraccount to a php application which can process it
httpURL = "http://servername.domain/TelExtension.php?UName=" + objUser.sAMAccountName + "&UExt=" + inputPhone
Set xmlhttp = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
xmlhttp.Open "GET", httpURL, false
xmlhttp.Send
strDate = formatDateTime(Now(), vbLongDate)
strMsg = "Your request will be processed by end of " & strDate
MsgBox strMsg,64,"Information Systems Department"

End Function

'Function to trigger an email
Function SendMail

'Launch Outlook
 Set MyApp = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
 Set MyItem = MyApp.CreateItem(0) 'olMailItem
 With MyItem
 .To = "admin@domain.tld"
' Properly set subject so as to filter out mail at the mail client
 .Subject = "Request for Extension change :" + objUser.sAMAccountName + "," + inputPhone
 .ReadReceiptRequested = False
' Compose body of the Email
 .HTMLBody = objUser.sAMAccountName + " was previously " + objUser.ipPhone + " and needs to be modified to " + inputPhone
' Send the mail
 .Send
 End With


End Function

'Function to Check the validity of extension entered
Function CheckExtension

If IsEmpty(inputPhone) Then
MsgBox strEngInfo & VbCrLf & "Thank You for your cooperation",64,"Information Systems Department"
'This is expected if the user clicks Cancel, i.e. his extension in our records is correct. So Set Flag to 1
Result=1
 If (inputPhone > 4000 And inputPhone < 4199) OR (inputPhone > 5000 And inputPhone < 5999) Then
   ProcessExtension()
   Result=1
  Else
   strMsg = "Please enter your extension again. Enter only the last four digits.For Eg. 5678 " 
   MsgBox strMsg,48,"UPDA Information Systems Department"
   Result=0
  End If
   
 End If

End Function

' Main code Begins here

Result=0

'Run till the user enters a valid number or cancels 
 Do While Result=0
  EnterExtension()
  CheckExtension()
 Loop

Compare data in two CSV files

2010-01-14T16:21:00.002+05:30

[root@nabeelmoidu html]# cat compare.php

 
 
// Input of the format
// field1 in file1 (eg, 2446)
// field2,field1 in file2  (Nabeel, 2446)
 
$filename='file1.csv';
$handle = fopen("$filename", "r");
$ctr=0;
 
while (($read = fgetcsv($handle, 1000, ",")) !== FALSE){
    $num[$ctr]= (int)$read[0];
//    echo $num[$ctr]."
";
        $ctr = $ctr + 1;
}
 
$filename1='file2.csv';
$handle1 = fopen("$filename1", "r");
$ctr1=0;
     while (($rawname = fgetcsv($handle1, 1000, ",")) !== FALSE)
{    $ext[$ctr1]= (int)$rawname[0];
    $name[$ctr1]= $rawname[1];
//    echo $ext[$ctr1]."
";
       $ctr1 = $ctr1 + 1;
}
 
for ($n=0; $n <= $ctr1; $n++) { $match[$n]=1; }
 
for ($x=0; $x <= $ctr; $x++)
    {
    for ($y=0; $y <= $ctr1; $y++) {
            if ($num[$x]==$ext[$y]){$match[$y]=0;}
        else {};
    }
    }
 
for ($y=0; $y <= $ctr1; $y++) {
                if ($match[$y])
                        { echo $name[$y]." |  ".$ext[$y]."
";}
                else {};
    }
 
fclose($handle);
fclose($handle1);
?>

PHP scripts for LDAP modifications

2010-01-14T11:16:00.005+05:30

[root@nabeelmoidu html]# cat ldap-search.php

 
// Open file handles for input and output file
$ip_handle = fopen('input.csv', 'r');
$op_handle = fopen('output.ldif','w');
 
$server="xx.xx.xx.xx";//Enter DC ip here
$basedn="DC=domain,DC=tld";
 
//User to bind to the active directory to search for the users, can be any ordinary user
$bindname="CN=binder,OU=Users,DC=domain,DC=tld";
 
// Read from csv, with the comma , as the delimiter
     while (($rawname = fgetcsv($ip_handle, 1000, ",")) !== FALSE)
     {
    $searchname=$rawname[1];  // First column is the useraccount
    $extension=$rawname[2];   // Second column is the extension number
 
 
    $filter="sAMAccountName=".$searchname; // search filter set as per the first column
 
        // Attempt to connect to the LDAP server
    if (!($connect = ldap_connect($server))) { die ("Could not connect to LDAP server"); }
         ldap_set_option($connect, LDAP_OPT_PROTOCOL_VERSION, 3);ldap_set_option($connect, LDAP_OPT_REFERRALS, 0);
 
        // Test if the user can be bound to the LDAP
        if (!($bind = ldap_bind($connect, $bindname, "passwd"))) { die ("Could not bind to $bindname"); }
 
        // Search for the user
        $result = ldap_search($connect, $basedn,$filter);
 
 
    if ($result) {
            $info = ldap_get_entries($connect, $result);
            for ($i=0; $i<$info["count"]; $i++)
            {
                        // Retrieve user information from the result
            $userdn = $info[$i]["dn"];
                $usersamname = $info[$i]["samaccountname"][0];
                $usertelno = $info[$i]["telephonenumber"][0];
                $useript = $info[$i]["ipphone"][0];
 
                // Echo output to screen and to file. If phone number exists, set changetype to modify, else to add
        if ($usertelno) {
            echo "
dn: ".$userdn."
changetype: modify
replace: telephonenumber
telephonenumber: ".$extension."
-
";
            fwrite($op_handle, "\ndn: ".$userdn."\nchangetype: modify\nreplace: telephonenumber\ntelephonenumber: ".$extension."\n-\n");
        }
            else {
            echo "
dn: ".$userdn."
changetype: modify
add: telephonenumber
telephonenumber: ".$extension."
-
";
            fwrite($op_handle, "\ndn: ".$userdn."\nchangetype: modify\nadd: telephonenumber\ntelephonenumber: ".$extension."\n-\n");
        }
 
        if ($useript) {
            echo "replace: ipPhone
ipPhone: ".$extension ;
            fwrite($op_handle, "replace: ipPhone\nipPhone: ".$extension."\n" );
            }
        else {
            fwrite($op_handle, "add: ipPhone\nipPhone: ".$extension."\n" );
            echo "add: ipPhone
ipPhone: ".$extension ;
            }
        }
        echo "
";
    }
    else {}
    ldap_unbind($connect);
}
fclose($op_handle);
fclose($ip_handle);
 
// Output will be
 
//dn: CN=Name1,OU=Department,OU=Users,DC=domain,DC=tld
//changetype: modify
//replace: telephonenumber
//telephonenumber: 5266222
//-
//replace: ipPhone
//ipPhone: 5266222
?>

The output file created by this script is then passed to ldapmodify to do the modifications
[root@nabeelmoidu html]# ldapmodify -a -v -h dc.domain.tld -D "CN=Administrator,CN=Users,DC=domain,DC=tld" -W -f /var/www/html/output.ldif

A system recovery report

2010-01-03T12:31:00.005+05:30

A linux server was unable to boot up after someone powered it off during an unresponsive state. The boot process was getting stuck at this error :

REDHAT nash version 5.1.19.6 Starting
Reading all volumes, This make take a while....
Found volume "volgroup01" using metadata type lvm2
VFS: can't find ext3 file system on dev dm-0
Mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3: invalid argument
Setuproot: moving /DEV failed: no such file or directory
Setuproot: error mounting /proc: no such file or directory
Setuproot: error mounting /sys: no such file or directory
Switchroot: mount failed: no such file or directory
Kernel panic - not syncing attempted to kill init !

So I went into rescue mode by inserting the RHEL original DVD and entering
linux rescue

2) The system booted up on the DVD in rescue mode but failed to discover any existing installations.

3) I then manually scanned and activated logical volumes, but mounting the partitions on the logical volume with the /root partition failed. The other partition on the Logical Volume 2 was cleanly mountable without any errors.

lvm pvscan
lvm vgscan
lvm vgchange -ay
lvm lvscan

mount /dev/mapper/Vol--storage-Vol00

4) This pointed to an instance of corruption of partition information on the root partition of the system, thus rendering it unbootable.

Corrective Actions
1) As no existing backup was available during the time of this recovery, and since the data on the disk was in a totally inaccessible state, the only way ahead was to proceed with data recovery procedures.
2) The partition table on the disk, since it was an ext3 journaling filesystem, was scanned for backup filesystem superblocks.

dumpe2fs /dev/mapper/Vol--storage-Vol00 | grep superblock

3) The listed backup superblocks were then passed on to the mount utility one by one till a noncorrupted superblock was found.

e2fsck -f -b 32768 /dev/mapper/Vol--storage-Vol00

4) The system was then mounted with this superblock and the partition data was corrected. The journaling was automatically converted to ext2 at this point to avoid conflicting superblocks.
5) The system was rebooted at this point but failed when it attempted to read any actual data necessary for booting up on the /root partition .
6) The system was again rebooted with the installation DVD into rescue mode and the partition was then scanned for filesystem errors. All diagnosed errors on the filesystem were fixed.
7) The filesystem scan resulted in the entire existing filesystem to be moved to the 'lost+found' location as the top level file structure was lost though ALL data within it was intact.
8) The data within the partition as available at this stage was then copied to the other empty partition on Logical Volume 2 as a backup before proceeding further.
9) The top level directories had been renamed by the scan utility to '#294942343' like numerical names. Based on the files contained in each of these folders, the actual names of the folders were identified correctly (as later verified) and moved correspondingly.
10) The entire top level file structure was thus recreated and verified with the fstab entries in the system. The permissions of all files were preserved intact throughout the procedures by using the corresponding options provided by the rsync utility.
11) The partition was then re-journaled to return to an ext3 state.

cd /lost+found
tune2fs -j /dev/mapper/Vol--storage-Vol00

12) The system then booted fine into a normal mode and all services configured at boot time started without errors.

Subversion setup in AD environment

2009-09-02T16:16:00.004+05:30

Setting up Subversion in an Windows 2003 Active Directory environment

 
 Install the following packages :

subversion-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1
mod_dav_svn-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1

 Create the repository

mkdir /var/www/svn
chown -R apache.apache /var/www/svn
cd /var/www/svn
svnadmin create SVN-REPO
 
  Create a file structure for project initializations

[root@isportal svn]# mkdir /opt/svn
[root@isportal svn]# cd /opt/svn
[root@isportal svn]# mkdir {branches,tags,trunks}

   
      Import directory structure to the new project

[root@isportal svn]# svn import /opt/svn/ file:///var/www/svn/SVN-REPO/Project1 -m "Initial import for first project"
Adding         /opt/svn/branches
Adding         /opt/svn/trunks
Adding         /opt/svn/tags
 
Committed revision 15.

   
      Now the project can be viewed via an SVN client or firefox using http://servername/SVN-REPO/Project1 provided you have the access rights. Access permissions are provided in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/subversion.conf file as follows :


   DAV svn
   SVNPath /var/www/svn/SVN-REPO
        AuthzSVNAccessFile /var/www/svn/accessfile
        AuthType Kerberos
        AuthName "Kerberos Login"
        KrbAuthRealm DOMAIN.TLD
        KrbVerifyKDC off
        Require valid-user
 


 
      Setup /etc/krb5.conf for kerberos authentication and define the svn access file as below:

[groups]
IT = user@DOMAIN.TLD, user2@DOMAIN.TLD
QCSWrite = developer@DOMAIN.TLD

[SVN-REPO:/Project1]
@IT = r
@QCSWrite = rw
* =

Here the IT group defined in the first section has read access to all repos, the nameWrite groups have read and write access, all others have no access.

To create any new project, just import the directory structure as shown earlier with the new project name, and added a section in the above accessfile as per the requirements of the application team.

Windows restore and Share permissions

2009-08-24T11:01:00.003+05:30

I'd to recently do a tape restore of the D drive on one of our machines and the restore worked fine. But the shares were not enabled immediately. After a bit of reading, I figured out this nice thing that Windows stores the shares and security permissions here in the registry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares

All you need to do is restart the server service.
If you are in any case gonna reinstall the server, etc, you can backup this registry (done automatically if u do a system state backup) to a .reg fiel and restore once you're reinstalled the server.

Installing ArcSDE 9.3 64-bit on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

2009-07-12T13:10:00.005+05:30

* Install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 with the following package groups:


          * from Development group
          + Development Tools package group
          + Legacy Software Development package group
          * from Base System group
          + Legacy Software Support package group with compat-openldap from Optional Packages
          + X Window System package group

* Ensure 32-bit i386 versions of these softwares are installed:


          o compat-libf2c-34
          o compat-libstdc++-33
          o compat-libstdc++-296
          o libXp
          o mesa-libGL
          o mesa-libGLU
          o openldap
          o openssl


[root@srvsde cdrom]#  rpm -qa  --queryformat %-{name}-%{version}-%{release}-%{arch}"\n" | grep ^compat | grep i386$ | sort
compat-libf2c-34-3.4.6-4-i386
compat-libstdc++-296-2.96-138-i386
compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-61-i386
compat-openldap-2.3.43_2.2.29-3.el5-i386
[root@srvsde cdrom]#  rpm -qa  --queryformat %-{name}-%{version}-%{release}-%{arch}"\n" | grep ^mesa | grep i386$ | sort
mesa-libGL-6.5.1-7.7.el5-i386
mesa-libGLU-6.5.1-7.7.el5-i386
[root@srvsde cdrom]#  rpm -qa  --queryformat %-{name}-%{version}-%{release}-%{arch}"\n" | grep ^libXp | grep i386$ | sort
libXp-1.0.0-8.1.el5-i386
[root@srvsde cdrom]#  rpm -qa  --queryformat %-{name}-%{version}-%{release}-%{arch}"\n" | grep ^open | grep 86$ | sort
openldap-2.3.43-3.el5-i386
openssl-0.9.8e-7.el5-i686


   * Mount the installation cdrom into /mnt/cdrom

[root@srvsde sde]# mount 172.31.32.120:/media/ESRI /mnt/cdrom/
[root@srvsde sde]# ls /mnt/cdrom/
Autorun.inf  ESRI.bmp  ESRI.exe  ESRI.ini  GDBDirectConnect  GDBDirectConnect_unix  hp  hpia  ibm  linux  Media  PDFs  quickstart.pdf  quickstart_unix.pdf  Readme.txt  sdk  solaris  windows  Xtras

   * Create the sde user
[root@srvsde ~]# useradd sde
[root@srvsde ~]# passwd sde
[root@srvsde ~]# useradd -G oinstall sde
  
   * Switch to sde user

[root@srvsde cdrom]# su - sde
[sde@srvsde ~]$ ls ESRI-linux/
db2  documentation_server  install_db2.htm  install_oracle.htm  install_postgresql.htm  oracle10g  oracle11g  oracle9i  pg
[sde@srvsde ESRI-linux]$ ls ESRI-linux/oracle10g/
01.toc  02.tar  b5.nls  en.nls  install  ja.nls  jp.nls  ko.nls  th.nls  tw.nls  zh.nls

   * Start the installation :
[sde@srvsde oracle10g]$ ./install -load
ESRI is willing to license the software to you only if you accept and agree to the enclosed license agreement. 
If you have read and agree with the terms in the enclosed license agreement type 'yes' to continue the installation process, if not press  or type 'no' to exit installation process. [no] yes


Press  to take the default, '?' for help, '^' to return to 
the previous question, or 'q' to quit.

Enter CD-ROM mount point: [/cdrom] /mnt/cdrom

Select which product to load by entering the product number.

   1 - /mnt/cdrom/hp/db2_64
   2 - /mnt/cdrom/hp/informix
   3 - /mnt/cdrom/hp/oracle10g_64
   4 - /mnt/cdrom/hp/oracle9i_64
   5 - /mnt/cdrom/hpia/oracle10g_64
   6 - /mnt/cdrom/ibm/db2_64
   7 - /mnt/cdrom/ibm/informix
   8 - /mnt/cdrom/ibm/oracle10g_64
   9 - /mnt/cdrom/ibm/oracle11g_64
  10 - /mnt/cdrom/ibm/oracle9i_64
  11 - /mnt/cdrom/linux/db2
  12 - /mnt/cdrom/linux/oracle10g
  13 - /mnt/cdrom/linux/oracle11g
  14 - /mnt/cdrom/linux/oracle9i
  15 - /mnt/cdrom/linux/pg/arcsde
  16 - /mnt/cdrom/solaris/db2_64
  17 - /mnt/cdrom/solaris/informix
  18 - /mnt/cdrom/solaris/oracle10g_64
  19 - /mnt/cdrom/solaris/oracle11g_64
  20 - /mnt/cdrom/solaris/oracle9i_64

Enter product number to load: [1] 12

Enter pathname to install directory: [/home/sde/ESRI-linux/oracle10g] 
The pathname to the install directory must not contain any upper-case letters

Enter pathname to install directory: [/home/sde/ESRI-linux/oracle10g] /home/sde/sdeexe9.3

Directory does not exist: /home/sde/sdeexe9.3
Would you like to create it? [yes] 

ArcSDE version 9.3 for Oracle10g - May 14, 2008  
-------------------------------------------------

ArcSDE Product
Package numbers to load: [all] 


Package selection complete
--------------------------

You have chosen the following packages to be loaded

ArcSDE Product
 ArcSDE Server                                         

Is this correct? [yes] 

Total size of chosen packages in megabytes: 169.7
Available space in megabytes: 4460.0

List file names while loading? [no] yes

Loading package(s), Please wait...

Help/
Help/accom_users.htm
Help/accounts.png
Help/add_new_svc.htm
Help/add_server.png
Help/add_soc.htm
Help/add_soc_1.png
Help/add_usrs_agsadmin.htm
Help/add_usrs_agsusers.htm
Help/agol_coordsys_extent.png

------------SNIP--------------

sdeexe93/lib/libpe.so
sdeexe93/lib/libsg.so
sdeexe93/lib/libsde.so
sdeexe93/lib/libsdeora10gsrvr93.so
sdeexe93/lib/libgsrvrora10g93.so
sdeexe93/lib/libsdesetup.so
sdeexe93/lib/liblocssa.so
sdeexe93/lib/libst_shapelib.so

Finished loading package(s)

Exiting...



   * Uncomment
      esri_sde      5151/tcp     # ArcSDE service on pinetree
in $SDEHOME/etc/services.sde


   * Copy the createsdeoracle.sql script to oracle home.
[root@srvsde ~]# cp /home/sde/sdeexe9.3/sdeexe93/tools/oracle/createsdeoracle.sql /home/ora10g/

   * Switch to Oracle user
[root@srvsde ~]# su - ora10g

   * Modify the createsdeoracle.sql file to replace the LOCATION variable in the line
datafile '/LOCATION/sde.dbf' size 400M
to
datafile '/u03/oradata/SRVSDE/sde.dbf' size 400M

   * Execute the script

[ora10g@srvsde ~]$ sqlplus "/ as sysdba" @createsdeoracle.sql

SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.4.0 - Production on Thu Jul 2 09:47:13 2009

Copyright (c) 1982, 2007, Oracle.  All Rights Reserved.


Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.4.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options

* CREATESDEORACLE.SQL script         *
*            *
* Purpose:           *
*            *
* To create the SDE tablespace, the SDE Oracle user    *
* and grant privileges to the SDE user       *
*            *
* NOTES: 1. Before running this script        *
*     Replace the word LOCATION with the pathname for  *
*     the sde.dbf datafile to be created.       *
*            *
*  2. If upgrading remove rem from the grants in the   *
*     upgrade section         *
*            *
*  3. Please use the sys user to run this script.      *
*     You will also need to the system password      *
*            *
*    Example:           *
* % sqlplus "sys as sydba" @createsdeoracle.sql      *
*            *
*            *
**************************************************************
* Granting of permissions by the SYS user in Oracle, on two packages
* to the public role.

Grant succeeded.


Grant succeeded.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* ArcSDE NEW INSTALLATION   *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* Connect as system/ to create the sde
* tablespace and user.
Enter password: 
Connected.
* Create the sde tablespace.
* Before you run this script update LOCATION for the desired datafile pathname.

Tablespace created.

* Create the sde user
* The password for the sde user is set to "XXX". You may
* change this if you wish.

User created.

* Granting the required privileges to the sde user.

Grant succeeded.


Grant succeeded.


Grant succeeded.


Grant succeeded.


Grant succeeded.


Grant succeeded.


Grant succeeded.


Grant succeeded.


Grant succeeded.


Grant succeeded.


Grant succeeded.


Grant succeeded.


Grant succeeded.

* SELECT ANY TABLE is required for compressing the database
* This privilege needs to be granted whenever a compress is run.

Grant succeeded.

* ADMINISTER DATABASE TRIGGER can be revoked after install

Grant succeeded.

* * * * * * * * * * *
* ArcSDE UPGRADE    *
* * * * * * * * * * *
* If upgrading please remove rem from each grant.
* Granting the required privileges to the sde user.
* After upgrading you may revoke the following privileges
* Please remove rem from each grant.
* Revoking the upgrade privileges to the sde user.
Disconnected from Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.4.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options
[ora10g@srvsde ~]$ sqlplus "/ as sysdba"

SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.4.0 - Production on Thu Jul 2 09:48:20 2009

Copyright (c) 1982, 2007, Oracle.  All Rights Reserved.


Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.4.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options

SQL> 
SQL> 
SQL> 
SQL> 
SQL> GRANT EXECUTE ON dbms_pipe TO public;

GRANT EXECUTE ON dbms_lock TO public;
Grant succeeded.

SQL> SQL> 

Grant succeeded.

SQL> exit
Disconnected from Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.4.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options


    * Configure the .bash_profile in /home/sde


[root@srvsde lib]# cat /home/sde/.bash_profile
# .bash_profile

# Get the aliases and functions
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
 . ~/.bashrc
fi

# User specific environment and startup programs

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin
SDEHOME=/home/sde/sdeexe9.3/sdeexe93/
export SDEHOME
ORACLE_HOME=/oracle/product/10.2.0
export ORACLE_HOME
TNS_ADMIN=$ORACLE_HOME/network/admin
export TNS_ADMIN
ORACLE_SID=QNMPSDE
export ORACLE_SID
PATH=$PATH:$SDEHOME/bin:$ORACLE_HOME/bin
export PATH
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$SDEHOME/lib:/usr/lib:/lib:$ORACLE_HOME/lib:$ORACLE_HOME/lib32
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
unset USERNAME

export PATH


    * Execute the sdesetup script
[sde@srvsde bin]$ ./sdesetup  -o install -d ORACLE10G -H /home/sde/sdeexe9.3/sdeexe93/ -u sde -p XXX -D qnmpsde -i esri_sde -l /home/sde/ECP666666666_v93.ecp 

ESRI ArcSDE Server Setup Utility Thu Jul  2 10:43:51 2009
----------------------------------------------------------------
Install or update ArcSDE, GDB schema objects: 
  Are you sure? (Y/N): y
Creating ArcSde schema.....
Successfully created ArcSde schema.

Installing locators.....
Successfully installed locators.

Creating geodatabase schema.....
Successfully created GDB schema.


Registering authorization key.....
Successfully registered authorization key.

Successfully installed ArcSDE components. 
Refer SDEHOME\etc\sde_setup.log for more details.


    * Start the sde service
[sde@srvsde bin]$ sdemon -o start
Please enter ArcSDE DBA password: 


-------------------------------------------------------
ArcSDE 9.3  for Oracle10g Build 508 Thu Apr 17 12:23:18  2008
-------------------------------------------------------


ST_Geometry Schema Owner: (SDE) Type Release: 1007

Instance initialized for ((sde)) . . .


Connected to instance . . .

DBMS Connection established...

RDBMS:     "Oracle"
Instance Name:    "esri_sde"

IOMGR Process ID (PID):           13547 


ArcSDE Instance esri_sde started Thu Jul  2 11:05:33 2009



Schedule cron jobs to send sms on mobile
2009-07-12T11:55:00.004+05:30
I've got a weekly shutdown for our Websphere servers for a Database backup. To keep an eye on the logs as the shutdown procedures happen, I've got this cron entry 



# Shut down Websphere Portal for Oracle backup every Thursday 12:05 midnight and start next morning 4:15 AM
05 00 * * 5    /etc/init.d/websphere_portal stop 2>&1 > /root/portal-stop.log; echo $HOSTNAME >> /root/portal-stop.log; tail -n 6 /root/portal-stop.log | mailx 'nabeel@smsserver.domain.tld'
15 04 * * 5    /etc/init.d/websphere_portal start 2>&1 > /root/portal-start.log; echo $HOSTNAME >> /root/portal-start.log; tail -n 6 /root/portal-start.log | mailx 'nabeel@smsserver.domain.tld'

So I get the last 6 lines in my mobile inbox as SMS


Init script for Websphere Portal/DB2 on linux
2009-07-12T11:39:00.008+05:30
Copy the following script to /etc/init.d/webpshere_portal or some name. 



#!/bin/bash
# Websphere_portal  # Startup script for IBM WebSphere Portal Server
#
# chkconfig: - 99 15
# description: Websphere Portal server startup
# processname: websphere_portal
# pidfile: /var/run/websphere_portal.pid
# author: Nabeel Moidu nabeelmoidu.at.gmail dot com
# Source function library.
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

portal=/opt/IBM/PE/AppServer/profiles/wp_profile/bin
args=WebSphere_Portal
prog="WebSphere Portal Server"
proc=/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/java/bin/java
RETVAL=0
username=portaluser
password=password


# verify installation
if [ ! -x $portal ]; then
echo "$prog is not installed"
exit 0
fi

# source function library
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions


case "$1" in
start)

 # Websphere should come up only if DB2 is up.
 for (( ; ; ))
 do

 # Check status of DB2
 su - wpdb2ins -c 'db2gcf -s' | grep Available;
 PRC_EXT_STAT=$?;

 # If DB2 is available, then startup the portal

 if [ $PRC_EXT_STAT = "0" ]; then
  echo -n "Starting $prog: "
  
  # Set ulimit
  ulimit -n 1000000
  
  # setup environment variables
  . /home/wpdb2ins/sqllib/db2profile
  
  # Bring up the portal
  $portal/startServer.sh $args 
  RETVAL=$?
  if [ $RETVAL = 0 ]; then
   touch /var/lock/subsys/websphere_portal
   echo_success
  else
   echo_failure
  fi
  break;
 # If DB2 is not up, then start DB2
 else
  su - wpdb2ins -c 'db2start'
 fi
 done

 ;;
stop)
 echo -n "Shutting down $prog: "
 $portal/stopServer.sh $args  -username $username -password $password 
 RETVAL=$?
 if [ $RETVAL = 0 ]; then
  rm -f /var/lock/subsys/websphere_portal
  # Shut down DB2
  su - wpdb2ins -c 'db2stop';
  echo_success
 else
  echo_failure
 fi
 echo
 ;;
restart)
 $0 stop
 $0 start
 ;;
status)
 status $proc
 ;;
*)
 echo "Usage: websphered {start|stop|restart|status}"
 exit 1

esac

exit 0



Then execute the following commands



chmod +x /etc/init.d/websphere_portal
chkconfig --add /etc/init.d/websphere_portal
chkconfig --level 345 websphere_portal on



SVN error
2009-05-28T16:27:00.000+05:30
[root@up-subversion ~]# svn import NetBackup file:///test/ -m "test"
svn: The log message is a pathname (was -F intended?); use '--force-log' to override

Fix 
[root@up-subversion ~]# svn import NetBackup file:///test/ -m "test message"

The message name was the same as the repo name and hence the error


Lotus Forms Error
2009-05-28T13:57:00.002+05:30
One of the developers in our application team was deploying a forms app on a Websphere Portal and this error kept occuring

[com/PureEdge/xfdl/FormNodeP]: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/PureEdge/xfdl/FormNodeP 

It turned out the Websphere Portal did not have the Shared Library LFS_API_LIB configured. Once I added it and restarted the Portal , it worked.


Set language firefox google search
2009-05-20T16:28:00.001+05:30
It annoys me often when my google searches via the default firefox google extension directs me to an arabic page. Here's how you fix it on linux (thanks to Colin Verot http://www.verot.net/google_language.htm ).

Edit the file
/usr/lib64/firefox-x.x.x/searchplugins/google.xml
or
/usr/lib/firefox-x.x.x/searchplugins/google.xml

and add the line
 Param name="hl" value="en"

Restart Firefox.


LVM Volume group extension fails
2009-04-28T11:29:00.002+05:30
If it fails with a message about missing uuid, try


vgreduce --removemissing VolGroupName


This removes the mising volumes in the group and we can proceed with the volume group extension


Disabling security for Websphere Application Server
2009-04-21T18:59:00.004+05:30
Quite a few times I've got my WAS installations having their security settings corrupted thereby denying me login into the admin console.
Here's how you disable security in such cases (of course you need to have root access to shell )

vim /opt/IBM/PE/AppServer/profiles/profile_name/config/cells/instance_name/security.xml 

in the first line disable security

useLocalSecurityServer="false"
enabled="false"

Now login with any name, troubleshoot the login issues and switch it back.


ISA unable to access site
2009-04-09T17:05:00.002+05:30
One of my friends couldn't access the birlasunlife.com website on IE 8 when passed through a proxy.
It was working on firefox though. Looks like its a malformed url as mentioned here
http://blogs.technet.com/yuridiogenes/archive/2008/10/09/error-64-from-the-field-to-the-classroom.aspx
good article in there.


ISA 2006 and migration troubles
2009-01-25T15:36:00.003+05:30
Our ISA 2004 server got screwed up and from my previous experience I'd found that setting up a new one and importing the settings is easier than troubleshooting one. So while my colleague worked on troubleshooting the existing one, I put up a new server with ISA 2006 ( a FORCED upgrade ;) )
and tried importing the old settings to the new server. 

I'd exported the configuration of the ISA 2004 server to an xml file some time back so that came in handy today. But while importing, it prompted for a password. I don't remember ever providing a password for the exported xml. I tried my usual ones but it was all in vain. I tried deleting the password line in the xml file.It didn't work. Finally after going through some forums etc. I figured out that the best way was to export the config of the new ISA 2006 to a new file, open the new and old xml files in an xml editor and identify the Array and Enterprise sections. Copy over the two sections from the old config to the newly exported file. Save it and import the configurations from the new xml file. You should have all the settings and rules of the old server working.


MySQL backup script
2009-01-21T17:11:00.004+05:30


#!/bin/bash
# A simple shell script to backup all MySQL Server Database
# Each dump will be line as follows:
# Directory:  /var/lib/mysql/backup/mm-dd-yyyy
# File: mysql-DBNAME.04-25-2008.gz
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOW=$(date +"%m-%d-%Y") # mm-dd-yyyy format
FILE="db-full-$NOW.tar.gz"
BAK="/var/lib/mysql/backups/"
 
### Server Setup ###
#* MySQL login user name *#
MUSER="user"
 
#* MySQL login PASSWORD name *#
MPASS="pass"
 
#* MySQL binaries *#
MYSQL="$(which mysql)"
MYSQLDUMP="$(which mysqldump)"
GZIP="$(which gzip)"
 
# get all application related databases
DBS="$($MYSQL -u $MUSER -p$MPASS -Bse 'show databases' | grep -v information_schema)"

# create backups securely
umask 006 

# start to dump database one by one
for db in $DBS
do
 FILE=$BAK/mysql-$db.$NOW.gz
 # gzip compression for each backup file
 $MYSQLDUMP -u $MUSER -p$MPASS $db | $GZIP -9 > $FILE
done



Websphere startup script for linux
2009-01-21T17:01:00.004+05:30
Startup script for Websphere Application server on linux. Its got an added check for Oracle connectivity before the service is brought up.



#!/bin/bash
# Websphered  # Startup script for IBM WebSphere Application Server
#
# chkconfig: - 99 15
# description: IBM's J2EE application server
# processname: websphered
# pidfile: /var/run/websphered.pid

# Source function library.
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

websphered=/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/AppSrv01/bin
args=server1
prog="WebSphere Application Server"
proc=/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/java/bin/java
RETVAL=0
username=user
password=password


# verify installation
if [ ! -x $websphered ]; then
echo "$prog is not installed"
exit 0
fi

# source function library
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions


case "$1" in
start)

 # Continous loop to check Oracle connectivity. Websphere should come up only if Oracle is up.
 for (( ; ; ))
 do

 # Check for Oracle connectivity

 su - oracle -c '/opt/Oracle/product/10.2.0/client_1/bin/tnsping database_name ' | grep OK;
 PRC_EXT_STAT=$?;

 # If Oracle is pingable, then startup WAS and break out of loop

 if [ $PRC_EXT_STAT = "0" ]; then
  echo -n "Starting Websphere Application Server: "
  $websphered/startServer.sh $args 
  RETVAL=$?
  if [ $RETVAL = 0 ]; then
   touch /var/lock/subsys/websphered
   echo_success
  else
   echo_failure
  fi
 #Break out of loop
 break;
 echo
 fi
 # Wait 30 seconds before checking again 
 echo " Waiting for Oracle connectivity: "
 sleep 30

 done

 ;;
stop)
 echo -n "Shutting down websphered: "
 $websphered/stopServer.sh $args  -username $username -password $password 
 RETVAL=$?
 if [ $RETVAL = 0 ]; then
  rm -f /var/lock/subsys/websphered
  echo_success
 else
  echo_failure
 fi
 echo
 ;;
restart)
 $0 stop
 $0 start
 ;;
status)
 status $proc
 ;;
*)
 echo "Usage: websphered {start|stop|restart|status}"
 exit 1

esac

exit 0



Uptime on Windows
2008-11-19T14:37:00.001+05:30
If u need to know the uptime on windows,

use either systeminfo (doesn't work on win2k)
or 
net statistics server


Some useful shell tips
2008-11-11T12:28:00.002+05:30
When in vi use :split for split view of two files, use Ctrl+W to toggle

for rpm query of only names 
 rpm -qa --queryformat='%{NAME} \n' | sort -n
or using awk
 rpm -qa | awk -F"-[0-9]" '{ print $1}'

for grep with highlight of matched word, 
grep --color word file


PHP script to monitor servers.
2008-08-11T14:29:00.003+05:30

<title>Code</title>

<title>Server Status</title>

<center> <b><font style="" size="5" face="Times New Roman,Times,serif"> Servers - Status of critical services </font></b> </center>

<p><font style="" size="2" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">

 <b>Servers</b> ";
for( $j=0; $servicenames[$j]; $j++)
   { echo "<font color="blue"> <b> $servicenames[$j]</b></font> "; }


$serviceports_array = $ini_array['service_ports'];
$serviceports = explode (",",$serviceports_array);
sort($serviceports,SORT_NUMERIC);

for($i=0;$hostnames[$i];$i++)
{
   $hostname = $hostnames[$i];
   $port_array = $ini_array[$hostname];
   $ports = explode (",",$port_array);
       sort ($ports,SORT_NUMERIC);
  
   echo "    <font color="green"> <b> $hostname </b></font> ";
   for($m=0,$n=0;$serviceports[$m];$m++)
   {    if ($serviceports[$m] == $ports[$n])
       { disp_status($hostname,$ports[$n],'Y'); $n++;  
       } else {
        disp_status($hostname,$ports[$n],'N');}  
   }
}

function disp_status($_hostname, $_port, $_status){

   error_reporting(0);
//    header("Content-type: image/gif");
   if ($_status == 'Y')
   {
       $fp = fsockopen($_hostname, $_port);
       if (!$fp)
       { echo " <img src="http://www.blogger.com/%27offline.png%27">";}
        else
       { echo " <img src="http://www.blogger.com/%27online.png%27">";}
       fclose($fp);
   }
   else
       { echo " <img src="http://www.blogger.com/%27NA.png%27">";}
}

?>


</font>
</p><p> <b>KEY :     <img src="http://www.blogger.com/%27offline.png%27"> OFFLINE          <img src="http://www.blogger.com/%27online.png%27"> ONLINE        <img src="http://www.blogger.com/%27NA.png%27"> NOT MONITORED </b></p><b>



</b>




DBORA script for oracle startup in RHEL
2008-08-06T12:39:00.002+05:30


[root@myserver ~]# cat /etc/init.d/dbora 
#!/bin/bash
#
# chkconfig: 345  60 50
# description: Oracle auto start-stop script.

# Modify the variables $ORA_HOME, $ORA_OWNER and $LOG as appropriate for each server.
#          -  Nabeel Moidu

# Source function library.
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions
# Source networking configuration.
[ -r /etc/sysconfig/network ] && . /etc/sysconfig/network

# Modify the variables $ORA_HOME, $ORA_OWNER and $LOG as appropriate for each server.
#          -  Nabeel Moidu
ORA_HOME=/u01/oracle/product/10.2.0.1
ORA_OWNER=ora10g
LOG=$ORA_HOME/log/server/dbora/dbora.log


if [ ! -f $ORA_HOME/bin/dbstart -o ! -d $ORA_HOME ] 
then
   echo "Oracle startup: cannot start"
   exit
fi

case "$1" in
    start)
       echo "$0: starting up" >> $LOG
       # Start the Oracle databases:
       su - $ORA_OWNER -c "$ORA_HOME/bin/dbstart &" >> $LOG
       # Start Oracle listener
       date >> $LOG
       su - $ORA_OWNER -c "$ORA_HOME/bin/lsnrctl start" >> $LOG 2>&1
       touch /var/lock/subsys/dbora
       echo "Refer to $LOG for details"
        ;;
     stop)
        echo "$0: stopping down" >> $LOG
        date >> $LOG
        # Stop Oracle Net
        su - $ORA_OWNER -c "$ORA_HOME/bin/lsnrctl stop" >> $LOG 2>&1
        # Stop the Oracle databases:
        su - $ORA_OWNER -c "$ORA_HOME/bin/dbshut &" >> $LOG
        rm -f /var/lock/subsys/dbora
        ;;
    restart)
        $0 stop
        sleep 120
        $0 start
        ;;
    status)
        if [ -f /var/lock/subsys/dbora ]; then
            echo $0 started.
            su - $ORA_OWNER -c "$ORA_HOME/bin/lsnrctl status"  
        else
            echo $0 stopped.
            su - $ORA_OWNER -c "$ORA_HOME/bin/lsnrctl status"  
        fi
        ;;
    *)
        echo "usage: dbora {start|stop|restart|status}"
        exit 1
esac
exit 0




Bash script for renaming files en masse
2008-07-09T00:45:00.004+05:30

#! /bin/bash
x=0
for i in `ls $1/*.$2`
do
mv $i `printf "%03x.$2" $x`
x=$(($x+1))
done



Usage : (say call the script a.sh )
./a.sh /var/www/html/images jpeg
will sequentially rename all jpeg files in /var/www/html/images to 001.jpeg 002.jpeg etc.


Updating RHEL to a specific version
2008-06-25T17:24:00.003+05:30

     1) Download the isos for the specific version from https://rhn.redhat.com/rhn/software/downloads/SupportedISOs.do using the rhn login. 
   2) Mount the CDs/DVD and copy the rpm packages in the RPMS folder in it to a particular folder like say /var/spool/RPMS/. 
   3) Open the file /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources and comment the line 
    #up2date default
    Modify the line beginning ”# dir my-favorite-rpms ” 
    dir UPDATE-RPMS /var/spool/RPMS/
    Save the file and exit. 
   4) Run the following command  
   [root@rhel ~]# up2date --configure
0.  adminAddress       ['root@localhost', '']                                
1.  debug              No                                                    
==SNIPPED==                 
19. pkgSkipList        ['kernel*', '']                                       
20. pkgsToInstallNotUp ['kernel', 'kernel-modules', 'kernel-devel', '']      
==SNIPPED==
Enter number of item to edit : 
    Edit the pkgSkipList to include the kernel rpms for update. 
   5) Make sure the server is backed up in the current state ( A lot of softwares might not work after the update or might face reconfiguration etc, especially third party softwares ). Then run the command 
    [root@rhel ~]# up2date -u
    If all goes well the system will update to the version of the dvd we have put in the /var/spool/RPMS folder.  
   6) Reboot the server for the new kernel to be loaded. To verify the update, run 
    [root@rhel ~]# cat /etc/redhat-release
  



Remote boot upload image error HP RADIA Dell Optiplex 755
2008-06-03T19:12:00.003+05:30
One of my colleagues was trying to upload a boot image of an xp install on a dell optiplex 755 using the HP OpenView configuration management tool (formerly radia) and it was showing up an error
no BootDisk found (actually something like that)

It's backend was (of course ;) ) linux so I tried switching the terminal and did an lsmod and tail of the /log/rnl.log file. An empty fdisk -l output confirmed it was a case of driver not being loaded for the sata.
I changed the SATA Operation parameter in the BIOS to AHCI from ATA and it worked fine.

UPDATE:
This didn't solve the issue. It doesn't install using an image uploaded this way. HP later released a patch for this .


Veritas NBU Installation on HPUX
2008-03-31T13:36:00.002+05:30
I was getting stuck at this message while trying to install a Veritas Net Backup Agent on an HPUX box.
Can't call method "info" on an undefined value at VxIF/4.2.2.12/VxIF/Installer.pm line 231

Googling suggested that it was an issue with the hostname resolution. The hostname looked fine in /etc/hosts and /etc/rc.config.d/netconf but the script still gave errors. Finally I set the hostname using
uname -S hostname
and the thing worked :)




Oracle and network detection
2008-02-05T11:13:00.000+05:30
I recently had to do a rhel server setup for Oracle 10g. I'd configured static networking for the server but Oracle started complaining I had dhcp set for the NIC. I verified my network settings and tried again but it still kept complaining about the same. Finally I added an entry to the /etc/hosts file and Oracle was happy about it. I don't understand the logic in looking at the /etc/hosts file to determine whether the network configuration is static or dhcp. But anyhow "it works" :)


Oracle 10g installation on RHEL4 AS x86_64 bit HP Blade BL 480c
2008-01-27T12:56:00.001+05:30
Hardware:
HP ProLiant BL480c G1, Intel Xeon E5345 (x86_64) 2 * Quad Core 2.33GHz
Memory 8192 MB, Hard disk 440 GB - RAID 5 H/w array of 146.8 * 4 SAS disks

Software:
Operating System Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 AS Update 6 x86_64 bit
Kernel Version Linux 2.6.967.ELsmp #1 SMP x86_64 GNU/Linux
Database Oracle 10g Release 2 Database

Installation procedure:

Note: Many of the special notes and parameters are specific to this installation on this hardware only. While installing other servers on a different type of hardware or different versions of the OS or any software used, choose the values accordingly.

1. Login as Administrator into iLO homepage. Choose the Integrated Remote Console option.( You'll need a Windows machine with IE for this)

Note: The RHEL Installation DVD needs to be connected to the server via the
Virtual Media option and hence the other options in iLO via serial/web/java
based cannot be used for installation since they don't have this option.
The other option is use the DVD ROM in the blade chassis. I'm lazy to go all the way to the data center for this . So I prefer the virtual media stuff ;)

2. Boot from the RHEL 4 AS Update 6 x86_64bit DVD ROM

Note: The RHEL 4 versions prior to U 6 do not contain the drivers for the SAS
disks and will not detect a hard disk on the server. The driver though can be
separately downloaded from the HP site and loaded from a floppy during the
installation.

3. Choose “linux text” method of installation since the mouse doesn't work during the graphical installation on the HP BL480c blade servers. Proceed with default options till the partitioning stage is reached.

4. Select to manually partition disk with Disk Druid and build the following disk
configuration:
/boot 100 MB
/ 50 GB
Ignore the swap warning and proceed.
Note: The rest of the partitions can be created on lvm  ONLY  using the graphical system-config-lvm tool once the installation is completed. The swap can be configured on a logical volume so that in case of memory upgrades we can easily increase the swap space accordingly. Its recommended to place the /boot partition on a non-lvm partition.

5. Configure the IP Address and hostname , select the adapter to activate on boot.

6. Select “customize the packages for installation” and choose the following :
a) X Window System
b) Gnome Desktop Environment
c) Editors
d) Graphical Internet
e) Text based Internet
f) Server configuration tools
g) Web Server
h) Windows File Server
i) FTP Server
j) Development tools
k) X software development
l) Legacy software development
m) Administration tools
n) System Tools

Leave the default options unchanged for the remaining steps and proceed.

7. Reboot the server once the package installation is complete and login as root.

8. Create an LVM (8e) partition with the remaining space on the disk using fdisk.
Issue the partprobe command so that the kernel reloads the new partition table.

9. Create a Physical Volume on the new partition using
[root@server1 ~]# pvcreate /dev/cciss/c0d0p5
Physical volume "/dev/cciss/c0d0p5" successfully created

10. Launch the system-config-lvm tool and create individual Logical Volumes on the newly created Physical Volume Vol0 with the sizes and mount points as below ( Set the mount points to be mounted only after reboot as we need to rsync the existing /tmp and /var directories before we move them to the newly created LVs ):
/dev/mapper/Vol0-u01 20G /u01
/dev/mapper/Vol0-u02 15G /u02
/dev/mapper/Vol0-u03 20G /u03
/dev/mapper/Vol0-u04 20G /u04
/dev/mapper/Vol0-u05 40G /u05
/dev/mapper/Vol0-u06 20G /u06
/dev/mapper/Vol0-u07 25G /u07
/dev/mapper/Vol0-u08 20G /u08
/dev/mapper/Vol0-u10 20G /u10
/dev/mapper/Vol0-backup 79G /backup
/dev/mapper/Vol0-archive 40G /archive
/dev/mapper/Vol0-tmp 9.9G /tmp
/dev/mapper/Vol0-var 15G /var
/dev/mapper/Vol0-swap 16 GB

11. Exit the system-config-lvm tool.

12. Prepare the /dev/Vol0/swap partition for swap.
[root@server1 ~] mkswap /dev/Vol0/swap
[root@server1 ~] swapon /dev/Vol0/swap

13. Move the /var and /tmp directories to LVs so that in case they get filled up due to any unexpected reasons, the system and the root ( “/” ) partition is not affected and so that in case they need to be expanded later on, it can be done easily. Create two temporary folders in /tmp for mounting the LVs var and tmp
temporarily. rsync the existing var and tmp directories to the corresponding LVs.
[root@server1 ~]mkdir /tmp/{var,tmp}
[root@server1 ~]mount /dev/mapper/Vol0-tmp /tmp/tmp
[root@server1 ~]mount /dev/mapper/Vol0-var /tmp/var
[root@server1 ~]rsync -av /var /tmp/var
[root@server1 ~]rsync -av /tmp /tmp/tmp
[root@server1 ~]

14. Add entries to /etc/fstab for all the newly created LVs.
/dev/Vol0/swap swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/Vol0/u01 /u01 ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/Vol0/u02 /u02 ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/Vol0/u03 /u03 ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/Vol0/u04 /u04 ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/Vol0/u05 /u05 ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/Vol0/u06 /u06 ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/Vol0/u07 /u07 ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/Vol0/u08 /u08 ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/Vol0/u10 /u10 ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/Vol0/backup /backup ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/Vol0/archive /archive ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/Vol0/tmp /tmp ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/Vol0/var /var ext3 defaults 1 2

15. Reboot system and login as root. Ensure all the filesystems have been mounted.

16. Make sure the following packages do not exist so that there's no package conflict with the oracle prerequisites.
a) Ksh2004022912
b) Ipw2200firmware2.03
c) Ipw2100firmware1.31
Use the command #rpm –e  to remove the packages.

17. Make sure the following packages (or later versions if available) are available and install/upgrade if necessary. The packages can be installed/upgraded either by manually downloading the rpm packages from RHN with subscription account.
kernel-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL
libstdc++-3.4.6-3
kernel-smp-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL
make-3.80-5
compat-db-4.1.25-9
pdksh-5.2.14-30.3
control-center-2.8.0-12.rhel4.5
sysstat-5.0.5-1
xscreensaver-4.18-5.rhel4.11
gcc-3.4.6-3
compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-47.3
libaio-0.3.102-1
openmotif21-2.1.30-11.RHEL4.2
gcc-c++-3.4.6-3
compat-libstdc++-296-2.96-132.7.2
glibc-2.3.4-2.25
glibc-common-2.3.4-2.25
gcc-g77-3.4.6-3
gnome-libs-1.4.1.2.90-44.1
mkinitrd-4.2.1.8-1

18. Configure the VNC server for remote administration.
[root@server1 ~]# cat /etc/sysconfig/vncservers
VNCSERVERS="1:ora10g"
VNCSERVERARGS[1]="-geometry 1024x768"
[root@server1 ~]# cat ~ora10g/.vnc/xstartup
#!/bin/sh
unset SESSION_MANAGER
exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

19. Download and install the latest HP Proliant Service Pack from the HP website
for x86_64 bit RHEL 4 AS to remotely administer the system and monitor the
server health. Untar the tarball and extract it to a folder. cd into the directory and
execute the following command:
[root@server1#]chmod u+x install791.sh ;
[root@server1#]./install791.sh

21. Reboot the server and get ready for the Oracle Database installation.


Oracle Database 10g Release 2 installation.

1. Check the prerequisite RPMs (Get the latest list from the oracle website)

2. Create the Oracle Groups
#/usr/sbin/groupadd oinstall
#/usr/sbin/groupadd dba

3. Create the oracle user
#/usr/sbin/useradd --home /u01/oracle/product/10.2.0.1 -g oinstall -G dba ora10g
Note: g for primary group and –G for other group

4. Change the password of the oracle user
#passwd oracle

5. Create oracle directories for binaries and data files
Creation of the ORACLE_HOME
#mkdir -p /u01/oracle/product/10.2.0.1
#chown -R ora10g:oinstall /u01/oracle/product/10.2.0.1
Creation of directories for oracle files
#mkdir -p /u01/oradata/prod
#chown -R ora10g:oinstall /u01/oradata/prod
Change ownership of /backup directory to the ora10g user.
#chown -R ora10g:oinstall /backup

6. Change the kernel parameters by appending the following to /etc/sysctl.conf:
#vi /etc/sysctl.conf
# For Oracle
kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 4294967296 # Set this to half of physical RAM
kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
fs.file-max = 192000
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000
net.core.rmem_default = 262144
net.core.rmem_max = 262144
net.core.wmem_default = 262144
net.core.wmem_max = 262144

Enter the following command to change the current values of the kernel
parameters (Reboot the machine if the command fails)
#/sbin/sysctl -p

7. Set the shell limits for the oracle user
Add the following lines in the /etc/security/limits.conf file
Ora10g soft nproc 2047
Ora10g hard nproc 16384
Ora10g soft nofile 1024
Ora10g hard nofile 65536
Add the following line to the /etc/pam.d/login file, if it does not exist
Session required /lib/security/pam_limits.so

8. Create the .bash_profile
#su - ora10g
$vi .bash_profile
ORACLE_BASE=/u01/oracle
Export ORACLE_BASE
ORACLE_HOME=/u01/oracle/product/10.2.0.1
Export ORACLE_HOME
ORACLE_SID-prod
Export ORACLE_SID
PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin
Export PATH
Umask 022

9. Copy the oracle database installation file 10201_database_linux_x86_64.cpio
to /tmp and extract it
#cpio -idmv <10201_database_linux_x86_64.cpio

10. Start the installation by running runinstaller and proceed with the installation.

11. After completing the installation apply the oracle patch version 10.2.0.3 (latest).




If you uninstall the rpm package itself!!!!!!!!!!!!
2008-01-22T12:16:00.000+05:30
Installing rpm's rpm without... rpm!
A friend of mine recently uninstalled the rpm package on his system and panicked. Now thats sure a tough situation. rpm is the lifeline of red hat based distros. Here's what to do in case it happens to you 

Download the rpm-4.x.x.i386.rpm package (the version depends upon the version of your distro )
Download this script and make it executable (chmod 775 rpm2cpio.sh)
http://www.rpm.org/tools/scripts/rpm2cpio.sh

Copy the script and the rpm-4.x.x.i386.rpm package in the / directory.
From the / directory, run the following command as root:

./rpm2cpio.sh rpm-4.x.x.i386.rpm | cpio -ivd

This will extract the files from the rpm-4.x.x.i386.rpm package and place them in the right directories, as if you installed it with the rpm command, but without updating the rpm database nor executing any postinstall script.

The pre- and post-install script are described in the attached file, that can be extracted from the rpm-4.x.x.i386.rpm package. You have to run them manually in a console window.

At the end, as extra security option, you could run

rpm -ivh --force rpm-x.x.i386.rpm

This should install rpm over itself, updating the rpm database and executing the pre- and post-install scripts as usual.


Apache on Kerberos from Win 2k3 AD
2007-11-20T12:15:00.000+05:30
So after a one year stint at Red Hat, I'm back to Doha. I've joined a govt. body that surprisingly has a Linux based infrastructure backend ( Surprising coz in this part of the world Linux deployment is still in its infancy). But the front end is still Windows mostly and so I'm back to a mixed environment. My first project was to test out an apache server to authenticate from the existing win 2k3 AD. After a few struggles I got it working. Here's the step by step

1) On the windows DNS server, add an entry for the linux server where the apache is running.

2) Install Support tools for Windows 2003 server. We'll need the ktpass tool for the next step.

3)  C:\Program Files\Support Tools>ktpass -princ HTTP/testapache.foo.bar@foo.bar -mapuser apache1 -pass apachepassword -out c:\temp\testapache.keytab

4) Copy this file over to the linux machine and drop it in /etc/krb5.keytab

5) Configure the /etc/krb5.conf on linux as follows ( FOO.BAR is the FQDN of the Windows domain, DC.FOO.BAR is the domain controller ):

[root@testapache html]# cat /etc/krb5.conf
[logging]
default = FILE:/var/log/krb5libs.log
kdc = FILE:/var/log/krb5kdc.log
admin_server = FILE:/var/log/kadmind.log

[libdefaults]
default_realm = FOO.BAR
dns_lookup_realm = false
dns_lookup_kdc = false

[realms]
FOO.BAR = {
kdc = DC.FOO.BAR:88
admin_server = DC.FOO.BAR:749
default_domain = FOO.BAR
}

[domain_realm]
.foo.bar = FOO.BAR
foo.bar = FOO.BAR

[kdc]
profile = /var/kerberos/krb5kdc/kdc.conf

[appdefaults]
pam = {
 debug = false
 ticket_lifetime = 36000
 renew_lifetime = 36000
 forwardable = true
 krb4_convert = false
}

6) Add the kerberos authentication module entry in apache. Then add the following ( Remember the caps for the Realm name is important) in httpd.conf within the "Directory" section. The tags seem to be getting overridden when publishing this blog:

 

  Options FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride None

AuthType Kerberos
AuthName "Kerberos Login"
KrbAuthRealm FOO.BAR
Krb5KeyTab /etc/krb5.keytab
KrbVerifyKDC off
Require user apache1@FOO.BAR
#require valid-user



That should be it. restart apache and test kerberos using kinit and then the website via logging to the website.


perl script for ftp backup
2007-10-18T15:39:00.001+05:30


root@srvsun01 # cat /usr/scripts/backup.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Net::FTP;
#my $ftp = Net::FTP->new("172.16.39.7");
#$ftp->login("backupadmin@foo.bar.edu","foobar");
my $host="172.16.39.7";
my $directory="pub";
($a,$d,$d,$day,$month,$yearoffset,$r,$u,$o) = localtime();
$year = 1900 + $yearoffset;
$backupdate= "$day-$month-$year";
print $backupdate;
$ftp=Net::FTP->new($host,Timeout=>240) or $newerr=1;
  push @ERRORS, "Can't ftp to $host: $!\n" if $newerr;
  myerr() if $newerr;
print "Connected\n";

$ftp->login("backupadmin@foo.bar.edu","foobar") or $newerr=1;
print "Getting file list";
  push @ERRORS, "Can't login to $host: $!\n" if $newerr;
  $ftp->quit if $newerr;
  myerr() if $newerr;
print "Logged in\n";

$ftp->binary;
$ftp->put("backup-$backupdate.tar.gz");
$ftp->quit;



Solaris 10.3 Installation on Dell Latitude 620
2007-10-07T23:43:00.000+05:30
My uncle was kind enough to temporarily provide me with a Dell Latitude D620. Now that I'm in Doha and have little else to do other than job hunting, I decided to install Solaris 10.3 on it. Things weren't easy initially. The installation would never cross the grub stage . Finally browsing through web forums , it was pointed out that the dual-core is not supported. So I disabled that and continued with the installation. There were no other hitches during the installation.

Then at the reboot, it didn't seem to proceed after grub again. This time I had to add "kernel/unix" to the kernel line in the grub entry for solaris boot, i.e.  

kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot
into
kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot kernel/unix -v

That did it and the system booted fine. It was so nice to see a good GUI for Solaris. The last time I worked on Solaris, it was on those horrible Netra 1125 boxes which don't even have the mercy to display anything on screen other than via serial console or ssh/telnet. We did have an Enterprise E450 too, but the GUI for that wasn't that impressive either.

Anyway Solaris 10.3 looks really nice, clean. Video card and NIC worked out of the box. Only the sound remains to be installed. Will do that tomorrow.
And btw, firefox doesn't seem to be there in the default  installation, only mozilla is installed. So I got a package of firefox for solaris on x86 and installed it. Now I feel much at home here too..


Merging pdfs
2007-08-26T17:39:00.000+05:30
ImageMagick package has a tool called convert which can easily merge pdfs. so if you get tutorials that have a file each for a chapter , then just use convert
convert chapter1.pdf chapter2.pdf tutorial.pdf

and you get a combined pdf of all the chapters :)


Padma for firefox
2007-08-22T14:26:00.000+05:30
I'm a regular reader of the Madhyamam newspaper but couldn't ever read its online version because of some font incompatibility with firefox. That was till I found out this plugin padma.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/873

Now I can happily read all the malayalam websites without any problems. Thats one more reason to go for firefox. Flexibility like never before.


FTP troubles
2007-08-22T13:58:00.000+05:30
We have an FTP server where we've disabled active FTP , so we often get complaints from users about being unable to use the server. Normally we just reply to specifically use passive mode, but we recently got a complaint from a user with a snippet of his output of the ftp client where he specifically mentions passive ftp and still gets a 550. 
I set detailed logging on my vsftpd server using these parameters in the vsftpd.conf

log_ftp_protocol=YES
xferlog_std_format=NO

and started monitoring the vsftpd.log file.
It started showing me that despite the client showing me an output saying that the PASV command was issued, it was reaching us as PORT. On further investigation , we figured out that the person was using an ftp proxy and it was probably modifying the commands.


Ripping VCDs
2007-08-22T13:37:00.000+05:30
Copying vcds on linux is a bit tricky. The normal cp and mv doesn't work.
So we need to rip the cds. Here's how to do it using mencoder
mencoder vcd://1 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=128 -o Song1.avi

If you need to rip the multiple files, you can put in a small loop

for i in `seq 1 10` ; do mencoder vcd://$i -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=128 -o Song$i.avi; done;


Zgrep
2007-07-24T15:19:00.000+05:30
To grep through archived gz files etc , instead of unzipping and then grep
you can use this tool zgrep
say for eg.
zgrep anonymous /var/log/xferlog.*


Scripting woes
2007-07-23T21:02:00.000+05:30
I was trying to get a perl script with a sed oneliner called from within the perl script..
It started itching me when I tried inserting a few leading spaces into the replacement text in sed.
Here's the snippet

    my $mask = '255.255.255.0';
    foreach my $device (sort keys %ifaddrs) {
        unless ($ifmasks{$device}) {
        $t = `sed -e "/255.255/ a\ \\\t        '$device' => '$mask'," $deffile > $deffile.new `  ;
 print $t ;   

The leading tab never worked properly till we finally preceded \t with two escape sequences- one each for the perl and sed parsing.
With the third one , it finally worked. The better part of it was that the perl variables worked well in sed ..i.e. they were parsed by perl before passing it on to sed..well, in another way thats what screwed me when it came to the white spaces..Anyway all working now, here's the full script...
#!/usr/bin/perl 
#use strict;
use warnings;
my $file = shift @ARGV;
my $check = 0;
print "\nchecking $file\n";
check_arrays($file);
sub check_arrays {
    my $deffile = shift;
    #my (%ifaddrs, %ifmasks, %bootproto, %onboot);
    require "$deffile";
    my $mask = '255.255.255.0';
    foreach my $device (sort keys %ifaddrs) {
        unless ($ifmasks{$device}) {
            print "$deffile def file does not have ifmasks for $device\n";
     $t = `sed -e "/255.255/ a\ \\\t        '$device' => '$mask'," $deffile > $deffile.new `  ;
     print $t ;   
  }
        unless ($bootproto{$device}) {
            print "$deffile def file does not have bootproto for $device\n";
    }
        unless ($onboot{$device}) {
            print "$deffile def file does not have onboot for $device\n";
    }
    }
    undef %ifaddrs;
    undef %ifmasks;
    undef %bootproto;
    undef %onboot;
}


A few tips
2007-07-14T02:08:00.000+05:30
Running multiple X sessions
On your login prompt. Insert your login and password and then execute:
startx -- :1
to get into your graphical environment. 
To go back to the previous user session, press Ctrl+Alt+F7, while to get yours back press Ctrl+Alt+F8.
The keys F1 to F6 identify six console sessions, while F7 to F12 identify six X sessions.


DVD Ripping
2007-07-12T23:01:00.000+05:30
I've been ripping a few DVDs of late and I've got this wonderful tool
HandBrakeCLI http://handbrake.m0k.org/
Its really cool and simple.You might need to get the right libraries installed but its really simple to use. Just remember to select your subtitle no..the default is none..

Just happened to get this strange error today while playing with one of the servers
shell-init: error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: No such file or directory
was wondering what it was...and finally turned out that I was installing an rpm sitting in a directory which the rpm moved and I ended up getting the error :)


Screen tips
2007-07-03T19:56:00.000+05:30
For scrolling  back on screen
press Ctrl A Esc
then Ctrl U

For down Ctrl D

To switch windows in screen
Ctrl A 1 , 2 , 3 etc


NFS options
2007-06-19T08:05:00.000+05:30
At times there are instances where you'd want to export an NFS share temporarily but don't want to add it in your /etc/exports file esp when its huge and bulky and another temporary entry might add to its ugliness. You can always do a temporary export using
exportfs -v -i -o root=server.domain.tld:rw=client.domain.tld /vol/tmp_data

Remember everytime anyone runs exportfs -a on the nfs server , the volume vanishes ..


for loop
2007-05-24T00:33:00.000+05:30
I often get confused with the for loop 
its always the ` and not the ' . For eg
for i in `ls *.log.*`; do gzip $i; done


Kickstarts
2007-05-03T02:37:00.000+05:30
I was doing a kickstart installation on one of my servers and it seemed to always get stuck at the first language prompt. Obviously that meant the ks.cfg was not accessible since thats the first entry in a kickstart file. so hunting down the reasons, I arrived at a DNS error , the hostname of the server was not properly added to the dns server. Once that was done , it was still not working.
Finally the nscd of the server where the requests for ks.cgi co was cleared of its hosts table and the kickstart finally got off to a nice start :)

Btw I cleared an RHCA paper for the RH401 exam . Now for the rest .........

NB: My earlier post about Rconnect wifi works with airtel too , just the difference that the no. to be dialled is *99#

Thats all for now!


Adobe Reader on FC6
2007-02-21T13:24:00.000+05:30
I suppose many others too might have faced this problem of Adobe Reader not working in FC 6. so here's a workaround
Edit the file /bin/acroread and replace the following line:

check_gtk_ver_and_set_lib_path "$MIN_GTK_VERSION"

with

# check_gtk_ver_and_set_lib_path "$MIN_GTK_VERSION"

(i.e. comment the line).

It worked for me. Thanks to AshutoshJSharma on Adobeforums.


Reset the binary screen
2007-02-14T22:19:00.000+05:30
Sometimes it gets really irritating if you mistakenly do a cat of some binary file and you end up with a command prompt that shows up with binary characters and everything you type on screen echoes as binary characters. the remedy is simple
just type "reset" and press enter.


Youtube downloads
2007-02-13T19:15:00.000+05:30
I normally used to use the site vixy.net for converting youtube flv videos to avi and download it to my system, but it seems to be down for some time now . So looking for alternatives I happened to find these two cools scripts that download videos from the youtube site and then convert them to avi.
Just copy this script for downloads..
http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/youtube-dl
Details about the script are available at http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thats the script . Thanks a lot Ricardo.. Just pass the url of the youtube video as its argument and execute it and the file gets saved on to your system as a .flv file.
Then you can use this script to convert it to avi.You'll need the mencoder package for this to work.

#!/bin/sh

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 {-divx|-xvid} list_of_flv_files"
  exit 1
fi

# video encoding bit rate
V_BITRATE=1000

while [ "$1" ]; do
  case "$1" in
    -divx)
      MENC_OPTS="-ovc lavc -lavcopts \
        vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=$V_BITRATE:mbd=2:v4mv:autoaspect"
      ;;
    -xvid)
      MENC_OPTS="-ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=$V_BITRATE:autoaspect"
      ;;
    *)
      if file "$1" | grep -q "Macromedia Flash Video"; then
        mencoder "$1" $MENC_OPTS -vf pp=lb -oac mp3lame \
          -lameopts fast:preset=standard -o \
          "`basename $1 .flv`.avi"
      else
        echo "$1 is not Flash Video. Skipping"
      fi
      ;;
  esac
  shift
done
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To run this , just set the executable permission on the script and use the -divx option or whatever you choose as the compression format and pass the flv file as the argument. You can also pass multiple files in the same command.


Getting an Rconnect card working in linux
2006-12-29T09:48:00.000+05:30
Well I thought this would be pretty difficult but turned out a lot simpler though.

First the specs
I am using a Dell D620 laptop with the Rconnect card in my PCMCI slot. I specifically told the Reliance guys to get me a card that works for Linux and they gave me a Huawei one . The normal ZTE cards they give don't work with linux AFAIK. Nevertheless the drivers you get with the Huawei card are still for Windoze. But don't worry, if you are using the latest kernel it will get detected automatically. For the record, mine is 2.6.9-42.13 thats RHEL 4.

Now su as root. open vi and create this small script file say rconnect in your directory.
[root@nmoidu ~]# cat rconnect
sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0x12d1 product=0x1001
mknod /dev/ttyUSB0 c 188 0
mknod /dev/ttyUSB1 c 188 1

Then set permissions for this to be executable.

Now for the modem properties and details of the dialup parameters, configure this file as below :

[root@nmoidu sysconfig]# cat /etc/wvdial.conf
[Modem0]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Baud = 115200
SetVolume = 0
Dial Command = ATDT
Init1 = ATZ
Init3 = ATM0
FlowControl = NOFLOW
[Dialer Rconnect]
Username = 93293292323
Password = 932939392323
Phone = #777
Stupid Mode = 1
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Inherits = Modem0
[root@nmoidu sysconfig]#

Then add this file to setup the network parameters of the Rconnect interface.
[root@nmoidu ~]# cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-Rconnect
# Please read /usr/share/doc/initscripts-*/sysconfig.txt
# for the documentation of these parameters.
ONBOOT=no
USERCTL=yes
PEERDNS=yes
TYPE=Modem
DEVICE=ppp0
BOOTPROTO=dialup
AC=off
BSDCOMP=off
VJCCOMP=off
CCP=off
PC=off
VJ=off
LINESPEED=115200
MODEMPORT=/dev/ttyUSB0
PROVIDER=Rconnect
DEFROUTE=yes
PERSIST=no
PAPNAME=93293293293# Change this no...:)
WVDIALSECT=Rconnect
MODEMNAME=Modem0
DEMAND=no
IPV6INIT=no
IDLETIMEOUT=600
[root@nmoidu ~]#

Customize each script and file according to the specifics in your machine like the device name and your phone no. etc. Run a dmesg to see under what device name your card is detected .
Now Run the script rconnect twice. Then do an ifup Rconnect.
Btw you'll have to call up Reliance and ask them to activate the card first and then the first connection will have to be done from a Windoze machine using the Rconnect software. Thats the unavoidable world of Windows . You have to live with it ;) .
Now once you are connected, browse , enjoy........


Alternately you can do it using the GUI too.
Create the rconnect script, run it.
Then open system-config-network . Add a new modem connection. Set the provider name to Reliance. Give no. to be dialled as #777. Enter your mob. no and password . Leave the other parameters as it is.
Follow the wizard and create the the new connection. Activate the new device from the GUI. Thats it.

In case of issues, Pls let me know. Leave a comment or mail me.


Setting up an SMS gateway
2006-12-06T05:11:00.001+05:30
I am writing this little howto for setting up an email2sms gateway which basically sends a mail to your mobile , like any alerts etc.

Hardware/software requirements are:

1)  A GSM modem (or a phone which can act as one). The key point is it should be able to talk to Linux as a modem. A lot of the modern CDMA/GSM phones have modems that need proprietary drivers to access the modem. These generally are not available for Linux.Choose one with support for linux.
Put your SIM into the modem, connect the serial cable to a serial-to-USB converter and connect to the system via USB port.( Nowadays I've seen the modems coming directly with a USB interface).

2) Linux , we used FC 5 since the modem drivers had some issues on RHEL.

3) The SMS software. We use here smstools ( http://smstools.meinemullemaus.de/)

Download the tar.gz file and do the normal installation - unzip , make , make install.

Go to  the configuration file /etc/smsd.conf . Configure as follows

[root@smsgw]# cat /etc/smsd.conf
# Example smsd.conf. Read the manual for a description

devices = GSM1 # Put in any name here for the modem to be identified.
logfile = /var/log/smsd.log # Set the log file here so that you can use it for debugging
loglevel = 7 # Check out the http://smstools.meinemullemaus.de/configure.html for details


outgoing = /var/spool/sms/outgoing # Define directory where the mails will come
checked = /var/spool/sms/checked
failed = /var/spool/sms/failed # Failed sms , for reasons like say - nil balance in SIM
incoming = /var/spool/sms/incoming # Define directory where incoming sms will be stored
sent = /var/spool/sms/sent # Mails sent out as sms

[GSM1] # Define each modem you named above , eg GSM1 , GSM2 etc.
device = /dev/ttyUSB0 # Define the device name of the modem
incoming = yes

We had used a serial-to-USB converter to connect the modem to the system. The modem hence appears to the system as a SUB device. So we define the GSM modem device as /dev/ttyUSB0. The mails that come into the outgoing folder should have the To field as the mobile no. of the person to whom the sms should be sent to. For automatically setting it to change the names of the mail id in the To field of the mail to the phone no. you will have to configure a filter like procmail to automatically change this.

[root@odin sent]# cat /etc/procmailrc
SHELL=/bin/sh
LOGFILE=/var/log/Proctest.log
LOG="--- Logging for ${LOGNAME}, "
#First, a few environment variables are included.
#Troubleshooting:
VERBOSE=yes
LOGABSTRACT=all

:0
  * ^TO_ .*@company.com
  | /usr/local/bin/extract-headers.sh

This calls for execution of the script extract-headers.sh for all mails coming to @ company.com domain.
The extract-headers.sh is just a script to extract the required headers only from the mail body and replace it with the phone no.s of the persons concerned in the To field , since the smsd sends the message to the number given in the To field of the message. See http://smstools.meinemullemaus.de/fileformat.html for more details on the sms format to be followed.

[root@smsgw]# cat /usr/local/bin/extract-headers.sh
#!/bin/bash
TMPFILE=$(mktemp)
FILE=$(mktemp -p /var/spool/sms/outgoing/)
formail -k -XFrom: -XSubject: -XTo: >> $TMPFILE # From, To and Subject headers copied to TMPFILE
rcptad=$(grep ^To: $TMPFILE | gawk '{print $2}') # search To field, output only mail-id part
perl -pi -e 's/To.*/To: 91999999999/' $TMPFILE;; # Replace mail id with mobile no.
FROM=$(grep From: $TMPFILE |gawk -F":" '{print $2}') # Get the From machine name
echo "from $FROM" >> $TMPFILE # Push the line "from sender-name" to the TMPFILE
cp $TMPFILE $FILE # Move the contents of TMPFILE to FILE
rm $TMPFILE # Delete TMPFILE



END of story. Start smsd in your system. put some mail in the /var/spool/outgoing folder , pay your mobile bill ;) and pray for the sms alerts to come :).
Contact me for any doubts.
___________________________________________________________________________

--
Thanks and Regards
Nabeel Moidu
Red Hat Inc.
Pune, India

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.  Noam Chomsky


Xen configuration
2006-08-08T20:34:00.000+05:30
For those who have trouble on installing a CentOS VM on xen on Debian or Ubuntu , this page has a few helpful hints
http://www.tapodi.net/~jda/blog/archive/2006_05_01_index.html


Xen and virtualization
2006-08-04T17:29:00.000+05:30
I have been working on Xen and virtualization for some time now and its been really impressive. Although it was a bit tough to get started and the concepts really took some time to get into my head , now it looks fine . I have got an FC3 xen kernel as a Guest OS (DomU) on an FC5 xen kernel. Things were pretty straight forward in FC5 . The networking and virtual disk concepts are a bit complicated for a starter , but finally what you get is an impressively efficient virtual OS running on top of your Host OS and you can hardly notice the performance difference.Nice work from Cambridge  University. I'd certainly like to go deeper into the technology.

By the way I recently came across a good pasting site that you can use to paste large text that you would want to avoid directly pasting on a yahoo chat or IRC forum.  http://rafb.net/paste/


Anti virus plays villain
2006-06-23T20:39:00.000+05:30
I recently had a bad time with my CEO's laptop(Its on M$ XP.As of now I can't even dream about having it on linux.But at least I am happy he admires Mozilla Thunderbird after using it). 
It was showing a strange behaviour. The wireless network gets connected for a few seconds and then it immediately gets off from the network. When I try reconnecting it, it again repeats this same behaviour.I start a ping and the first few packets , say 12 or 15 of them give a response even if I try www.google.com if its done immediately after a reconnect to the wireless network , but then after a few seconds it even stops pinging to the gateway ( the wireless AP). I couldn't think of any firewall that would block any pattern of traffic only after a few seconds .

Well, finally it turned out to be an issue with the anti virus software installed , or rather a virus in the machine. The explanation I  can think of is like this.

There's a virus in the system which the anti-virus seems to detect only after the network comes up and there's some regular interval when the anti virus software polls something to detect it and the moment it identifies the virus , it's inbuilt firewall cuts off the machine from the network.

If anyone has any better ideas , please suggest.


Working on command line tools with proxy settings
2006-06-21T17:39:00.000+05:30
In situations where you have a proxy and you need to use command line tools like wget going through the proxy , add the following commands 

export http_proxy="http://192.168.1.10:3128"
export ftp_proxy="http://192.168.1.10:3128"

If you need authentication on it in wget,add 

wget --proxy-user "Domain\username" --proxy-passwd "pass123" http://mirror.kernel.org/linux.iso

Altenatively, you may encode the username/password in the http_proxy variable: 

export http_proxy="http://username:password@192.168.1.10:3128"
export ftp_proxy="http://username:password@192.168.1.10:3128"


Linux Netfilter is better than PIX
2006-06-12T22:36:00.000+05:30
Well, in some aspects.........
The other day I was trying to migrate a Linux Netfilter based firewall onto a Cisco PIX device.
I really felt pity for PIX. The GUI was very ill designed , many things were just so bad in the GUI that I decided to switch over to its CLI. I tried adding a new NAT rule , it went wrong and then when I tried to delete it it started giving errors.When I did the same with the CLI , it worked well.When I tried to change the interface IP of the mgmt interface , it said the dhcp server is in  a different range so you cant change it.Vice versa it the dhcp said the interface ip was on a diff subnet. Finally the CLI worked.
Then to the rules .I don't know why Cisco doesn't feel that two external IPs should not be mapped to an internal IP. Iptables just flawlessly allows it.I've really lost the big impression I had about PIX.Though its better than the Checkpoint Firewall-1 that I have used on Nortel Contivity boxes it still doesn't have many feature that Netfilter has. Well it does have a few that Netfilter doesn't have too...But then PIX is supposed to be best in the market ....
Well , it didn't convince me.............


Dragging windows in linux
2006-05-28T14:44:00.000+05:30
On many occasions in linux , I have come across the situation where the window size is bigger thatn the screen size so in effect , i can't see the ok or apply buttons at the bottom .
In such cases , you can use the alt + mouse left click combination and press the arrow keys to drag the window up and down .
Hope it helps


Brainbench Job role
2006-05-22T21:42:00.000+05:30
I didn't notice till recently that Brainbench had job role certifications that was given if a selected set of papers was cleared.Well, I set my sights on three of the available ones.
Network Administrator, Linux Administrator, Unix Administrator.
Finally cleared Network Administrator.The other two are still pending.Need to clear an elective from C , Bash , Perl , Python .
I think Bash or C might be my choice.
If that is also cleared , I will get the latter two job roles also.
I hope I can do it before the Games ends this 31st.


Some more games with Awk
2006-05-17T20:23:00.000+05:30
To rename all files in current directory (append .bak to all of them):
ls -l | awk '{print "mv "$1" "$1".new"}' | sh

Thats doing an ls of all files , passing each name to awk as argument , renaming the awk input and passing the whole formatted output to shell

  1. Renaming within the name:
      ls -1 *name1* | awk '{print "mv "$1" "$1}' | sed s/name1/name2/2 | sh

  2. remove only files:
      ls -l * | grep -v drwx | awk '{print "rm "$9}' | sh
      or with awk alone:
      ls -l|awk '$1!~/^drwx/{print $9}'|xargs rm
      Be careful when trying this out in your home directory. We remove files!

   3. remove only directories
      ls -l | grep '^d' | awk '{print "rm -r "$9}' | sh
      or
      ls -p | grep /$ | wk '{print "rm -r "$1}'
      or with awk alone:
      ls -l|awk '$1~/^d.*x/{print $9}'|xargs rm -r
      Be careful when trying this out in your home directory. We remove things!

   4. killing processes by name (in this example we kill the process called netscape):
      kill `ps auxww | grep netscape | egrep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`
      or with awk alone:
      ps auxww | awk '$0~/netscape/&&$0!~/awk/{print $2}' |xargs kill
      It has to be adjusted to fit the ps command on whatever unix system you are on. Basically it is: "If the process is called netscape and it is not called 'grep netscape' (or awk) then print the pid"


Today's catch
2006-05-16T22:35:00.000+05:30
I was busy most of the day with some networking issue at office. But I took some time out later at night to write at least one exam .So the catch of the day is

Networking Concepts.

I have set my sights on few others.Will have to wait till tomorrow for that.....


Brainbench games
2006-05-15T22:20:00.000+05:30
Well ,Happy news for those who are looking out for a certification to add to your resume...
the famous online certification site Brainbench.com has started their brainbench games for this year.Its the best opportunity to write their exams for free online.Normally you get to write only a few for free and for the rest you need to pay.
I attempted the following today and cleared them
1)Information Technology Security Fundamentals  
2)Network Technical Support 
3)Internet Technology Fundamentals
4)Linux Administration - Redhat

That takes my Brainbench tally to 8 certifications.
Well it seems there is a prize for each country that has the most no. of certificate earners.
Check out www.brainbench.com for more...........


My younger brother receiving a prize
2006-05-15T17:45:00.000+05:30

Thats him shaking hands with the principal


Pronouncing "Linux"
2006-05-15T13:16:00.000+05:30
I've seen many people pronouncing Linux in many different ways.
Some say it with li as in liar
some with the li as in limit
some with the nu as in nook
Well going by what Torvalds says
http://www.paul.sladen.org/pronunciation/torvalds-says-linux.wav

I'll go by that


What Shorewall could and Nortel Contivity couldn't
2006-05-11T21:33:00.000+05:30
I happened to have a strange issue.I had an IP to which I had done  a layer of NATting so that an IP w.x.y.z would see to my network users as a.b.c.d. I used Nortel Contivity CSF/NAT software for this.
But whenever we did an FTP to the natted IP , the initial connection got established but after that the data connection was never established.It dropped connection whenever a data connection or passive mode was requested.I checked the rules at my end thoroughly , opened up the required ports , ensured that at the other end also everything was open.But nothing worked.Finally I decided to do a packet capture and set an ethereal capture with the filter on ftp port alone.
To my wonder the PORT raw FTP command was giving the ip a.b.c.d to the ftp server at w.x.y.z which the server was not aware since I was doing a NAT. 
The problem was detected, but earlier this used to work when I did the same using Shorewall.
I read the documentation of Shorewall and understood that Linux was aware of this issue and hence there was a kernel module ip_nat_ftp which took care of modifying PORT and PASV commands in case of a nat.Shorewall automatically loads this module .Thats why it used to work earlier.
When contacted Nortel said its a known bug with their firmware version which they will fix in their next update.
Perhaps if their code was open, it might have got noticed a long back .................
Am I right????????


A few cool vim tips
2006-05-10T21:07:00.000+05:30
The "*" key will search for the word from the current cursor position to EOF
The "#" key will search for the word from the current cursor position to the top of the file.

/^[A-M]\+/      : search for lines beginning with one or more A-M
/you\|me     : search for YOU OR ME

/\<\d\d\d\d\>               : Search for exactly 4 digit numbers
/\<\d\{4}\>                 : same thing

:s%/,/\r/gc                 : To find and replace all commas with a new line

/^\n\{3}                    : find 3 empty lines
:%s/^\n\{3}//               : delete blocks of 3 empty lines

:%s/^\(.*\)\n\1$/\1/        : delete duplicate lines

" Recording (BEST TIP of ALL)
qq  # record to q
your complex series of commands
q   # end recording
@q to execute
@@ to Repeat
5@@ to Repeat 5 times

Thats it for now.Rest later


Connection drops when TTL changes!!!
2006-05-09T17:06:00.000+05:30
I had a very strange issue today.There was a linux server that had been working for some time and suddenly the developer team suddenly started facing connection drops.they also noticed that whenever the ping ttl was 63 it was working fine. When it switched to 127 it started dropping. And worst, people started putting the blame on linux saying it was showing inconsistent behaviour and that was the last thing on earth I wanted to hear on linux. One of the biggest reasons why I prefer Linux/Unix over M$ is because for everything that misbehaves there is a reason.Its not that you restart the OS and all your problems will be over .But here I was left clueless because in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_default_ttl was 64 only and there was no reason why it showed 127 in the ping .
Well finally the problem was somebody else had given a new windows machine the same ip .Whenever traffic hit the windows machine it was returning 127 as the TTL and hence all connections to services on the linux server was dropping.
The ip was then changed on the new machine and then the services connected happily ever after...............................


At work
2006-05-09T12:11:00.000+05:30





Some occasions where you can replace awk with  cut
2006-05-07T22:07:00.001+05:30
Let me tell you first that I love awk and its my favourite scripting language.But  in case you just have a one time simple requirement for column processing and you don't know awk , in some cases you can fulfil the requirement with cat and cut

cat inputfile | cut -f 6 -d ' '
where the sixth column would be output when space is the delimiter.

the awk equivalent would be
awk -F  ' { print  $6 } ' inputfile

"And yet they said awk is difficult
But Awk is a wonderful tool"


A new great link
2006-05-06T22:45:00.000+05:30
I got this one from my favourite linux support forum
linuxquestions.org

This guy has put up a large no of wonderful howto's .Probably if I had got this five months back I could have avoided my company having to pay Redmond a huge amount for M$ Exchange.Well in case there is anyone else right now in my situation its all right here.Have a look.Great work Paul
http://www.yourhowto.org

And one new thing that i learnt
If you are pretty irritated by the password prompt every time you type sudo
add an option NOPASSWD: ALL this to the visudo config file line where you have specified your user rights .The ALL above is for all commands you can restrict it according to your needs


Some M$ stuff
2006-05-04T13:22:00.000+05:30
I am not suppose to be posting Redmond stuff here, but I feel this might be helpful to those *nix users who are used to configuring everything from the command line when they are forced to do something on a M$ system
To use a command line to set IP address information on a Windows NIC :-
  Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP provide the Netsh utility, which, among its many capabilities, can configure the IP properties of NICs. To set a static IP address, use this format:
netsh interface ip set address local static    
as in the following example:
netsh interface ip set address local static 192.168.1.15 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1 1
 (Some command lines wrap to two lines here because of space constraints.)
 To set a client's NIC DNS settings, run this command:
netsh interface ip set dns local static 192.168.1.150 primary
To set a client back to DHCP, run these commands:
netsh interface ip set address local source=dhcp
netsh interface ip set dns local source=dhcp


Partition deletion and grub problems
2006-05-02T21:42:00.000+05:30
I recently deleted some partitions from my disk using fdisk , and they had nothing to do with my active OS , but at my next reboot , my system started giving kernel panic.
The problem was that the deleted partitions were like hda5, hda6 etc and the partition where my OS was loaded was something like hda10,hda11 etc.Once the others were deleted , the partitions got renamed while menu.lst and fstab was as per the old numbering of the partitions.
I went into single user mode , edited grub and fstab , and rebooted , but then on it got stuck at grub prompt.
When i entered the parameters for root, kernel and initrd in grub and gave boot , it worked , but again at reboot it stood at grub.I tried rebooting after ensuring all changes were properly affected in grub.conf , menu.lst and in fstab(I use SUSE at home) but it still got stuck at grub.every time I entered the parameters and gave the boot command it worked ,but when the same thing was written in menu.lst it did not accept it.
Finally I reinstalled grub from the normal prompt after booting from grub and rebooted and things were back to normal.
Now my system works fine.


SELinux (t)errors
2006-05-02T13:02:00.000+05:30
One of my friends had a strange experience.He had a script stored inside the Apache document root and it could not be executed when the script was called directly using  "  ./script ".The executable permissions and all were fine but there was no way to run it there.But when the same script was called with   "bash script "
It worked fine. Again if the script was copied somewhere else outside the Apache doc root it would work when directly executed also. The strace showed that open(/dev/tty) was returning a failure return code only when executed from the apache doc root. The strace o/p of both successful and unsuccessful executions of the script were put to diff and all the troubles seemed to begin from there.A lot of head scratching later we saw that Selinux was enabled on the box and that was the cause for all this.It was putting the Apache doc root in a chroot jail and was not allowing any script to be executed there.
Then changed the setting in /etc/selinux/config from enforcing to disabled and
echo 0 > /selinux/enforce
and lo things were back to normal


Firewall upgrade
2006-04-23T18:59:00.000+05:30
I had upgraded my Nortel Contivity router with its latest firmware and all of a sudden traffic seemed to reach only my ISP's gateway but not beyond.Initially I thought it was the ISP's issue but then they confirmed  that there was no issue on their side.I had a look at my routing table and the default gateway was set to the next hop of one of our serial links .But in my configuration for the router I had not configured it like that anywhere .The ISP gateway was in the same subnet as my public ip so that was the reason why their gateway was reachable but not the other destinations.I searched through the static route entries and the default gateway specifications and saw a new check box to verify public default route .I checked it and then refreshed the routing table.That did not help.
Next I thought of checking out the interface config of the serial links and  there stood a new check box for default route .It  was not there in the older version of the  GUI  for the firewall. It  caused that interface to be the default route and hence the other entry where I had specified the public default route was not being effective.Well I unchecked it and things started working fine.


A few but very simple ones
2006-04-23T16:33:00.000+05:30
Check out this one
cp /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf {,.bak}
would substitute
cp /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.bak
Now that's a pretty simple one right ?

To see the details about a file - i.e. its access time ,  size , blocks , inode etc..
stat filename

A cool link from Stanford University
Here's a pretty impressive collection of network monitoring tools for any network admin
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/xorg/nmtf/nmtf-tools.html


A few new tips
2006-04-05T12:45:00.000+05:30
To identify if the processor is 32 bit or 64 bit  ( I guess the OS will also have to be corresponding)
use        uname -i        or         getconf LONG_BIT

To   identify processes using files or sockets (will come handy esp when you are unable to unmount disks)
fuser port/type  eg   fuser   21/tcp will give the process ids using ftp on your machine
fuser -km /home kills all processes accessing the file system /home in any way.
Alternatively you could also use lsof and then pipe it to grep to find the file or process you are looking for

To print real and effective UIDs and GIDs of a user use
id username

In case you get these errors for yum while attempting multiple mirrors
[Errno -1] Metadata file does not match checksum
give
yum clean metadata
and if that doesn't work then give
yum clean all
then try again

To know the exit status of the last process executed
echo $?


IPSEC from Nortel contivity to Juniper netscreen
2006-03-29T19:19:00.000+05:30
I was having difficulties in getting an IPSEC tunnel shifted from a Cisco VPN Concentrator onto a Nortel Contivity router . Well it turned out that there were lots of options that needed to be changed with respect to the encryption settings in the Contivity.The default settings for each manufacturer is quite different.Anyway I got a document to configure the tunnel to a Juniper Netscreen (That was the other endpoint)  from a Nortel Contivity device and once the settings were done , it worked fine.
I was also able to configure a User tunnel  on the Contivity .It was rather simple , I just created a user account in the profiles -> users section of the gui for it and then assigned a IP address pool for the user and lo that did it.The connection was established . Then I had to open the firewall rules for people accessing the network through the tunnel.


Packet drops on an RF link
2006-03-28T16:08:00.000+05:30
This has been bugging me for so many days now. A small percentage of packet drops and remote connections become a nightmare.Well this time it seems the signals from the RF transmitter on top of the ISP's tower were weak because the  alignment of the transmitter had changed and the signal strength to our ISP base station had become low and thus the packet drops.
The ISP guys aligned the transmitter and now the link is fine
Well on other occasions the reasons for packet drops were duplex setting mismatch, choking etc


Samba  suddenly stopped working
2006-03-28T13:48:00.000+05:30
My Samba server with ADS authentication suddenly stopped working .
When I gave wbinfo -u and getent passwd it was all working fine.
Then i tried kinit username@domain.tld and it gave the error
kinit(v5): Cannot find KDC for requested realm while getting initial credentials
I set dns_lookup_kdc = true in krb5.conf
Next it gave the error
kinit(v5): Clock skew too great while getting initial credentials
For some reason the ntp synchronization with my Windows AD had stopped.
I went to system-config-time and reconfigured the ntp server as the AD and it worked.
Well later I figured out that the first error was because I gave lower case in the domain name in the kinit statement and the actual problem was not that.Anyway with the dns_lookup_kdc = true in the krb5.conf lower case also seems to work....................:-)


Misc Tips for Linux
2006-03-27T23:11:00.000+05:30
The First Collection
To sort the union of two files removing duplicate lines. Suppose a and b contain the files. Do just this:
cat a b | sort -u -k 2
-u means unique, -k 2 selects the second field as sorting key.

Need to "watch" everything a user does? The following watches donkey.
$ watch lsof -u donkey
Or, to see what in going on in directory "/work/junk"
$ watch lsof +D /work/junk

To view text output of a binary file
strings /bin/ls

strace can also be used to trace an already started program.
Usage: strace -p pid (where pid is the process id of the program)

To find files opened by a process
ls -al /proc/process-id/fd/

*Find package which gives library
rpm -q --whatprovides /usr/lib/libreadline.so.4

Files being used by diff processes
/usr/sbin/lsof
to check how much swap is under use type "cat /proc/meminfo" at a console.

MOUNTS
mount -t smbfs -o workgroup=domain.tld,uid=user,password=password //192.168.21.14/share /mnt/mountpoint

GUI Problems
* panel disappears suddenly - killall -9 panel ; /usr/bin/gnome-panel ;

CREATE A SWAP FILE INSTEAD OF PARTITION
# dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1024 count=65536
---> this creates a 64Mb file with the name "swapfile"
# mkswap swapfile ---> to make it a swap file
# swapon swapfile ----> this will add the file as a swapfile
# cat /proc/meminfo ---> to check the new swap size
If you are done using the swap file, you can swapoff the file:
# swapoff swapfile ----> to remove the swap file

Using a CORAID box as LVM :
Include this line in /etc/lvm2/lvm.conf
under the devices section
types = [ "aoe" ,16 ]
modprobe aoe
vgscan
vgchange -a y


In the name of Allah ,Most Gracious , Most merciful
2006-03-27T22:25:00.000+05:30
I am not a regular diary writer and so I wasn't much interested in blogging but then I thought OK I will post on this everyday whatever troubleshooting I do in my work  and some misc tips - might be handy for me later or for somebody else.And some other thoughts that come across my mind during my day's work or while browsing the net.

If at all any of it helps you at any point of time , please put in a comment in here.
If you have got any doubts about it also , feel free to put it across to me ,we'll sit and sort it out.
And of course If you see any mistakes please point that out also.

I will begin by putting up a few of my favourite tips that I have compiled over the past year