Tech Debug

An excerpt from an MSNBC article about China and another crazy law: In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.

I’ll be taking a blog-break due to workload at work… Back soon! In the mean time listen to some decent music. Ssssh! It’s Secret!

Jonathan Schwartz the SUN CTO detailed on his blog about the new deal between Sun and IBM that allows IBM to offer Solaris x86 as a supported OS on their hardware. What does this mean for sysadmins around the world? More Solaris. That’s OK in my books. The less windows servers the better. Someone should tell IBM about their new interest.

A friend was trying to compile cvsgraph on his Mac (10.4.10 intel) the other day and was receiving the error <br /> configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables<br /> By chance he also tried installing a Fink package by source that day as well, and received the same error. We checked out the GCC version <br /> gcc -v<br /> and it showed GCC 3.3. Some google time later, and it turns out this is an older GCC for the current XCode SDK he has installed.

Recently I posted about our Websphere MQ MQCONN 2195 errors, and how we needed to apply the minimal recommended Solaris Kernel tuning for Websphere MQ. Well, we applied the changes, rebooted and connection problems were gone. Our application was able to spawn multiple connections to MQ without the errors we were seeing before. However, we were still getting climbing response times when doing load tests between a request message being sent and a reply message arriving back.

On linux and other [Unix like operating systems][1], you can untar a tar file with an absolute path to a different location. On Solaris using tar you can not. How do you get around this? [Perderabo on the Unix for Advanced and Expert Users forum][2] describes how. Here is an example (names and servers changed to protect the innocent):

I was wondering how to set permissions on an element in clearcase under unix. You can’t just use your normal chmod. After reading “Phil for Humanity” I had the answer: cleartool protect -chmod 550 myscript.sh Quite simple after all. Your file, in this case myscript.sh, will now have the permissions you want. Remember however, if you try to set write permissions on a file element, it wont set. The clearcase man page for protect advises that write perms are ignored – instead to obtain write permission to a file element, it must be checked out.

In Solaris (and UNIX), a process is a zombie, as shown by the message defunct in the ps report. A zombie process is one that has had all its resources freed, but has not received an acknowledgement from a parent process, receipt of which would ordinarily remove its entry from the process table. The next time a system is booted, zombie processes are cleared. Zombies should not affect system performance, and you should not need to remove them.

I think I may have stumbled upon the answer. I’m so set in my CVS ways that I though the best thing was to branch the entire top level folder – recursively. What I really was after was a way of setting the configspec on the NEW view I create for the new branch, and making it show code that is labeled with a particcular label, then when it is checked out and in, a new revision exists on the new branch.

Following up from the last post, you may be interested in a little reading on Sun’s explanation of the semaphore and shared memory settings for Solaris Kernel parameters, using /etc/system. set semsys:* is for System V Semaphores set shmsys:* is for System V Shared Memory set msgsys:* is for System V Message Queues My personal server OS of choice is OpenBSD, so if you know OpenBSD, then think /etc/sysctl.conf as it is similar.

I was working on a recently built Solaris 9 server with a fresh copy of MQ installed. During application testing, we were getting 2195 errors from our application when establishing more than 3 concurrent connects to MQ. After a day of wasted de-bugging of our application, we put it down to the system, and it seems we may have been correct. There is an install chapter in the MQ V6.0 documentation that should NOT be overlooked.

The Two Beans Worth Coffee Blog at espressocoffeesnobs.com references an LA Times article as stating: In a study done by Rutgers University, NJ, the scientists found that rats could reduce the likelihood of pre-cancerous sun-damaged cells from becoming cancerous by 100% if the rats either exercised or drank caffeine. However, when both the exercise and caffeine were combined, the preventative qualities of the combo raised the efficacy to a whopping 400%

Just when I had gone and written my own init scripts for MQ, IBM release a support pack for Linux/Redhat. It is in RPM (rpm2cpio.pl anyone?) format, and seems very linuxy. I’ll stick with my own Solaris scripts, but should you run MQ on linux, then check it out.

I’m so used to making branches in CVS. <br /> cvs tag -b system_test<br /> As the CVS doco states simply, “This splits off a branch based on the current revisions in the working copy”, and these revisions will get assigned the branch name, in this case `system_test’. Simple, powerful enough and quick! But Rational Clearcase is a different beast as I learn it. You have to make your branchtype.

I’ve started blogging from textmate. And this is one of my recent posts using this app. A friend uses Textmate and swears by it as his main text editor, so here I am using it more often (Thanks Tim). I’m still a dab hand at vim, BUT now that I can blog from textmate, then its looking like my licence will finally get some use. From where I stand using the Mac is soooo much more than just jumping on a computer to bang out some email.

I know it has been blogged to death by now, but Mac OSX, my desktop OS of choice, is now officially a standard UNIX. Specifically to the UNIX 03 Product Standard. This confirms it conforms to Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification. This makes Apple Inc. an official UNIX vendor along with all the other big boys. On the serverside, I will stick with OpenBSD as my personal server OS of choice, with Solaris following close behind.

Logging on to Warcraft on the weekend, I note that a new expansion has been announced at Blizzcon. It features Arthas as Lich King, no doubt in some mega dungeon that you and 25 of your closest friends get to take down. In addition there is new land to the north including buildings you can take down – towers, etc. – very reminiscent of Warcraft3 for all you old school gamers.

A quick lesson (for my own benefit as much as yours) in applying Access Control Lists (ACL) on files and directories under Solaris (in this case Solaris 9). To allow group “somegroup” read only access to a folder recursively, you need to set the ACL on EVERY directory and file. This is due to the fact that the Solaris setfacl command does not have a recursive option (do not confuse -r with recurse).

It is really amaing what a “branded” piece of computer equipment can do compared to its 1/2 price no-name competitor. 3 Years ago I purchased a 400W PSU. It suited the PC system fine, but when I got my new Leadtek Geforce 7 series card, it had a molex power connector on it which required dedicated power direct from the PSU. The bus power is just not up to speed o supply this Graphics Beast to drive all those pixels.