G'day Mate (Mk III): November 2005 Archives

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November 30, 2005

R.I.P. Harry Boyle

This poem and story were found in the obituary from The Maitland Mercury. At the end of his life, Harry was a writer and historian but his long career included a stint as a paper boy, working as a both a jackeroo and a farmer, and he spent his war years as a secret intelligence officer behind enemy lines (Z Force).

Harry Boyle historian and friend to Maitland
MARGARET SIVYER
Tuesday, 29 November 2005
The poem on this page to me epitomizes the man who has given so freely and generously of his time and interest to further the knowledge and history of our country in time of war, disaster, the Hunter area and, of course, the personalities such as Les Darcy, and in particular his regard for one of our early pioneers, Molly Morgan.
...
The highlight of the week for many of us has also been the articles in the Maitland Mercury written by him, which will come out in book form in 2006.
...

Build me no monument should my turn come,
Please do not weep for me and waste your tears,
Write not my name on honour rolls of fame
To crumble with man's memory through the years.
Wear no dark clothes, speak in no saddened voice
Seeking rare virtues which did not exist,
Just let me lie under the cool sweet earth
And sleep in peace, where I will not be missed.
I ask one thing. That in still far off days
Someone who knew me should in their daily round
Suddenly pause, caught by some sight or sound,
Some glance, some phrase, some trick of memory's ways
Which brings me to his mind. Then I shall wait
Eager with hope; perhaps to hear "how great
If he were with us still". Then, at the end,
All that I wish for - Just; "he was my friend"
This poem written by David McNicholl in Syria in 1941 was a poem Harry told me that he has had in his research records since 1945.

Additional information can be found in Hats off to Harry and in Family and friends remember life lived to the full.

Posted by Ozguru at 06:00 PM

Looking for work?

Many people quit looking for work when they find a job.

Posted by Peskie at 12:00 PM

Does Solaris have SMIT or SMITTY

AIX has some useful administration tools but Solaris does not.

Some versions of Solaris had admintool (users, printers) but the closest would probably be SMC (Sun Management Centre). This is usually installed as an extra software package (not part of the standard install).

Posted by Ozguru at 06:00 AM

November 29, 2005

Making your pile...

[Found over at Read My Lips....]

A young man asked an old rich man how he made his money. The old guy fingered his worsted wool vest and said, "Well, son, it was 1932, the depth of the Great Depression. I was down to my last nickel.
I invested that nickel in an apple. I spent the entire day polishing the apple and, at the end of the day, I sold the apple for ten cents.

The next morning, I invested those ten cents in two apples. I spent the entire day polishing them and sold them at 5:00 PM for 20 cents.

I continued this system for a month, by the end of which I'd accumulated a fortune of $3.50.

Then my wife's father died and left us ten million dollars."

Posted by Peskie at 12:00 PM | Comments (1)

Blojsom Install

I installed blojsom via DarwinPorts but could not get it to work at all. My first problem was not knowing where the files were to edit:

/opt/local/var/db/blojsom/[insert_blog_name_here] (blog entries)

/opt/local/share/java/tomcat5/webapps/blojsom (config files)

Second problem was not knowing how to restart blojsom after changing the config - check the TomCat management interface (http://localhost:8080).

Finally, don't forget to forward port 8080 through your ADSL modem and turn off the firewall rules for 8080 on your local server....

Posted by Ozguru at 06:00 AM

November 28, 2005

Cats and bags...

Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin' it back in.

Posted by Peskie at 12:00 PM

StorEdge D1000 (Again)

A D1000 is a SCSI array. Actually it is two arrays.

OK, I actually had a couple of readers who were curious about this post. What is a D1000 they wanted to know and who cares...

Well a Sun StorEdge D1000 is really just an differential SCSI array (actually two differential SCSI arrays in a single box).

It was intended for use in a rack mounted environment and could be configured as one array by crosslinking the two internal controllers. When crosslinked, you want to make sure that the individual target address do NOT overlap. Hence the comments the other day :-) The two controller cards appear as targets e and f and the disks (in a second generation D1000) would be 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 8, 9, a, b, c, d. Note that 7 is not used because that is reserved for the host end of the SCSI connection.

The way I normally find these boxes deployed is in a boot-disk mirror. In this case the host server will have two SCSI controllers - one connected to the left hand array and one connected to the right hand array. Both arrays have their targets configured to start at zero so that the target numbers in the metadisk configuration look "similar" (i.e. less confusing for the poor sods who maintain it). For example the array I set up the other day ended up supplying c1t0, c1t1, c1t2, c1t3 and c5t1, c5t2, c5t3, c5t4. In this case c1t0 was mirrored to c5t0. Same for c1t1 and c5t1. The remaining four disks were assembled into a RAID 5 stripe.

Warning for the uninitiated - don't link the two halves together when you are connected to two controllers. SCSI is a bus architecture, not a ring technology! Use terminators instead.

Posted by Ozguru at 06:00 AM | Comments (4)

November 27, 2005

How (little) women think?

Recycled from 2003/08/01.

Posted by Peskie at 12:00 PM

November 26, 2005

Artificial Insemination...

[Found over at Cynical Cyn's...]

Amy, a blonde, city girl, marries a Texas rancher. One morning, on his way out to check on the cows the rancher says to Amy,

"The artificial insemination man is coming over to impregnate one of our cows today. I drove a nail into the two-by-four just above the cow's stall in the barn. You show him where the cow is when he gets here, okay?"

So the rancher leaves for the fields. After a while, the artificial insemination man arrives and knocks on the front door. Amy takes him down to the barn. They walk along long row of cows and when she sees the nail, she tells him,

"This is the one..... right here."

Terribly impressed by what he seemed to think just might be another dizzy blonde, the man asks, " How did you know this is the cow to breed?"

"That's simple. By the nail over its stall," Amy explains.

Then the man asks, "What's the nail for?"

"I guess it's to hang your pants on," she tells him as she walks away.

Posted by Peskie at 12:00 PM

StorEdge D1000

This time ... read the fine manual ... just for a change.

Just in case any of you find yourselves installing a Sun StorEdge D1000 at some point in time, I would like to recommend that you get hold of the essential pdf file (805-2624-12) attractively called "SunStorEdge (TM) A1000 and D1000 Installation, Operations, and Service Manual" (look on the SunDocs site).

Why?

Because it has the correct settings for the incy-wincy-teeny-weeny dip-switch settings.

The very clear and exact instructions that come attached to the first generation D1000 (the one with only 8 disks instead of 12) suggest that the correct settings are switch 1 down and switch 2 up to give the addresses as targets 0, 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, a and b. If you split the D1000 you change switch 2.

This is wrong.

Very wrong.

The rightmost (as viewed from the back) dipswitch (1) controls the right hand array (as viewed from the front). Up gives 8, 9, a and b. Down gives 0, 1, 2 and 3. The next switch (2) controls the left hand side (up for 8, 9, a and b; down for 0, 1, 2 and 3).

Clear now? Probably not. Just follow the manual and completely ignore the instructions on the D1000 itself :-)

Posted by Ozguru at 06:00 AM

November 25, 2005

Puddle fun

Posted by Ozguru at 06:00 PM | Comments (3)

Satan in Church?

From rec.humour.funny:

A few minutes before the services began, the townspeople were sitting in their pews and talking. Suddenly, Satan appeared at the front of the church.

Everyone started screaming and running for the front entrance, trampling each other in a frantic effort to get away from the evil incarnate. Soon everyone exited the church except for one elderly gentleman who sat calmly in his pew without moving, seemingly oblivious to the fact that God's ultimate enemy was in his presence.

So Satan walked up to the old man and said, "Don't you know who I am?" The man replied, "Yep, sure do."

"Aren't you afraid of me?" Satan asked.

"Nope, sure ain't." said the man.

"Don't you realize I can kill you with a word?" asked Satan.

"Don't doubt it for a minute," returned the old man, in an even tone.

"Did you know that I could cause you profound, horrifying, physical AGONY for all eternity?" persisted Satan.

"Yep," was the calm reply.

"And you're still not afraid?" asked Satan.

"Nope."

More than a little perturbed, Satan asked, "Well, why aren't you afraid of me?"

The man calmly replied, "Been married to your sister for over 48 years.

Posted by Peskie at 12:00 PM

Unix Error Messages

[Found at Gotterdammerung where the motto is "Always remember to pillage before you burn!" ...]

At the USENIX Association conference in Atlanta recently [Ed: 1985/1986] a contest was held to invent the most humorous/bizarre/etc UN*X error message of the errno(2) 'EERROR' type. This contest had been tried at an earlier European Users Group meeting, where the winning entry was:
ENOTOBACCO - Read on an empty pipe
You get the idea. A partial [alphabetized] list of 'top(?)' entries from Atlanta [and from several readers of hp.unix] follows; if your pun/wierdness tolerance is low, you may want to abandon ship:
EBEFOREI - Invalid syntax
ECHERNOBYL - Core dumped
ECRAY - Program exited before being run
EDINGDONG - The daemon is dead
EFLAT - System needs tuning
EGEEK - Program written by inept Frat member
EIEIO - Here-a-bug, there-a-bug, ....
EIUD - Missing period
ELECTROLUX - Your code could stand to be cleaned up
EMILYPOST - Wrong fork
END.ARMS.CONTROL - Silo overflow
ENOHORSE - Mount failed
ENONSEQUETOR - C program not derived from main(){printf("Hello, world");}
EWATERGATE - Extended tape gap
EWOK - Aliens sighted
EWOK - Your code appears to have been stir-fried
EWOULDBNICE - The feature you want has not been implemented yet

And finally, a sort-of 'period piece':
EMR.ED -

A host is a host, From coast to coast And nobody talks to a host that's close, Unless the host that isn't close Is busy, hung, or dead.

I would also like this new signal to be supported:
SIGNUKE - Nuclear event occurred (cannot be caught or ignored :-)

Posted by Ozguru at 06:00 AM

November 24, 2005

Revenge

From rec.humour.funny:

He gave his now ex-wife just 3 days to move out.

She spent the first day packing her belongings into boxes, crates and suitcases.

On the second day, she had movers come and collect her things.

On the third day, she sat down for the last time at their beautiful dining-room table by candlelight, put on some soft background music, and feasted on a pound of shrimp, a jar of caviar, and a bottle of Chardonnay.

When she had finished, she went into each and every room and deposited a few half-eaten shrimp shells, dipped in caviar, into the hollow of the curtain rods. She then cleaned up the kitchen and left.

When the husband returned with his new girlfriend, all was bliss for the first few days. Then slowly, the house began to smell. They tried everything; cleaning & mopping and airing the place out. Vents were checked for dead rodents, and carpets were steam cleaned. Air fresheners were hung everywhere.

Exterminators were brought in to set off gas canisters, during which they had to move out for a few days, and in the end they even paid to replace the expensive wool carpeting.

Nothing worked. People stopped coming over to visit...repairmen refused to work in the house...the maid quit...finally, they could not take the stench any longer and decided to move.

A month later, even though they had cut their price in half, they could not find a buyer for their stinky house. Word got out, and eventually, even the local realtors refused to return their calls.

Finally, they had to borrow a huge sum of money from the bank to purchase a new place.

The ex-wife called the man, and asked how things were going. He told her the saga of the rotting house. She listened politely, and said that she missed her old home terribly, and would be willing to reduce her divorce settlement in exchange for getting the house back...

Knowing his ex-wife had no idea how bad the small was, he agreed on a price that was about 1/10th of what the house had been worth...but only if she were to sign the papers that very day. She agreed, and within the hour, his lawyers delivered the paperwork.

A week later, the man and h is new girlfriend stood smirking as they watched the moving company pack everything to take to their new home...including the curtain rods.

Posted by Peskie at 12:00 PM | Comments (2)

Hex Converter

There is a magic string that you feed to dc when you want to convert a hex number to a decimal:

echo "16 10 o i FF p" | dc

The idea is that you can convert any base 16 number to a decimal easily. Although the string looks arbitrary it is actually quite meaningful if I tell you that dc is an RPN calculator (more jargon). How about a step by step example (if you type this in, ignore the comments - lines that start with a '#' character):

# Start the program dc (probably /usr/bin/dc) $ dc # Add 16 to the stack (another bit of jargon) 16 # Add 10 to the stack (on top of the 16) 10 # Take the top stack value (10) for the output radix (i.e. base) o # Take the top stack value (16) for the input radix i # Chuck any old hex number onto the stack DEADBEEF # Print the top stack value out p 3,735,928,559

Intelligent readers should be able to use the same method to convert decimal to binary.....

Posted by Ozguru at 06:00 AM

November 23, 2005

The Special Pig

A woman was walking down the street when she saw a man walking a three legged pig. She thinks to herself, "That's odd."

She decides to ask the man about the pig. "Excuse me sir, can you tell me why it is you are walking down the street with a pig that only has three legs?"

"Why certainly," the man says. "I'm a farmer, and this here is a special pig."

"What makes it so special?" the woman asks. "Well, the other day, we came across a school bus full of children that had flipped over in a ditch and this pig ran down and dragged all of the children out to safety. And just a few days ago, I fell into the lake and would've drown had it not been for this pig going in to save me."

"That's remarkable. But, why does he only have three legs?" the woman asks.

"You see, ma'am," the farmer starts, "a pig this special isn't eaten all at once."

Recycled from April 2004.

Posted by Peskie at 12:00 PM | Comments (3)

AP and boot disks

Q: I have set up AP as per the normal configuration but I keep getting errors when I try to reboot. I even put a rootdev line in /etc/system but then the next reboot crashed completely.

A: The most likely solution is that you forgot to run apboot on your boot disk. Running apboot would have updated the kernel with a whole bunch of other key lines:
* Begin AP root info (do not edit) forceload: drv/ssd forceload: drv/sf forceload: drv/socal forceload: drv/sbus forceload: drv/ap_dmd forceload: drv/ap forceload: drv/pseudo rootdev: /pseudo/ap_dmd@0:8,blk * End AP root info (do not edit)
Without those lines, the kernel cannot mount the root filesystem....

Thanks to AD, DG, JT, TH for solving this one.

Posted by Ozguru at 06:00 AM

November 22, 2005

Career Advice

[Found at Stokely Consulting....]

Should I become an astronaut, a firefighter, or a system administrator?
Author Unknown

Are you at a career crossroads? Are you asking "Should I become an astronaut, a firefighter, or a system administrator?" Here is a handy comparison chart that may help you make your decision.

PURPOSE OF YOUR CAREER
Astronaut: Advancing scientific knowledge for the good of humanity.
Firefighter: Saving lives and property.
Sysadmin: Assuring uninterrupted access to alt.binaries.erotica.sheep.

ADVICE YOU'LL GIVE KIDS WHO WANT TO FOLLOW IN YOUR FOOTSTEPS
Astronaut: "Study science and math and eat your vegetables."
Firefighter: "Study science and math and eat your vegetables."
Sysadmin: "DON'T DO IT! RUN AWAY!"

QUESTION YOU'LL BE MOST TIRED OF ANSWERING
Astronaut: "Where do you go to the bathroom?"
Firefighter: "Do you really slide down a pole when the alarm goes off?"
Sysadmin: "Can't you do anything about all this spam I've been getting?"

WILL YOU EVER BE ON TV?
Astronaut: Yes!
Firefighter: Occasionally.
Sysadmin: Only MSNBC's "The Site," which doesn't technically count as TV.

WILL YOUR JOB EVER GET ANY EASIER?
Astronaut: As computers get more and more advanced and able to control more of the functions of the space vehicle, yes.
Firefighter: As more and more people install smoke detectors in their homes, yes.
Sysadmin: As more and more clueless newbies discover the Internet, absolutely not.

INSPIRING MOVIE ABOUT YOUR PROFESSION
Astronaut: "The Right Stuff"
Firefighter: "Backdraft"
Sysadmin: Uh... gee, I'm really drawing a blank here... "Wargames"?

YOUR WORK HOURS
Astronaut: Fairly long days during the mission, but lots and lots of time between missions to relax.
Firefighter: 24-hour shifts, but 48 hours between shifts to relax.
Sysadmin: Not really "work hours" or even "work days"... more like "work millenia."

FRINGE BENEFITS OF YOUR JOB
Astronaut: Lots of good stories to tell to impress members of the opposite sex.
Firefighter: Lots of good stories to tell to impress members of the opposite sex.
Sysadmin: You get ALL of the jokes in "Dilbert."

NUMBER OF COMPLAINTS ABOUT YOUR PROFESSION
Astronaut: A few, from people who think the government should be spending its money in different ways.
Firefighter: A few, from people who think you take too long to arrive following a 911 call.
Sysadmin: You'll have to learn what comes after "trillion" to be able to count them all.

YOUR VEHICLE
Astronaut: Multimillion-dollar space vehicle atop multi million dollar rocket.
Firefighter: Big red truck with flashing lights and siren.
Sysadmin: ~~1978 AMC Gremlin.~~1993 Ford Panelvan.

In conclusion, if the sysadmin option has seemed the most appealing in even one of these categories, you should become a sysadmin.

Posted by Peskie at 12:00 PM

Watchdog Reset

Today's tech tip comes from Geoff Huntley:

This fatal error usually indicates some kind of hardware problem.

Data corruption on the system is possible.

Look for some other message that might help diagnose the problem.

By itself, a watchdog reset doesn’t provide enough information; because traps are disabled, all information has been lost. If all that appears on the console is an ok prompt, issue the PROM command below to view the final messages that occurred just before system failure:
ok f8002010 wector p
The result is a display of messages similar to those produced by the dmesg command. These messages can be useful in finding the cause of system failure.

This message doesn’t come from the kernel, but from the OpenBoot PROM monitor, a piece of Forth software that gives you the ok prompt before you boot UNIX. If the CPU detects a trap when traps are disabled (an unrecoverable error), it signals a watchdog. The OpenBoot PROM monitor detects the watchdog, issues this message, and brings down the system.

Posted by Ozguru at 06:00 AM

November 21, 2005

In the beginning....

In the beginning, God created the bit. And the bit was a zero; nothing.

On the first day, He toggled the 0 to 1, and the Universe was. (In those days, bootstrap loaders were simple, and "active low" signals didn't yet exist.)

On the second day, God's boss wanted a demo, and tried to read the bit. This being volatile memory, the bit reverted to a 0. And the universe wasn't. God learned the importance of backups and memory refresh, and spent the rest of the day ( and his first all-nighter ) reconstructing the universe.

On the third day, the bit cried "Oh, Lord! If you exist, give me a sign!" And God created rev 2.0 of the bit, even better than the original prototype. Those in Universe Marketing immediately realized the the "new and improved" wouldn't do justice to such a grand and glorious creation. And so it was dubbed the Most Significant Bit, or the Sign bit. Many bits followed, but only one was so honored.

On the fourth day, God created a simple ALU with 'add' and 'logical shift' instructions. And the original bit discovered that by performing a single shift instruction, it could become the Most Significant Bit. And God realized the importance of computer security.

On the fifth day, God created the first mid-life kicker, rev 2.0 of the ALU, with wonderful features, and said "Screw that add and shift stuff. Go forth and multiply." And God saw that it was good.

On the sixth day, God got a bit overconfident, and invented pipelines, register hazards, optimizing compilers, crosstalk, restartable instructions, microinterrupts, race conditions, and propagation delays. Historians have used this to convincingly argue that the sixth day must have been a Monday.

On the seventh day, an engineering change introduced UNIX into the Universe, and it hasn't worked right since.

Posted by Peskie at 12:00 PM

The Day SunOS Died

I found this over at Stokely Consulting and figured it was entirely relevant given that I am currently teaching a Sun course that includes the transition from SunOS (BSD) to Solaris (SysV):

The Day SunOS Died
by N.R. "Norm" Lunde, with apologies to Don McLean

Remember when those guys out West
With their longish hair and paisley vests
Were starting up, straight out of UCB?

They used those Motorola chips
Which at the time were really hip
And looked upon the world through VME.

Their first attempt ran like a pig
But is was the start of something big;
They called the next one the Sun-2
And though they only sold a few
It soon gave birth unto the new
Sun-3 which was their pride
And now they're singing