Tak buntu lagi

My Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) CD finally arrived last week. This time they give away 1 CD & a few stickers only. Not even the Live CD :(

Tak macam dulu, berpuluh2 CD depa bagi ;)

For those who interested to get this CD for FREE, go here

Thanks ubuntu!

p/s: kat mana la aku nak install ni...

fsck /dev/oncall

last weekend was not very good weekend for me. sucks big time! i was oncall last week. there was no page at all during the week days. but on friday my bos told me that there will be a power outage in one of our DC this weekend. they want to do something with the power supply & will fail over the power to generators. my thinking, i should not be worried then since the power will still be there. but i was wrong!

on saturday i got paged as early as 7am. one by one our servers rebooting. login to office's vpn and looked at our monitoring tool. shit! all of our servers rebooted & a few of them still down including 4 out of 6 our cluster servers! i knew something was not right.
connected to console to check what wrong with the servers. some of them crashed & needed fcsk, some of them keep on rebooting with root_mount_not_found and some other weird errors that i never encountered before.
my boss called and told me to go to DC. he's coming too of cos. i was there till 10pm doing fsck the servers. we managed to recover all except 1 server and continue on Sunday till 12pm.
there goes my weekend...
but out of it i learned a lot of things especially recovering root filesystems on solaris disk suite, veritas volume manager & veritas cluster server as well as the preasure behinds it when the big bos keeps asking when will the systems back online.
what went wrong was the generator failed!!! fsck /dev/generator

p/s: in total i received 100 over paged

Linux Explorer

it has been a while i'm not writing about tech unix/linux stuff here. so here we go...

we are having a strange problems with one of our linux servers here - Red Hat Linux Advanced Server release 2.1AS (Pensacola) running on Sun Fire V60 (hardware ni dah end of service dah pung)

this machine keeps on automatically reboot by itself at least once a week. no significant errors found in log files, even i turned on everything in syslog.conf from debugging till all the info.

but since we still have vendor support for this machine, i logged a call to them. so they ask me to install Linux Explorer ala2 Sun™ Explorer to collect some data so they can dig in for further analysis.

Linux Explorer (LINUXexplo) indeed is a cool tool, well actually it just a shell script. once you excute it, it will generate a .gz file so you can easily pass to the vendor or you can also check by yourself under /opt/LINUXexplo/linux/ where all the info/data saved.

example of info/data collected:

# ls
boot etc httpd logs network rhn selinux system X
disks hardware kernel lp proc san software var yp

but sad to say, the vendor also couldn't find anything that caused the reboot :(
anyone can help me here?

Linus: I’ve never used Debian

Linus Torvalds was interviewed by http://www.oneopensource.it/

One of the questions:
A curiosity: which is your favourite distribution, and which one do you consider more secure?

I don’t really tend to care much, I’ve changed distributions over the years, and to me the most important thing tends to be that they are easy to install and upgrade, and allow me to do the only part I really care about - the kernel.

So the only major distribution I’ve never used has actually been Debian, exactly because that has traditionally been harder to install. Which sounds kind of strange, since Debian is also considered to be the “hard-core technical” distribution, but that’s literally exactly what I personally do not want in a distro. I’ll take the nice ones with simple installers etc, because to me, that’s the whole and only point of using a distribution in the first place.

So I’ve used SuSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu, YDL (I ran my main setup on PowerPC-based machines for a while, and YDL - Yellow Dog Linux - ended up the easiest choice). Right now, most of my machines seem to have Fedora 7 on then, but that’s only a statement of fact, not meant to be that I think it’s necessarily “better” than the other distros.

You can read the rest here http://www.oneopensource.it/interview-linus-torvalds/
Debian was my favourite distro & still is even though I'm not heavily use it now. Well, all the distros in my office are RedHat . What to do... :P

What say you MyDebian Group ?

Happy Birthday Linux

15 years ago...
From: Linus Benedict Torvalds
Date: Mon, Aug 26 1991 4:57 am
Email: torva...@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Groups: comp.os.minix

Hello everybody out there using minix -

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).......

me with Linus - LinuxWorld 2003 San Francisco


Happy Birthday Linux!

mii-tool vs ethtool

both commands are actually doing the same things. an useful tool to display or change ethernet cards settings, but bare in mind that mii-tool only for 10/100M NIC while ethtool can support all hardware. so in case you are using GB cards, you should use ethtool then.

# ethtool eth0
Settings for eth0:
Supported ports: [ TP ]
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Full
Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Full
Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Speed: 100Mb/s
Duplex: Full
Port: Twisted Pair
PHYAD: 0
Transceiver: internal
Auto-negotiation: on
Supports Wake-on: umbg
Wake-on: g
Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)
Link detected: yes

for more info

# man ethtool

change hostname - solaris vs linux

in order to change your machine's hostname, you will need to edit some files.

for solaris:
there are 6 files you need to edit:

/etc/hosts
/etc/nodename
/etc/hostname.network_interface (e.g hostname.hme0)
/etc/net/*/hosts (3 hosts files)

but for linux:
only 1 file

/etc/sysconfig/network

for temporary hostname (i'm not sure why you need it temporary), you can use command:

hostname new_hostname

but if you want it permanent, you need to reboot the system after changing all the necessary files.

linux tip: change date

last time when i want to change the date/time, i use date command with this option:
date MMDDhhmm

$ date
Mon Mar 27 17:41:37 CEST 2006
$ date 03271630
Mon Mar 27 16:30:00 CEST 2006

but i found an option which much more easier:

$ date
Mon Mar 27 16:30:15 CEST 2006
$ date -s "Mon Mar 27 17:45:15 CEST 2006"
Mon Mar 27 17:45:15 CEST 2006

just copy & paste the current date & edit it.