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Published: 08 November 2011

I have two servers with KVM running, on both I use preseeding to install the guests. It's amazing to watch a guest install automatically by using virt-install and passing some parameters on command line. Basically you need to pass further preseeding parameters in a file. When converting this script to wheezy I ran into a problem. In squeeze, the parameter that defines the disk was named vda (why vda??? however) in wheezy its sda now (more like its in every debian install). Means I had to change the config parameter from

d-i partman-auto/disk string /dev/vda

d-i partman-auto/disk string /dev/sda

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Published: 06 November 2011

Still not finished with my Gnome-Desktop, what I can say that there are some great features that I really missed on Windows for years, however I want to use my Thunderbird and Windows parallel and decided to use dual-boot with the same thunderbird-profile-directory. Wheezy still has a 3.x icedove (=thunderbird) client, and my Windows installation already has a 7.0.1, so I needed a new client, and could not find any distribution out there. Means I was forced to build it by myself. There were two guides that helped my with that topic the one was from Mozilla, the other one for an Ubuntu-build. Here is my step-by-step guide:

get sourcecode

wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/7.0.1/source/thunderbird-7.0.1.source.tar.bz2

tar -vxfj thunderbird-7.0.1.source.tar.bz2

cd comm-releases

get build-backages

apt-get install build-essential libasound2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libnotify-dev libxt-dev libiw-dev mesa-common-dev autoconf2.13 yasm

apt-get build-dep icedove

create .mozconfig file

mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/thunderbird-7.0.1
ac_add_options --enable-application=mail
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=mail
ac_add_options --enable-optimize
ac_add_options --enable-calendar
ac_add_options --disable-crashreporter

workaround for bug with 3.0 kernel

cd mozilla/security/coreconf
cp Linux2.6.mk Linux3.0.mk

start the build

make -f client.mk

cd thunderbird-7.0.1

create the deb-package

make -j4

checkinstall -D --install=no --pkgname=´thunderbird-fairtec´ --pkgversion=´7.0.1´

dpkg -i thunderbird-fairtec_7.0.1-1_amd64.deb

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Published: 06 November 2011

Last week I setup dual boot on my Laptop for giving Gnome on Debian a try. Worked without any problems, except the sound, the driver was installed correctly, but still had no sound. After reading loads of docs I found the hint of using the Realtek Code-Software here. Here step-by-step what I needed to make it working:

get_build_packages

apt-get install linux-source linux-headers-3.0.0-1-all-amd64 build-essential

get file from realtek - choose your kernel

become root

su root

uncompress file (example!)

tar -vxjf LinuxPkg_5.17Beta.tar.bz2

change to new dir (example!)

cd realtek-linux-audiopack-5.17

do the installation and reboot

./install
reboot

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Published: 11 September 2011

Today I tried to restore a full backup of an old DB to a new database with

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Published: 10 September 2011

I am using sqlplus and rman on linux a lot, and one very annoying thing is that there is no history (key-up) as it is on windows. Reason is that in sqlplus/rman is running in a dosbox and the dosbox has the "key-up-history" feature implemented automatically.

But also in Linux it's easy to achieve. The tool you need is "rlwrap". Just install it (example for Debian)

and call sqlplus with "rlwrap sqlplus" or rman with "rlwrap rman".

Nothing more to make it run? No, nothing more!

Have fun!

Details

Published: 29 April 2011

If you are using UTL_MAIL you will soon come to some limits of this package.

•  it does not support SMTP authentication
•  it does not support attachments (not provided here)

Last week I needed the authentication part for a project.
I decided to take something that's already stable ready to be used, and free.
It's Apache Commons Mail part. Basically these class makes handling in Java much easier than provided by SUN/ORACLE.
es, it's a Java-class. But Java is really easy to use in Oracle, you will see.

Basically you get the jar, say "loadjava myjar.jar", create a simple java-class in oracle, create a simple pl/sql wrapper.
This cooking recipe is on Linux, but except the unpacking it's almost the same on windows.
And don't forget to take the most current and stable jar-files!

get the mail.jar from here http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javamail/index.html

get the commons-email-xxx.jar from here http://commons.apache.org/email/

unzip both in a directory on your database server and use following statements to load it into the database (REPLACE USER/PW!!!):

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loadjava -u myuser/MYPW -resolve mail.jar
loadjava -u myuser/MYPW -resolve commons-email-xxx.jar
 

Now we need some Java and PL/SQL programming. I did the design so that it can be basically used instead of UTL_MAIL, means same parameter names and default-values.

Just some more parameters were added for using the authentication.
You can download the files from the download-sections here. Just install them with SQL/PLUS or whatever tool you like.

After compiling the programs into the databse give it a try. You need to set some permissions, so keep DBMS-Output enabled, in the output you find the statements that needs to be executed. It will look like similar to this:

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dbms_java.grant_permission( 'yippie', 'SYS:java.lang.RuntimePermission', 'accessDeclaredMembers', '' );
dbms_java.grant_permission( 'XYA', 'SYS:java.util.PropertyPermission', '*', 'read,write' );
begin dbms_java.grant_permission( 'XYA', 'SYS:java.net.SocketPermission', '123...', 'connect,resolve' ); 

Ok for testing we need a testscript:

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BEGIN

dbms_output.enable(10000);
dbms_java.set_output(1000000);
std_mail.send(
   sender => This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.',
   recipients => This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.',
   subject => 'subjective',
   message => 'messagemessagemessage',
   smtphostname => 'mail.mytestdomain.com',
   smtpport => '587',
   smtpuser => 'myuser',
   smptpassword => 'mypw',
   useTls => false);
END;
/

That's it!

The programs here are released under the GNU/GPL2.

Have fun!

Feedback appreciated, please comment!

Details

Published: 16 March 2011

If you are running into a ORA-07445 or ORA-00600 error something you should fix immediately happened on your Database. You should do following things before opening a TAR on Metalink:

• get the exact error-message including the things in the square brackets from the alert-log
• logon to metalink and search for the document 153788.1 that's the Error-Lookup-Tool from Oracle for these errors and open that document
• choose if it is a ORA-00600 or a ORA-07445 and enter the things in the first square brackets into the field "Error Code First Argument" and press "Lookup Error"

If you are lucky and find informations/patches (what pretty often happens -> good stuff Oracle) you can probably fix it by yourself. If not you have to open a Metalink-TAR.

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Published: 09 March 2011

Currently I reinstalled my Samsung Galaxy S (with insanity 6.3) and came across "an error occured while downloading your recovery." when trying to flash clockworkmod recovery. With installing a superuser version from the market and reinstalling clockworkmod my problem seems to be solved. There seems to be a bug in the superuser app I was using previously.

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Published: 04 November 2010

I recently installed a usb-harddisk on my server and mounted it on a guest with virt-manager. The performance was very bad, i had 50Kbyte when testing with hdparm.

I remounted it in virt-manager as IDE drive instead of USB-Drive and voila i had full performance again. It seems that the USB-drive mounting is a bit bugged.

Details

Published: 04 November 2010

I am using KVM for a while now and reinstalled my XEN-Server. I have to mention it's not the same hardware. XEN was on a 2 year old Server with 4G memory and Debian Lenny32, KVM is on a 6 months old 8G memory Server with Debian Squeeze. So i have a bit better hardware and a 64bit System on KVM.

I like that KVM is out-of-the-box working with virsh/virt-manager the performance improvement is enormous, especially with 64MB-RAM systems like I use for my wiki. I use LVM for the guest-disks (I did it even for the XEN-guests) and compared to use files it's even a huge performance improvement.

The only thing that's easier in XEN is that you can mount the guest-partitions and can access them directly in KVM you need to use kpartx (not hard but one step more) to achieve this.

I started to move to KVM because it seems as XEN development slowed down and there is much more development activity and support for KVM. I think that was a good decision.