While the article is discussing the SSD drives as an option for IBM’s DS8000 Disk Storage system, it has alot of really good information about SSD drives. It discusses topics such as SSD Endurance and advantages over traditional spinning disks.
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Ubuntu 9.04 Release Candidate now Available.
April 21, 2009 – 7:12 pm
I’m a big fan of Ubuntu and I’m excited for the new 9.04 RC release. Keep in mind this is a “for testing only” release. Currently I run Ubuntu 8.10 for my main desktop in my home/office. I’m generally late to upgrade and prefer to play with new releases in a Virtual Environment (or, in some cases, an alternate physical environment) before I upgrade to the latest and greatest. This is true with all OSes that I work with.
Right now, I’m downloading 9.04 and will install it in Sun’s (Oracle’s?) VirtualBox and play with some of the new features.
Oracle to buy Sun Microsystems
April 20, 2009 – 8:18 am
It’s all over the news… Unfortunately, I wondered away from keep track of this. The last time I was watching, IBM was considering it.
The press release confirms that Oracle is buying Sun Microsystems. I was a little surprised by the news, but not surprised by the move.
I think it’s a great move. I’ve worked with Sun and Oracle for over 14 years and both are great companies with great products. I’m very curious to see how things progress from here.
I also wonder… what’s going to happen to MySQL? Ideally it would be great if it continued to mature with Oracle’s help. But I wonder if Oracle wants to keep it around. Selling it would just be creating competition. Keeping it would give customers an option other than going with Oracle’s RDBMS products.
We should find out soon.
COTD: fuser - identify processes using files or sockets
April 20, 2009 – 7:44 am
Today’s Command Of The Day is the “fuser” command.
Have you ever wanted to unmounted an NFS share, or local filesystem and couldn’t because it was in use? The same applies to CD/DVD’s, PenDrives, etc. Generally, you receive a message similar to the following:
# umount /dev/sdc1
umount: /media/disk: device is busy.
The fuser has many options. The ones I use the most are “-cu”. The “u” option appends the username to the PID and the “c” option is the same as the “m” option, is what you use if you are telling it to check a file, filesystem, or mounted device.
# fuser -cu /dev/sdc1
/dev/sdc1: 8500c(gsmeiers)# ps u -p 8500
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
gsmeiers 8500 0.0 0.2 21588 4488 pts/3 Ss+ 08:25 0:00 bash
Here we see that /dev/sdc1 has one PID that is using it. A further ps shows what that PID is. You can specify either a device name or filesystem when using cu and it will work the same.
You can also, in some versions of fuser, specify a “-v” option to have it show the information about the processes it finds. For example:
$ fuser -cv /dev/sdc1
USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/sdc1: gsmeiers 7367 ..c.. bash
gsmeiers 8500 ..c.. bash
gsmeiers 9534 F.c.. vi
Fuser also has other commands — such as the “-k” command, which can kill all processes that are using a particular filesystem/device. Be careful with this one!
Windows Services for UNIX
April 16, 2009 – 5:40 pm
This is not a Windows blog. However, I wanted to mention a Microsoft product called Windows Services for UNIX. This is a Windows Add-on that provides some UNIX interoperability.
It provides things like; Password Syncronization between Windows and UNIX, a Telnet Server, Remote Shell execution Services, a NFS Server, a NFS Client, and more.
I’ve only used it for a NFS Client. It’s a “cheap” way to add NFS mounting capabilities to a Windows workstation. I run primarily a UNIX (and Linux) environment at home, but I do have a few Windows workstations. With this, I can keep all of my data on a UNIX NFS server and not have to mess with Samba/CIFS to access the data.
I won’t go into much details on how to configure it, but it’s pretty straightforward.
Xenix
April 16, 2009 – 5:04 pm
I remember my first modem. It was a Radio Shack/Tandy 300 Baud Manual Connect modem. I had purchased it on clearance at a local Radio Shack for $15. I brought it home and using the pinouts in the back of the manual for my VTECH Laser 128 Apple compatible computer, proceeded to wire-up a cable to connect the modem to my computer. I don’t remember when, exactly, but this was somewhere around the mid to late 80’s.
I don’t remember where I got the communication software from — most likely from a friend. But soon I was a frequent visitor to many local Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) in the area. For many years I would now use my Laser 128 as a VT100/ANSI Terminal — my gateway to the world. Keep in mind, this was way before the Internet was easily accessed aside from Universities.
One of the BBSes I discovered was a BBS that went by the name of EDSI — Enterprise Data Systems Incorporated. This system was different than the other BBSes that I had been connecting to. All of the other ones shared the same variety of BBS software. EDSI was different.
Here is an excerpt from the NixPub publication of that Era. The NixPub was a list of UNIX systems which provided public access.
09/91 414-734-2499 edsi Appleton WI 3/12/24 24
IBM PS/2 Model 55SX, SCO Xenix 2.3.2; Running STARBASE II Software.
Enterprise Data Systems Incorporated (Non-profit). 100+ local rooms,
PLUS USENET, Multi Channel Chat, 9 ports, $15 yr, flat rate for full
access to net news, mail. The Fox Valley’s only public access Unix
based BBS. Contact: Chuck Tomasi (chuck@edsi.plexus.COM)
Later I went on to meet Andy White, a good friend even to this day. Andy showed me how to “sneak” into the UNIX shell from VI. That little “$” prompt hooked me for life. EDSI was running Xenix 2.3.2 on an IBM PS/2 Model 55SX. What made EDSI so cool, was that it was “connected” to what we call today the “Internet”… Well, kinda.
EDSI was “connected” to the Internet via UUCP. Chuck Tomasi, the sysop of EDSI, worked for a large company in the area that had an Internet connection. Through Chuck’s arrangement, a system at this company would connect up to EDSI, via Modem, periodically to deliver e-mail and new USENET messages, as well as pick up outgoing items.
EDSI wasn’t connected directly to the Internet… So you couldn’t telnet, ftp, etc. However, I did fully utilize a FTP to Email Gateway service that was run my Digital Equipment Corp. to navigate FTP sites and fetch files… all via e-Mail.
For the next several years, I would spend all of my time learning UNIX. I would visit the public library, check out every book on UNIX, and then spent all day and night learning by example.
Recently, my cousin offered me an IBM PS/2 Model 55SX machine that he had laying around. I’m hoping to clean it up, and setup a XENIX system as a tribute to the system that first got me started in the UNIX world.
VirtualBox
April 7, 2009 – 5:35 am
I know Sun’s VirtualBox has been out for awhile now. However, when it came out, I already have VMware running and had plenty of VMs operational. Recently, I upgraded to a new workstation and switched OSes. Instead of going with VMware, I tried VirtualBox.
To be frank, I love it.
Other than a few quirks, it works well — and it’s quite fast. I installed it at first to install the latest build of OpenSolaris. Everything went flawlessly. I then used it to build a Windows 2K VM that I use for some testing. That went flawlessly.
I’ve only scraped the surface of VirtualBox, but some of the commandline tools are very handy. I’ll post some more tips and tricks as I find them.
VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, OpenSolaris, and OSX hosts and supports a nice array of guests.
Renaming files with spaces to dashes
March 21, 2009 – 9:36 am
I was just playing with some old disk images of SCO Xenix to try to get it to boot in an emulator. It was quite frustrating that all of the disk images had spaces in the file names. A few files would have been ok, but I have multiple version of multiple releases for multiple CPU architectures.
I was just about to create a script to rename all the files to change the spaces to underscores. But, since I just woke up a few hours ago, and haven’t had any Caffiene yet, I figured I’d find a script already written.
The first one I found was this one which worked really well.
To use it, you just do a find and -exec the files found to the script. I named my script “dashem”.
$ ls -1
SCO Xenix 386 System V v2.3.4 (Disk B1).vfd
SCO Xenix 386 System V v2.3.4 (Disk N1).vfd
SCO Xenix 386 System V v2.3.4 (Disk N2).vfd
SCO Xenix 386 System V v2.3.4 (Disk X1).vfd
SCO Xenix 386 System V v2.3.4 (Disk X2).vfd
SCO Xenix 386 System V v2.3.4 (Disk X3).vfd
SCO Xenix 386 System V v2.3.4 (Disk X4).vfd$ find . -name “*.vfd” -exec ~/bin/dashem {} \;
$ ls -1
SCO_Xenix_386_System_V_v2.3.4_(Disk_B1).vfd
SCO_Xenix_386_System_V_v2.3.4_(Disk_N1).vfd
SCO_Xenix_386_System_V_v2.3.4_(Disk_N2).vfd
SCO_Xenix_386_System_V_v2.3.4_(Disk_X1).vfd
SCO_Xenix_386_System_V_v2.3.4_(Disk_X2).vfd
SCO_Xenix_386_System_V_v2.3.4_(Disk_X3).vfd
SCO_Xenix_386_System_V_v2.3.4_(Disk_X4).vfd
Beautiful! Just be careful where you run this. Most UNIX filesystems don’t have many (any?) files with spaces. But, you may not want all of your files renamed. You may want to add a few arguments to find such as “-maxdepth”, etc.
Also, it’s generally a good idea, anytime you are going to use find and “-exec” the results, to run the find command without the exec and make sure it’s only finding the files you want to exec.
For example, my previous command without the exec:
$ find . -name “*.vfd”
./SCO Xenix 386 System V v2.3.4 (Disk B1).vfd
./SCO Xenix 386 System V v2.3.4 (Disk N1).vfd
./SCO Xenix 386 System V v2.3.4 (Disk N2).vfd
./SCO Xenix 386 System V v2.3.4 (Disk X1).vfd
./SCO Xenix 386 System V v2.3.4 (Disk X2).vfd
./SCO Xenix 386 System V v2.3.4 (Disk X3).vfd
./SCO Xenix 386 System V v2.3.4 (Disk X4).vfd
I always do the find first and add the “-exec” after I am sure I’m only going to work with the files I really wanted to. Find, without any search criteria will, by default, find every file recursively underneath the starting point.
Firefox 3.0.7 Available
March 5, 2009 – 5:35 pm
Firefox 3.0.7 is available for Solaris according to BlogFinger.
Does anyone remember Internet Explorer and Outlook Express on Solaris Sparc around 1998 or so? It was neat running IE on a Sparc workstation and OE was great for reading USENET. It’s too bad Microsoft discontinued support for it. Fortunately, we now have a great browser called Firefox.
Versions of Firefox 3.0.7 for Linux and OSX can be found here.
Linux.com domain sold
March 5, 2009 – 5:25 pm
Computer world reports that the domain Linux.com has been sold by SourceForge to the Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation has posted a press release with their intentions.
I’m still kicking myself for not going domain-registering-overboard back in the early 90’s registering all the big company domains before the big companies did.
Back in those days you could register a domain name simply by e-mailing a text file to the Internic and receive an invoice a month or two later. Wow, have times changed.