Sometimes, copying big files/volumes with DD takes much time. With this simple script, you ‘ll see the progress of the copying process (in MB). (source)
dd if=/boot.img.gz of=/dev/sda -pg bs=1M 2>&1 | perl -e 'print $i++." MBn" while(read(STDIN,$c,3));'Today, I had to move a Linux Debian Etch virtual machine to another vmware host. No problem, this is a rather simple operation. BUT my eth0 interface just disappeared when I powered the virtual machine on the other host.
I managed to solve this problem by following these rules:
Finally there’s a bugfix for the Linux kernel SATA bug I mentioned in this post. This is how I fixed it on my Ubuntu 7.04 machine:
– Make a file called stopsata in the folder /etc/init.d
The file should contain the following two rules:
#!/bin/sh
echo 1 > /sys/class/scsi_disk/0\:0\:0\:0/stop_on_shutdown
– Make a file called S89stopsata in the folder /etc/rc0.d
The file is a symlink to the previously made script. You can link it with:
ln -s /etc/init.d/stopsata S89stopsata
Attention, Ubuntu 7.04 is using kernel 2.6.20.x. This fix is already included in the kernel but not standard activated yet.
Info/patch about the bug on kernel.org: http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7838
Info about the bug on Ubuntu’s launchpad: Bug #63937
Since the latest network-manager-openvpn doens’t support pkcs12 certs, I needed to convert the pkcs12 key into other keys. This is how I managed to do it.
Extract CA cert, client cert and private key to a single PEM file
> openssl pkcs12 -in client.p12 -out client.pem
Extract client cert to client.cer (no private key or CA cert)
> openssl pkcs12 -in client.p12 -out client.crt -clcerts -nokeys
Extract client private key to client.key (no certs)
> openssl pkcs12 -in client.p12 -out client.key -nocerts
Lately I installed an Ubuntu Dapper LTS 6.06 server with a 3ware 8006-2 sata raid controller. I wanted to use the CLI and the 3DMD raidcontroller software. So I downloaded the software on the website, installed it, but it just refused to work, complaining about wrong drivers. I suppose the drivers into kernel 2.6.15.x are good enough, in fact they are _to_ good/new. So I started to find a solution. I found one by downloading the newest CLI version 9.4.1.
The 3DMD tool wouldn’t work either, so I tried to install the 3DM2 tool. It failed because the installer didn’t generate a .pem file. So I searched some repositories with 3DM2 binaries and found a debian based package.
wget http://ftp.debian-unofficial.org/debian/pool/restricted/3/3ware-3dm2-binary-i386/3ware-3dm2-binary_9.3.0.4-1duo1_i386.deb
I just had do install it with dpkg and it works perfectly now.
The guys from I Make Things are amazing! It’s a sort of blog where some friends are making weekend projects. This weekend (month) they wanted to go to space using a weather balloon to reach 100k feat. You can watch the video podcast about how they made the balloon.
The latest stable CentOS release (4.4) isn’t compatible with some “older” software (compiled against other depencies). So today an application I wanted to install broke up. “Unable to find libstdc++.so.5 …” cause version libstdc++.so.6 is the standard installed version.
You can easily solve this by installing the CentOS C++ compatibility library:
yum -y install compat-libstdc++-296 compat-libstdc++-33
Finally I found some time to write a little “partyreport” of the Skynet Groovecity event on Saturday November 18th. I was looking forward to this party cause I was getting sick of doing _crap_ parties all the time (I mean crap music or dj-ing (or do I just expect to much?)).
At 20H, I picked up a friend of mine. During the trip to the Brussels KartExpo, we listened to the program Switch on StuBru (a great warm up before this party). Twenty minutes later, we arrived at the party. Very well organised, was my first impression.
The first artist we wanted to see was “System-D” in the D&B room. After half an hour of shaking, we decided to go for the smooth house grooves. I heard the name “Silicone Soul” somewhere before, but this was their first liveset I tasted, nice! I love their UK deephouse sound. Ready for some techno beats? Our next stop was the techno room with “The Hacker”. This was the most impressive room with some big projector screens and nice light effects. The second D&B DJ for that night was DJ-Krust, nice, but a little bit to much Reggae influences (certainly after The Hacker). Ok, now we were heading for some more grooves with “Martin Solveig”. The set of the French man just made the crowd crazy. His performance was unbelievable, and all alone! Perfect beatmixes, loops, samples and lots of creative things with electronic music. Almost satisfied, we ended the night with a perfect set of “Sven Vath”. I think I’m starting to like minimal very much. 🙂
I expected a lot of this event, but it was even better then I hoped!
If you are a Gnome user, just press Alt-F2 and enter “gegls from outer space”. I didn’t know this one. 🙂
Yesterday afternoon a friend and I build a sort of portable ignition for a “bigger project” which I can’t mention for the moment.
First we had to find a suitable coil, so we drove to 6 garages. At least we found a (smaller) coil from a mower in a garden shop. Based on an ignition scheme from a car combined with an NE555 timer chip and a 9V battery we made the first design. We succeeded in making some little blue sparks. Not suitable for a good ignition. After a while (and blowing up an NE555) we found that the transistor which we used was to light. After some optimalisation we came to a nice result -> sparks with a length of 3mm.
Isn’t it time to build a bigger Tesla Coil? 🙂
