May 2009 Archives

27-05-2009 11:27

Dell into Linux

Well I didn't know Dell was that keen.... http://linux.dell.com/projects.shtml


Posted by DaveQB | Permanent Link | Categories: IT

22-05-2009 17:12

RPM db corruption

Ever got an error like this and don't know how to solve it?

[david.ward@install02 /var/lib/rpm]$ sudo rpm -qa|grep rpm
rpmdb: Program version 4.3 doesn't match environment version
error: db4 error(-30974) from dbenv->open: DB_VERSION_MISMATCH: Database environment version mismatch
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 -  (-30974)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm

Well the solution is simply, as root:

rm /var/lib/rpm/__* && rpm --rebuilddb

Posted by DaveQB | Permanent Link | Categories: IT

18-05-2009 10:50

Setup and internal network on VirtualBox

I wanted to setup an internal network using VirtualBox for some testing. The steps to do this are:

  1. Create a VM whats going to be the gateway. On that, setup 1 NIC to be NAT. This will be your route out onto the internet and LAN the Host resides on.
  2. Create a 2nd NIC on this box thats set for internal network and give it a name.
  3. Get this intiail VM setup with its OS and setup a dhcp server onit. I chose dnsmasq.
  4. Now the rest, just create VM's with 1 NIC on intenral networking of the same name.
  5. One last thing, to get out of this netowkr and onto the 'paren't network, Internet, enable ip_forward on the dhcp server VM you setup in step 1 in the /etc/sysctl.conf file. This had me for a little bit.

I know these are brief instructions, it's just something I wanted to get down before I forgot about it.


Posted by DaveQB | Permanent Link | Categories: IT

15-05-2009 11:29

Booting and iso with PXE

A hurried post: http://kleeschulte.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-to-take-bootable-cdrom-image-and.html


Posted by DaveQB | Permanent Link | Categories: IT

14-05-2009 14:03

rpmbuild, linking libraries and md5sum

I was trying to build a simply rpm from a binary only tarball. I had a few issues. One was the fact that when building it raised issues about prelinking. But not fatal. The next was, when it was installed, it would fail due to an md5sum. I knew this was false, as I unpacked the rpm and compared the md5sums with the source library file and the one it complained about in the rpm and they were identical. Finally some seearching found this

http://software-witchcraft.blogspot.com/2008/05/ranting-raving-madness-of-rpmbuild.html

So what I did was went in an ran the prelink -u on all libraries causing trouble in the building and then the library causing troubles on the install. Probably solved [not sure if solved the best way, but solved none-the-less]


Posted by DaveQB | Permanent Link | Categories: IT

14-05-2009 09:19

build-essential for Red Hat based

Want to get the same as apt-get install build-essential on a Red Hat based system? Here it is: yum install gcc gcc-c++ kernel-devel


Posted by DaveQB | Permanent Link | Categories: IT

09-05-2009 10:15

Xen management alternatives

I installed XenServer to play with it yesterday and found to manage it you need a Windows box :(. Here are a list of possible alternatives:http://www.gridvm.org/xen-remote-management-interfaces.html


Posted by DaveQB | Permanent Link | Categories: IT

08-05-2009 17:44

Bash startup file order

So I have briefly looked at this in the past but it came time I had a better look at it. Here is a great page to explain it: http://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/zshbash-startup-files-loading-order-bashrc-zshrc-etc/

From reading that, I did a quick flow chart to help visialise it. I have used this chart to them make chart of systems I am using to troubleshoot start up issues. The source file for this chart is here: http://www.dward.us/files/bash.dia



Bash startup flow chart

Posted by DaveQB | Permanent Link | Categories: IT

05-05-2009 14:45

Access Google calendar with Thunderbird

http://bfish.xaedalus.net/?p=239

I might write this up in more detail as I did for my company on their wiki, but the article above does a very good job in showing one how to do this.


Posted by DaveQB | Permanent Link | Categories: IT