Software Free

Where can I find….

As usually happens, I get an IM or email with a request for a piece of information and either I have that info in a bookmarked or easily referencable location, or it’s time to put on the derby and become Network Jones and the Lost Files of Wendy.  (If you get that reference, you’re as old as I am and love that cartoonist too…)

All nostalgia aside, someone recently asked me a question that before a month ago I would have faked a network connection problem or a heart attack to avoid having to be involved in:  What Oracle products are certified and supported on SLES, all versions.

A Brighter Day

From Solveig’s excellent OpenOffice.org Training, Tips and Ideas blog:

I’ve created some quick-reference sheets. The layout looks like this. Click the image to see it bigger. It’s tables that repeat in three columns on each page. I needed columns so that I could keep the procedure name, in the left column of each table, together with the content in the right side of each table, the steps for the procedure. I also needed a heading at the top that spanned the columns.

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Customers are always looking for ways to get their cost of Linux deployments down lower, and make management easier on their staff. One of, at least in my opinion, the best options they have is to get rid of 3^rd party multi path IO solutions for your SAN and disk management.

I was at one of my customers the other day helping them set up MPIO that is built into SLES 10. While I was there I took a few notes for what we did to get things working for their environment. These same instructions should work with other SAN’s that can handle multi path IO.

SLES 10 supports a lot of SAN’s right out of the box and automatically detects them so you don’t really need an /etc/multipath.conf. My customer likes to be able to change the black list for various types of hardware they use and wanted user-friendly names. To do this I created a multipath.conf for them that looked like the following…

## /etc/multipath.conf file for SLES 10
## You may find a full copy of this file, with comments, here..
## /usr/share/doc/packages/multipath-tools/multipath.conf

Linux is a “unix-like” operating system while Mac OS X is based on BSD Unix, and as such they are basically cousins

There are a number of tools that ship with your Mac by default, and others that are included on the installation media that can be used to remotely administer SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Machines from your Mac.

From the article:

The topic of a bootable external USB Linux hard drive (without dual-boot) is an area that is not well documented. A simple Google search shows many articles, blogs and forum posts written on this topic, all of them discuss setting up dual-boot strategies. While I did not specifically test a USB Thumb Drive and did not intend to address this device in this article, I see no reason why this would not work for Thumb Drives as well. This article was written with the goal of defining an alternative to the traditional dual boot concept and keeping each operating system isolated from each other.

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Many customers have asked about this set of steps, and it’s finally possible to use Broadband cards from all three major vendors on SLED 10 SP1 due to some awesome driver work and the efforts of Greg KH and others.

Setting Up the Cards

1. Here are the steps needed to setup most broadband cards that are available in the Unites States from AT&T, Verizon and Sprint:
2. Open a terminal session and login as root
   Insert the broadband card in your laptop
   Wait a few seconds and type dmesg in the terminal session.

Verifying the Card is Detected

1. The messages below are from a Cingular Option GT Max card - yours should show something different. What we are looking for is if the card gets detected as a USB device or something different and does it load a drivers. Mines loads the Nozomi driver and maps to /dev/noz0. Most other cards map to /dev/ttyUSB0. Check in /dev directory to see if the device gets created.pccard: CardBus card inserted into slot 0

Note: The output should show similar to the below.

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Source: SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Americas

I’ll cop to being a fan of Solveig’s blog “OpenOffice.org Training, Tips and Ideas“, and it’s not all about the tips themselves, it’s the writing too.

Take today’s article about the OO.o Navigator, where she shows you how to make navigating around in your documents easier and more fun.  The three examples of when you would use the Navigator could just have been examples, but one in particular made me laugh out loud:

You think, re-reading the first draft of your novel, “No, the dream sequence should come first to grab people, and I’ll put the conversation between Grimelda and her guru in chapter five after the chariot race.”

I love doing this kind of thing in my own writing, why just say something when you can make the point and make the reader laugh too?  It’s a win/win all around.

Recently a co-worker gave me her new Lenovo X61 and asked me to install SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on it and get “the cube” working. Below are the steps that I took to get Compiz and XGL working.

Step 1: Install SLED 10 SP1. Register with the Novell Customer Center in Yast:
yast2 inst_suse_register
Make sure that you install all updates after registering with NCC.

Step 2: Determine what video chipset you are using. It appears that by default the necessary video drivers are not installed. When I ran hwinfo --gfxcard it did not list the proper name of the card. After “googleing” the laptop model I learned that it had an Intel 965GM chipset. After I installed the right Intel drivers hwinfo showed the model number of the card (I’ll walk you through installing the drivers in the next step):

Vendor: pci 0x8086 "Intel Corporation"
Device: pci 0x2a02 "965GM"
SubVendor: pci 0x17aa "Lenovo"


Having done this a while ago, I appreciate fully what’s necessary to get Mom intro’ed to the Penguin.  Now if I could just get her to stop forwarding me those darned “Send this to 10 people you know or ____ will happen to you” emails.

From the article:

For most computer literate children, a request from mom to get her set up on “this web thing” is met with panic and a feeling of drudgery. Are you about to expose your sweet mother to spam, phishing, viruses, or worse? Or perhaps more frightening, sign your life away as a 24/7 tech support center? Perhaps, but there’s a better way.

Read More.

From the article:

If a server goes down, essential services don’t have to shut down along with it. To prevent downtime, Linux administrators can set up a Heartbeat cluster on Linux. Heartbeat adds the advantage of a cluster to Xen virtual machines (VMs), thus maintaining VMs’ uptime when a server crashes.

This series explains how to configure and use a Heartbeat cluster on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server using a storage area network (SAN) and a Xen VM as a cluster resource. I’ll also discuss the Linux Heartbeat project, whose mission is improving critical services availability in the network environment at critical times. In this, the first installment, I cover installation of a SAN. In the next tip, I’ll cover the configuration of the Oracle cluster file system (OCFS2).

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