Vote!

Get out there and vote! It's a very important part of the function of our government and maybe if more people voted regularly we could force some repercussions on politicians who do the wrong things.

64 bit flash plugin for firefox 3

I have had a ton of trouble getting the flash plugin to work for 64 bit firefox 3. I'm using opensuse 10.3.

It turns out the trick is that nspluginwrapper only works on the actual library, not the link to the library. Most instructions I've seen on the net point to running
nspluginwrapper -i /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so
but that didn't work. It either gave no output or it said something about it not being a valid NPAPI library or something.

The finally solution for me was this:
# nspluginwrapper --verbose --install /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so
Install plugin /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so
into /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so

Restarted firefox and it worked perfectly.

Solar cell revolution.

A 12 year old in Oregon has developed a 3D solar cell that he believes uses 500 times more light than a standard 2D cell and 9 times as much light as a standard 3D cell. 12. I was pretty damned bright when I was 12, but I sure as hell didn't do anything as cool as this with it.

Solaris 10 restore

Here's one that surprised me quite a bit. I had a server that was toast and had to burn it down and rebuild it. The first restore I did wasn't set up right, but I didn't know that at the time. When the server eventually came up, it seemed to work just fine. It's an all in one server so it does apache, coldfusion, mysql, dns, sendmail, and some other apps. All of those appeared to be functioning correctly, so I went on to work on other stuff that was switched as part of the disaster recovery plan. Then I went to check something on the production server and found that in the local zone running the webserver and most of the rest of the stuff, I was missing some pretty seriously important and low level commands from the OS. Things like vi, touch, uptime, and a bunch of others. Baffling. Most baffling for me was how it was running at all with so many low level OS bits missing.

Turns out with netbackup I needed to check "overwrite files" and "rename hard links" but not the softlinks. The hard links hadn't been checked the first time through, so it didn't restore any of the hard link files. Or at least, thats the nearest explanation I can come up with, because checking that and redoing the restore (which was a nightmare in its own right that I'll write up later) seems to have fixed everything just fine.

Solar links

Here's a nice informative website with a great solar calculator. It'll tell you roughly how much potential your roof has for generating solar energy. It doesn't take into account shading, but other than that it's pretty accurate at least for my situation. Roof Ray


And here's a little article about nanoantenna solar collectors which may be a great technology to look into soon.

There's also some great news from MIT about using colored filters to make current PV technology drastically more efficient.

And a great new solar concentrator system that should be much more efficient than the old style systems.

Solar financing

Well. I finally heard back from my mortgage guy. He got me better deals than I could get from anywhere else, but he still was short $9,000 of the minimum I needed to do the solar installation. So...until the housing market goes up again or I somehow drastically increase the equity I have in this house I'll have to wait to get solar installed. It's sad, but it was likely to happen.

In November there will be a vote in congress to continue the solar incentives. If that fails then it's likely I won't be getting solar installed for a very long time, but everybody seems to think that it's a shoe in. I'm just so used to be ridiculously disappointed by all politicians that I can't really bring myself to believe it'll continue.

solar and roof readiness

I had a roofer come out and check out my roof. He said it is 2 roofs, and that the newest one was in a really good shape and pretty new. He also mentioned I should get an extra downspout in my huge long north roof. Probably a good idea. So that means that as far as my house and everything go, I'm set to get solar installed.

Confirmed that REC Solar installs their systems on posts which are flashed to the roof, so when the roof needs to be re-done they can just take the panel frames down, re-roof, then put them right back on the same mounting poles they were on in the first place. Good to know. The roof will likely need to be replaced before the solar.

I still need to figure out what to do with the black walnut tree next to the house, so I'm going to try to get a tree specialist to come take a look at it and let me know how much it would cost to move it, trim it, cut it down, whatever.

I was discussing with a friend what I should do for shading on the south side of the house, especially if I have to cut the tree down. One of the things we came up with is to put in trellis mounted to the outside eave facing. Then I'd have trellis and some sort of vine growing along that side of the house. It has the disadvantage of blocking the house somewhat from sunlight during the winter, but in the summer it would work great. Another option is putting solar water heating along the wall, but while I'd like to have solar water heat also it wouldn't really do what I want it to do for shading the whole wall. For either solution (or some combination of both) I still need some sort of shading arrangement for the windows so that they are shaded all summer, but receive sunlight all winter. I'm not sure what I'm going to about it. Either way...those aren't on this year or probably next years agendas...unless I suddenly become very wealthy.

Solar financing

I have no solid numbers for this, just vague assumptions based on looking at REC Solars page about Solar financing and what I've talked with my mortgage guy about in the past. So...this is my preliminary financing plan....

The 8kW REC system is going to cost me about $26,000 (probably a bit less, I'm not sure how much the monitor I want costs yet). I can get about $23,000 out of a home equity loan because I haven't owned the house long and because the housing market is tanked so bad at the moment. So I'm going to get the largest home equity loan I can get, then finance about $150/month worth of additional loan. That should be enough extra money to finish doing a few other things around the house like putting in a sidewalk and stairs, finishing the electrical, dealing with the walnut tree, etc.

So that's my current plan, now to see if I can make that work. Then I'll be in a tight financial situation for about 9 months and then I should be ok again. It'll mean I'm back to paying for my house for 30 years, and it might mean that I have to take a non-fixed loan which I really dislike, but all of that is fixable in the future as long as I'm clever and attentive. I intend to be both of those. heh.

If that all works, I'm quite a ways down my list of things to do for the house. In fact, I'd be down to doing almost luxury sorts of things. Solar hot water heater (if I can even do that with PV on the house), hot tub, furniture, audio/video update...really pretty much just luxury items. Oh...and getting an electric heating/cooling system for the house...hopefully a heat exchanger/dehydrator for cooling and type 2 radiant heat for heating. Oh yeah! And more insulation and weather proofing of the whole house...but I don't think that'll be very expensive, more just work intensive.

I need to find a good general contractor/handyman kind of person. Well...really I should just learn how to do all this stuff myself. But for me to feel comfortable doing that I'd want someone competent to teach me, and that doesn't seem to be an option unless I start flying my dad out here every few months for a couple of years.

Solar estimates

I finally got through the final analysis of the current estimates last night. Here are the results:
One company came out and did an evaluation but never got back to me with an estimate. One company had a rep come out and basically told me that my roof needed work before the solar could be installed and even then they could only get a 2kw system installed even though I mentioned trimming back the tree next to the house. I'm getting the roof inspected as soon as I can to make sure that isn't correct. And I still need to verify a couple of things but this looks to be the end result.

Of the three companies that have been cooperative and helpful these are the numbers:
Rec Solar 8000W $25,000 including all fees and taxes but not including tax rebate.

IPS 9900W $38,115 plus taxes and fees (~3% of total) not including tax rebate

SRE 8000W $30,174 including all fees and taxes but not including tax rebate

So the question is still how much financing I can afford, but it's unlikely I'll decide to spend roughly $14,000 in order to get an additional 1.9kW of power. I'd love to have the additional power, but the payoff just isn't worth the expense, especially with all the great solar technology that is being invented right now.

I don't think I've mentioned the problem with the tree here, so here's a bit of info about that.
I have a black walnut tree about 10' from my south facing roof. It's not huge, but it does shade the roof where I want there to be solar panels. So it'll have to be trimmed severely, cut down or moved before I get the solar installed. I'd really rather not kill a tree that I don't have to kill, and I don't think I can afford to have it moved, so I'm hoping the amount it needs to be trimmed won't kill it and won't make it completely idiotic looking. However...black walnet isn't really a tree I'd have chosen to put in my yard. They don't provide enough shade for how big they are, they don't have leaves enough of the year, and they drop annoying nuts in the yard. On the other hand, it's kind of fun having squirrels running across the roof. That would annoy most people, but I think it's funny.

Shade is a tricky thing with solar panels. Each panel is made up of groups of chips. And then the panels are in groups like the chips. So, if you get a spot of complete darkness that covers enough chips it will shut down not just the chip that is covered but the group of chips it is in. If enough groups shut down, then the panel shuts down. If enough panels shut down, the the whole group of panels will shut down. So if you have even a small amount of very deep shade on the panels, there is a chance that from that chunk of deep shadow you could get a pretty significant percentage of your solar array to stop producing energy.

The reason this happens is that each subset has to produce a certain amount of power in order to trigger it's connection to the others. If the chip doesn't produce enough power to get beyond that threshold it never turns on and so no power flows out of it. That scales up in the same way all the way up to the entire array.

So now I am waiting for verification of a couple of things, then I have to start trying to get the financing and hope that the estimates don't change much or at all, and that they are accurate and I can afford to pay for solar. Otherwise...time to start saving up significant amounts of money.

Solar home visits

All 5 of the companies I've contacted have been out to my house now to do the initial site inspection.
REC Solar
Standard Renewable Energy
Cool Solar
Solar Independent Power Systems
Namaste Solar

I've talked to each company about the house, they've taken measurements of the roof and we've talked about how much of the roof I want to use, which parts are the most efficient to use, etc. Some of them did Solmetric readings and pictures to use in a computer program to put together a pretty accurate estimate of how much the shading around my house will affect my energy production at various times of the year and times of the day.

The Solmetric camera and the device that goes with it are very cool. The old style was pretty inaccurate and involved sort of getting on the roof and making some measurements and guesses about shading. Then a device with a big domed top was invented and you basically set it down in the right orientation and used a piece of chalk to mark out where there was shade at the moment, then did some correlation with the date and time to figure out what the effects on different dates and times would be. This is a very very clever little device. Then someone said "Hey...why don't we just take a picture of that, and build a computer program that takes all that data and does the projection? That would be radically faster and more accurate." So that's what they do. And what you get, with this great piece of software from NREL is a very accurate estimate using actual shading data from your actually situation to tell you with a high accuracy exactly how much solar energy every part of your useable roof will get through out the year.

So...one of the companies needs to come back out and do that, one didn't really even bother to offer and just sort of said "I can't see getting more than a 2kw system out of your roof" and the others have already done the pictures. So I'm waiting for the 4 final estimates then I'll write up all of the information I have about all of the options.

It'll be quite a bit of data...I'm hoping to organize it a bit better than what I've been doing so far.

Oh...and there's a chance that I'm a bit confused about the devices for the shading thing. I think the Solmetric is merely one brand of shading calculation equipment and that the camera used isn't special, just the device set up with the bubble on top and then the camera is a normal camera used in just the right way. I never remembered to get that clarified and the short research I did into it online hasn't been conclusive yet.

I'm likely going to have to cut my black walnut tree back quite a bit. I'm ok with that, I just hope it's not too bad. It doesn't seem to shade the roof that much to me except for 2 branches, but I'm certainly not an expert and will wait for the results of the magic shade calculation device.

Solar related

I've got a rep from Standard Renewable Energy (formerly Sunflower) coming out to the house today to give me an estimate, then next week someone from Namaste Solar will be out. After that I'll be making an appointment for Independent Power Systems to come out for an estimate. I need to find out financing options from all of them since the housing market here is so messed up that I can't get enough money to do the solar install out of a house refinance at the moment. So...if none of the solar companies can give me financing that is affordable, I'll have to wait until my house is valuable enough to get me a big enough home equity loan to pay for it. But at least I'll have gotten the specific estimates from the companies and know which system I want to be installed and by whom.

Hopefully the amazing mortgage guy I talk to is correct and this will be a short term dip here and my house will be back to it's most recent value in a few months. I wish my house were actually valued the way Zillow.com says it should be, but my tax assessment was as low as the current Realtor assessed value. As he pointed out, the foreclosure rate during the Great Depression was something like 34%, and even now at the worst its been in a long time, its about 4%. Of course, it appears the average house value in the US is plunging faster than it did during the depression...so maybe that 34% is just in the future yet.

More Solar information.

This isn't going to be very organized unfortunately. This is information I've received so far by doing more research on the web, talking to Jeff Martin@REC Solar and especially from this great site Solar Dave. He's even offered to interview me once I get my system installed, which would be interesting.

At this point, I'm waiting to get estimates from a few other companies before deciding on what I'm getting installed and by who. And of course...financing. If I can't get financing that suits my current income none of this will be possible. I'm still searching around for options and talking to my incredibly amazing mortgage guy.

So here's a chunk of info:
Getting the rebate through Xcel requires that you sign a 20 year contract of some sort. The implication I've heard/seen so far is that you have to agree not to go off grid or install power storage in your house for 20 years. It makes sense...they are giving a gigantic amount of other peoples money in the solar installation rebates, and that money is given to them with the agreement that they use it to promote renewable energy sources. So basically Xcel is paying me a bunch of money to stay attached to the grid and continue generating energy via my solar panels and putting it back into the grid. I'm ok with that. I'd rather have some sort of storage so that if the grid goes down when the solar isn't producing enough I still have power, but maybe some sort of compromise solution is possible. I'll have to find out from Xcel and from the contract when I see it.

I've seen estimates that having an electric car or plugin hybrid increases your system size by about 1kW. Of course, most of the time you're going to be recharging the car when the solar isn't producing, so the 1kW is an approximation for how much additional power you'll have to generate with the system when the sun is available to offset charging the car at night.

I've been looking at the Kyocera, Sanyo, BP and Mitsubishi panels. This is just my take on things, but it looks to me that the Sanyos are the best of the bunch with the Kyocera and BP panels being tied for second and then the Mitsubishi panels are in last. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they're all good panels. Here's why I rank them in my mind the way I do:

Sanyo
HIP-195BA are hybrid panels of single crystalline silicon surrounded by amorphous silicon layers. This apparently makes them higher efficiency and gives them the ability to generate energy at lower light levels. If I remember correctly they are more strongly affected by high temperatures, but where I live that isn't a big deal since it doesn't get hot enough to show a difference. Getting comparable efficiency numbers out of the panel makers seems to be somewhat difficult, but these are supposed to be 17% efficient. Higher efficiency means higher energy generation per square foot, so in theory I'm maximizing the amount of power I can generate using higher efficiency panels. The problem being that they are $7.69/DC Watt. The cells are 52"x35"

Kyocera
KD205 GX-LP are polysilicon and have an efficiency of 14.2%. They have a cost of $7.00/DC Watt so quite a bit cheaper than the Sanyos. The cells are 59"x39". So not only are they larger than the Sanyos, they are less efficient.

BP
I haven't looked into these very well, I've been told they are pretty close to the Kyoceras.

Mitsubishi
PV-UO185MFS are 13% efficient, they cost $7.08/DC Watt and are 65"x33". So more expensive, larger and less efficient than the Kyoceras. Apparently people that buy them are buying them for the name.

Xcels rebate is $4.50/Watt or something like that.

Hmmm...that's all I've got at the moment.

Solar power for my house

I recently found out there is a company already doing solar power installations in my area called REC Solar
so I called to talk to one of their sales people. I'm definitely planning to go with solar power on my house, but I had expected the price to be quite a bit larger than it is, so I'd expected it to be several years down the road. However, with this information and a call to my brilliant financial guy, it turns out that there is a good chance I could get this done right now without destroying my finances. So I'm very excited about this. I'm calling today to get the installation estimate done which will give me more specific information.

Here's the info I have from REC Solar so far.

He said it sounded like I was using about 600 kWh electricity per month, which turns out to be drastically too low. But with that as a base, he said that a 3 kW system would provide about 2/3rds of the power I use. Apparently that's about what they shoot for in their installations. I said I wanted at least 100% solar because I was expecting my electricity use to go up in the future due to switching to an electric furnace. He said that was good planning and that I should mention it during the installation estimate. Anyway, here are the cost figures he then gave me (these are very general estimates).

3 kW
$23,000 cost - $13,000 rebate - $2,000 tax credit
6 kW
$16000-$17000 after rebate - $2000 tax credit
9 kW
$22000-$23000 after rebate - $2000 tax credit.

10kW is the largest installation I believe they do, and I might end up needing to get that. Either way, while that's still a lot of money, even the most expensive system from REC is about 1/4 the price I thought I was going to have to pay. Hopefully I'll find out soon.

warranty 10 year from rec on the installation
25 year warranty on panels (this includes specifics like 90% of original power generation at 10 years, 80% at 20 or something like that)
15 year warranty on inverter


The way I understand this to work at this point is that the solar panels will be installed on the roof (happily I have a good quality fairly new roof) and the power then run through an inverter and connected to my main house panel. I remain attached to the local power grid and I'm apparently not allowed to use any sort of power storage devices while attached to the grid.

The panels generate electricity during the day, likely a lot more than I use, and the power company pays me at some very low rate for whatever power I put into the grid. Then when there is no electricity generated by the panels, or when I use more than the panels generate, I pull electricity from the grid at the normal ridiculous power/kW price. Happily electricity is almost always more expensive during the day than during the dark, so the difference in cost will be somewhat in my favor. Still, it's very likely that I'll have to pay the power company money every month anyway. We'll see how that turns out.

There are many questions I still need to ask, details of the installation, options for equipment, shading, all kinds of things. One I need to know is if monitoring software/hardware is included in the installation. I'll definitely want a good power monitoring solution. I have to assume that when I have to get the house re-roofed that the solar will all have to come down and be re-installed. That seems like a fairly significant future cost. I suppose I should consider getting a bio-diesel generator also for times when the grid and it's dark.

If I'm really lucky I'll be able to get a refinance that gives me enough money to install the solar, fix the other small electrical problems, change some things about the plumbing, and get the rock and tile work done that I need. But that might be asking too much.

More as the story develops!

Congratulations are in order.

A very good friend of mine graduated from Med School this weekend. An exceptional being without question, he and his extraordinary wife managed to raise one of the coolest children I've ever met while she worked to support their family and he was in med school. They impress the shit out of me and I'm honored to have them as friends. They are both way smarter than me with at least twice the memory and their kid is likely to become an incarnation of the godhead at any minute.

The Matrix of the Rings

Agent Elrond: As you can see, we've had our eye on you for some time now, Mr. Baggins. It seems that you've been living two lives. In one life, you're Mr. Baggins, innocent traveller, you have a hole back in the Shire, you pay your taxes, and you help your uncle with his parties and affairs.. The other life is lived in adventures, where you go by the heroic alias Ringbearer and are guilty of transporting stolen artifact quality magic rings. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not. I'm going to be as forthcoming as I can be, Mr. Baggins. You're here because we need your help. We know that you've been contacted by a certain individual, a man who calls himself Gandalf. Now whatever you think you know about this man is irrelevant. He is considered by many authorities to be the most dangerous man alive. My colleagues believe that I am wasting my time with you but I believe that you wish to do the right thing. We're willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start and all that we're asking in return is your cooperation in bringing a known wizard to justice.

Frodeo: Yeah. Wow, that sounds like a really good deal. But I think I got a better one. How about I give you the finger -

Agent Elrond: Uhm.

Frodeo: - and you put my ring back.

Agent Elrond: Uhm, Mr. Baggins. You disappoint me.

Frodeo: You can't scare me with this Nazgul crap. I know my rights. I want my ring.

Agent Elrond: Tell me, Mr. Baggins, what good is a ring if you're unable to wear it... You're going to help us, Mr. Baggins, whether you want to or not.

problems with imapsync

Here's something I hadn't thought about doing initially, but when I've got a long term problem, I'll try to post the steps I take to resolve it here also. That'll help me organize things and keep the full solution set for problems I've had around somewhere. So far what I've had to do was first get over a fairly stupid mistake I made, and then figure out how to get the right version of Mail-IMAPClient installed. Imapsync doesn't use the 3.0X Mail-IMAPClient so that was a problem for a while. But the stupid mistake was my misreading the version numbers on the distribution site for imapsync. I took 1.99 to mean 1.9.9 which of course would be a newer version of the software than 1.2.5.2. Unfortunately for me, the real version numbers were 1.99 and 1.252 that I was looking at...clearly 252 is a much higher version number than 99. Sometimes I hate my brain.

Anyway...here's the problems I'm having. I've posted them to the projects freshmeat web page but I have no idea if that is a reasonable approach to getting help or not. Hopefully I'll find solutions to these problems and post them. I've got a huge amount of email I'd like to upload to gmail, and having "most" of it upload isn't nearly as good.

I've got imapsync 1.252 on an opensuse10.3 box. I finally got it to upload to gmail, but I'm having these problems:
+ NO msg #42916 [0qNSHzC8X0ZHBOB9O6qNww:1049] in Sent06
+ Copying msg #42916:1049 to folder Sent06
flags from : [\Seen]["19-Dec-2006 11:01:46 -0600"]
parse_headers want an ARRAY ref
Couldn't append msg #42916 (Subject:[0]) to folder Sent06: Error trying to append: 14796 NO Unable to append message to folder (Failure)

That happens to quite a few messages on initial attempt to sync.

Then this happens when I attempt to run it again:
Warning : no header used or found for message 17524
no header so we ignore this message


I've got another folder that gets to either
the From [Folder] Parse 1 line or the To [Folder] Parse 1 line or actually starts to upload the first message before it crashes with no further output or error messages.

adult content

Oh, if anybody wanders across this and wonders why it says there is adult content and yet there really doesn't seem to be, I thought I'd put something up to explain that.

I initially clicked it because I tend to use what some people call "harsh language" a lot. And given my attitude about nudity and pr0n there is always the chance that I'll put something that wouldn't be particularly work safe for some people. So I thought having the adult content flag set would be a reasonable thing to do.

Also, I have an idea kicking around in the back of my head that is somewhat rebellious and dislikes the idea that people have to label something "adult content" because of the ridiculous ideas of propriety in the US. I really hate censorship and the idea that one group of people attempts to keep information from another group. I fully understand that parents want to be able to control what their children see and interact with. I don't agree with it, but I'm not a parent and I'm not about to try to tell anybody how to raise their children, other than the obvious that abusing them is bad. M'kay? So I somewhat set that adult content flag to indicate how stupid it is that such a thing is needed, but mostly just so that people have no legitimate reason to bitch if I decide to post something that is actually adult content.

I also got off into a giant rant about censorship and people pushing their beliefs onto others, but decided to delete it. I tend to over state stuff when I get to ranting, and while I won't put a lot of my opinion on issues in this blog, I'd rather keep away from ranting on here as much as possible.

google apps

One of the best choices I've made recently was to stop hosting smtp for my domain on my server at home. A friend who always seems to be ahead of me in the computer world told me one day that he'd switched to using google apps for smtp for his domain and that it was great.

I'd been having trouble for a while with my smtp server because it is on a cable mode and so it's IP address changes occasionally, plus almost all rbls have those IP ranges designated as bad sources of spam, so a lot of my email was blocked as coming from spammer IPs. It was annoying. So one day it was causing trouble again, and I thought back to what my friend had said about google apps and just decided to give it a shot, figuring at worst I'd just have to switch my dns settings back to pointing to my home server.

It was amazingly easy to set up. Here's the link:
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/resources/setup/

Now I don't have to worry about whether my email is being black listed by IP (assuming google can fix this problem http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/27/0045242), and I don't have to worry about my sendmail server being hacked, or my home server crashing, or the cable connection going down, etc. Google is always on, always answering, and much faster than my server could ever be.

Also, I've got access to my email through a web interface from anywhere I can get to the net. Very nice, and something I never got around to rigging up on my own server.

The only problem I've found is kind of confusing. I use thunderbird for my email application, and occasionally gmail just refuses to accept my credentials, even though they have been working all along. So I'll signin and check my email and then start surfing or something, and after a while thunderbird will say that the imap server responded that it needs my password or that my password was wrong. Well, it can't have been wrong, because it worked and it hasn't changed since then.

Now, I have no idea if the problem is with gmail, my google apps setup, or more likely a glitch between Thunderbird and gmail. Either way, it only comes up occasionally and it only lasts for short periods of time. Its not even bad enough that I've bothered trying to find what is causing it.

The only other problem I've had is that I haven't found a good way to get my many years of email archives up to gmail. My friend recommended imapsync, but I've not been able to get it to work. It says it can't connect to the imap server on my home server, but I can connect by hand, through thunderbird, or through an "openssl s_client -connect <server>" from the command line. So I know the imap connection works, I just seem to be doing something wrong with imapsync. Hopefully I'll find a different tool that works for me, or I'll figure out how imapsync works and get that working. I tried using thunderbird to just copy the folders up to gmail, but it just takes too long and eventually it gets disconnected and then I don't know which files have been copied and which haven't.

Yes...it's a lot of email. In theory I've got every non-spam email I've received since I got my first real unix login in 1992 and all of the email I've sent since about 1996. However, I don't believe that's true anymore. I think somewhere along the lines I whacked an archive I shouldn't have because I haven't seen them in a while. So...it may be significantly less than it used to be, but still much more than I want to move by hand or in small bunches.

I've still got my webserver running on my home server just so I have a convenient and local place to post my photos. I use Gallery2 which I like quite a bit, even though I can never get the damned upload functionality to work, and always have to put all the pictures up on the server, then upload them to Gallery2 via "local directory upload".

big bunch of random stuff

cold fusion has a file named registry that you can set the admin password to blank and then reset the admin passwd.

---------------------------------------------------
When cloning one sun machine to another with different hardware:
boot from cd/dvd and partition the drives correctly
newfs the drives
ufsrestore from the tape
ufsdump the new drives
modify /etc/hosts /etc/nodename /etc/hostname.<eth#> for new info
ok boot cdrom -s
...
# mount /dev/dsk/c0t3d0s0 /a <--- t3 is being used as an example only
# cd /tmp/dev
# tar cvfp - . | ( cd /a/dev; tar xvfp - )
# cd /tmp/devices
# tar cvfp - . | ( cd /a/devices; tar xvfp - )
# cd /tmp/root/etc
# cp path_to_inst /a/etc/path_to_inst

NOTE: The vfstab file may need to be edited at this time to make
any
changes to the target address

# cd /tmp/root; umount /a; halt
...
ok boot -rv

------------------------------------------------------------------
find cd rom on solaris
cfgadm -al | grep CD
then as an example of vfstab:
/dev/dsk/c1t6d0s0 - /cdrom hsfs - no -

--------------------------------------------

setting up mirrors on v210s
format drives to make partitions the same
metadb -a -c3 -f c1t0d0s7
metadb -a -c3 c1t1d0s7
vi /etc/lvm/md.tab and list mirrors
metainit -f d11
metainit -f d21
metainit -f d31
metainit -f d41
metainit d10
metainit d20
metainit d30
metainit d40
edit vfstab to boot to meta devices instead of slices and preserve / slice vfstab entry
metaroot d10
init 6
metainit d12
metainit d22
metainit d32
metainit d42
metattach d10 d12
metattach d20 d22
metattach d30 d32
metattach d40 d42
metastat d10
swap -l
dumpadm
dumpadm -d /dev/md/dsk/d20
metastat | grep -v "State: Okay"

If you have to boot back to the slice instead of the metadevice remember that /etc/system has a line about the root boot device or use "metaroot /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0"

---------------------------------------------------------
jobs is the command to see fg/bg jobs
smpatch analyze to get a list of patchs available.
showrev -p then grep for patch number to see current patchs
updatemanager is the patch manager on solaris 10
<cfgadm -c [un]configure c1> configs or unconfigs device list c1 shown by
command <cfgadm -al>
devfsadm finds new hardware attached
iostat -En displays all device errors in descriptive format
-----------------------------------------
netbackup commands:
bpps -a shows all running processes
jnbSA is the graphical interface to netbackup
bp.kill_all to kill all processes (not elegant)
get_license_key to add/delete/list licenses
sgscan to scan for devices

---------------------------------------

When mysql gets the error:
"Database page corruption on disk or a failed
InnoDB: file read of page"
delete the ibdata1, ib_logfile* and then restart mysql and it should work.
There may also be:
"Warning: an inconsistent page in the doublewrite buffer" errors.

----------------------

mrtg for throughput thru switchs

robtest - netbackup robot test software

--------------

ma - to mark a spot in vi
d'a - deletes back to that spot

Symantec netbackup on Solaris 10

My current backup server is an E450 (I know...control your covetousness) running solaris 10 with symantec netbackup enterprise server on it attached to a robot. When I started all of this I was running 6.0. During the process of figuring out what was going on with the server I upgraded to MP6. I was doing a lot of stuff at the same time, which complicated things later (yes...I know...shut up) but this is what happened and how it was resolved.

I used updatemanager to perform an update. One of the patches was 120011-14 which was a manual only kernel patch. I also got out a standalone tape drive to add to my robot so I could start doing offsite backups in a more reliable/organized way.

After all the patches were done, I rebooted the server and when it came up it no longer recognized the robot. After a ton of looking around we determined that it wasn't generating the SG drivers because NetBackup wasn't recognizing that the robot was there. I could probe it from the boot prompt, I could write to it and read from it (well, the tape drive in it) from the command line, but the NetBackup software just would not recognize it.

So after doing all of the troubleshooting I knew how to do for it, and all I had time to do with a consultant I work with at times, I ended up spending a couple of hours a day several days in a row on progressively higher level tech support with Symantec. Here's the things we did to try to regenerate the SG drivers. I must have gone through various versions of this 20 times or so all with no success.

(DO NOT PERFORM THESE COMMANDS WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT YOU ARE DOING! )
cp /kernel/drv/st.conf /kernel/drv/st.conf.`date +%m%d%y_%H%M%S`
cp /kernel/drv/st.conf /kernel/drv/st.conf.`date +%m%d%y_%H%M%S`
cp /kernel/drv/st.conf /kernel/drv/st.conf.`date +%m%d%y_%H%M%S`
mv /kernel/drv/sg.conf /kernel/drv/sg.conf.`date +%m%d%y_%H%M%S`
cp /etc/devlink.tab /etc/devlink.tab.`date +%m%d%y_%H%M%S`
cd /kernel/drv/
vi st.conf
cd /etc
vi devlink.tab
cd /usr/openv/volmgr/bin/driver
../sg.build all -mt 15 -ml 2
cat st.conf >> /kernel/drv/st.conf
rem_drv sg
./sg.install
sgscan


At this point I was waiting for 3rd level or 4th level tech support to call back and it just kept bugging me that I'd done a kernel update right before this happened. I searched the kernel patch and couldn't find anything that seemed to have anything to do with the sg drivers but it just kept bugging me. So while I was waiting I uninstalled the patch and rebooted. Just as it was coming up and before I could retry the set of commands to regenerate the sg commands Symantec called back and we went through a slightly modified version of the commands above and this time the sg drivers were there, and after a bit of re-configuring everything worked just fine.


The difference in the last set of commands is that the last time all we ran was:
sg.build all
mv /kernel/drv/sg.conf /kernel/drv/sg.conf20Mar08
./sg.install
sgscan

And there they were...so it seems unlikely that it was the "sg.build all" instead of the way I ran it before, but I can't rule that out. I guess I would suggest trying it instead of removing the patch first, but expect to have to remove the patch to get it to work.

Some commands I learned/relearned/whatever during this process:
devfsadm
Maintains /dev

tpconfig -d
Shows NetBackup tape configuration

/usr/openv/volmgr/bin/scan
Shows detailed tape drive information

cfgadm -al > cfgadmout.txt
Shows dynamically reconfigurable resources listing with attachment points

iostat -En
Gives a descriptive output of all errors reported by terminal, disk, tape and cpu utilization.

Jeffrey Rowland and his All Star Band of Ragamuffins

I'm going to start off this probably pointless blog with the highest of high praises for the phenomenal people at TopatoCo.

Really, all the people that manage to keep up funny, creative, interesting, artistic, etc webcomics impress me. And entertain me a great deal.

Mostly what you'll see here if you're bored enough to look will be things I've learned about computers. Some of it simple, hopefully some of it will be complex. Occasionally I'll probably spout a bunch of nonsense about some subject that's bugging me. Feel free to ignore it.

nmap -sV -n your.computer.name
Probes open ports on the computer and reports what it finds and what it thinks is living there.

amap -bd server port
Probe a port on a server and return the ASCII banner and a hex dump of the response from the port.

egrep "foo|bar"
Grep for logically ORd things. Finds any line with foo OR bar on it.