VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-0 Disk Group ...

Today a colleague asked me about a strange situation when adding new disks to a existing disk group in AIX 7.1. He had two new disks from two different storages. The first disk could be added easily as always:

# vxdg -g oradg adddisk emc_clariion1_79

But when he tried to add the second disk he became the following error:

# vxdg -g oradg adddisk emc_clariion0_80
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-0 Disk Group oradg has only standard disks and trying to add cloned disk to diskgroup.Mix of standard and cloned disks in a diskgroup is not allowed. Please follow the vxdg (1M) man page.

Migrate/Move PPs in AIX LVM

Today I needed to replace a disk which is used by AIX LVM and which wasn't mirrored. Of course all data should remain.
The first thing I did was to list all volumes on the specific disk (in my case hdisk2):

Apache virtual host

My company asks me to create two new websites. One for the internal intranet another one for the internal blog. For the intranet drupal should be used and for the blog wordpress should be used. To sum it up: two new websites accessable under:

http://intranet.company.com
http://blog.company.com

Configure Nagios statusmap with User-supplied coords

The statusmap is most useful if you use the User-supplied coords function (imho). This article covers the following topics:

Add coords to the host definition
Set the User-supplied coords statusmap as default
Change the image from ? to a valid gd2

WeeWX with simulated data

WeeWX is a nice software that allows you to communicate with your weather station. Unfortunately I don't own a weather station (currently I'm thinking about buying one - that's why I stumbled over WeeWX) but WeeWX offers to simulate a weather station. And that is was this article is about: install WeeWX under Slackware and run it in simulator mode.
Before you can install WeeWX you need a few more python modules, at least configobj, six, pyserial and Cheetah. If you have a weather station than you might more python modules.
Start by creating a build location where you can store all your sources etc:

Install and run ColEm

ColEm is an emulator for the old but impressive ColecoVision. This article will show you how to install the emulator and a short introduction how to use the emulator. I build the sources successully on my notebook (running Slackware64-14.1) and on my Cubietruck (running Linaro-13.04).

7z

If you're faced with a 7z file then you need a program like 7za to extract these archives. If your distribution has no 7z package you need to download the sources first:

SSD TRIM

Since I have my new SSD (SanDisk SDSSDHP128G) I read a little about performance tuning for SSD's etc. One thing I read was to activate trim (if possible) and to deactivate noatime during mounting. I have only one SSD where I store my entire operating system on so the partition layout is fairly simple:

importvg failed

The situation so far: a customer has two systems with a couple of luns presented to them. Two luns (hdisk2 and hdisk7) were imported as testvg on Node 2. Exporting the VG on Node 2 worked fine, importing on Node 1 failed (unfortuanatly I've no error message here). First I checked the physical volumes (note that I only take a closer look at hdisk2 and hdisk7 which belongs to the VG testvg):

unrar

When you need to extract a RAR archive then you need unrar. Depending on your distribution you need to install unrar first. I use Slackware so I have to download the source and compile them. The first step is to download the sources:

Database crashed, controlfiles deleted and missing archive logs

Current situation: tonight a database crashed and the controlfiles have been destroyed/deleted. When I tried to open the database then I got:

$ export ORACLE_SID=KARDB
$ sqlplus "sys/password as sysdba"
SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.3.0 Production on Tue Apr 22 18:03:00 2014
Copyright (c) 1982, 2011, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
Connected to an idle instance.
SQL> startup
ORACLE instance started.
Total System Global Area 1068937216 bytes
Fixed Size                  2232840 bytes
Variable Size             524291576 bytes
Database Buffers          536870912 bytes
Redo Buffers                5541888 bytes
ORA-00205: error in identifying control file, check alert log for more info

IP forward and masquerading

Today I was in the challenge to setup a router. We ware at a meeting with a small wireless router connected to the internet and a couple of hardware with copper interfaces only. We didn't had physical access to the wireless router. We just saw the ESSID to connect to. Luckily I had my notebook running Slackware with a wireless and a copper NIC. The situation was like:

Editing MP3/ID3 tags

A couple of days ago someone asked me how to change the ID3 tag in MP3 files via commandline. There are a couple of programs out there and the first one I found did the job right: id3ed
To get id3ed running download the source from http://freecode.com/projects/id3ed first. Then extract the tar file and build the source:

Setting up a tftp server with Slackware

Setting up a tftp server with Slackware is an extremely easy task. Unlike most
of my articles there is no need of compiling any additional software since
everything is shipped with Slackware. So let's get started.
The first thing you need to do is to edit the inetd.conf file and comment out
the line that's starts with tftp:

Destroy a deported disk group

Today I wanted to destroy a disk group that was deported. A import fails because there were missing disks (it was just a test environment so loss of data was wanted):

# vxdg import testdg
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-10978 Disk group testdg: import failed:
Disk for disk group not found

Control volume via command line

I have a neighbour who complains currently about my music which is too loud in
the night. So we agreed that I turn of my music at 11PM. First I tried to look
on my watch and to turn off music at 11PM. Most I failed and my neighbour stands
in my door. The fun partis that I'm listening to music via my Linux based HTPC.
So I deceided to create a cronjob that sets the volume to 0 every day at 11PM.
The first thing I needed was a list of all available alsa controls (where -c 0
is the first sound card):

(MIT) Kerberos for Slackware

With this article I want you to show how to set up Kerberos in Slackware. I have setup two VM's to write this article. The first VM is named kdc01 and will be the Kerberos server. The second VM is named kdc02 and will be the Kerberos client. This article contains the following sections:

1. Install and configure the Kerberos server (kdc01)
1.1. Install Kerberos
1.2. Configure Kerberos
2. Install and configure the Kerberos client (kdc02)
2.1. Install Kerberos
2.2. Configure Kerberos
2.3. Install PAM
2.4. Configure PAM for Kerberos

Ripping DVD's with K3b and Slackware(64)-14.1

K3b has the nice option to rip DVD's. Unfortunatly this requires transcode which doesn't come with Slackware by default.
When you open K3b and navigate to "Tools" -> "Rip Vide DVD..." then you will get the following error message:

"K3b uses transcode to rip Video DVDs. Please make sure it is installed."

Sendmail with LDAP support in Slackware

The sendmail package that comes with Slackware has no LDAP support. In case that you need it then this article might help. It covers the following topics:

1. Recompile and reinstall sendmail with LDAP support
2. Reconfigure OpenLDAP
3. Reconfigure sendmail and import aliases into LDAP

Before you try to use this description make sure that you know a little about OpenLDAP and sendmail itself! This article was tested on a Slackware environment but should also work for any other Unix/Linux (except for recompiling the sendmail package).

Combining SNMP and LM-SENSORS

Little known is that you can query lm-sensors with snmp. Unfortanatly the Slackware net-snmp package does not support that. This article will describe the current situation and how to change it.
First take a look at my lm-sensors output on the command line: