StorEdge 6180: Battery {0} has expired.

Today a customer called in telling me that one of his batteries for his StorEdge 6180 has expired the lifetime. Since the customer doesn't have any valid support for the storage I deceided to set the lifetime expiration to never. To do this I needed the sscs and service command (package SUNWstkcam, SUNWsefms etc) in my environment. In normal cases these packages are installed to /opt:

Initial Ramdisk

A short howto for using a initial ramdisk (initrd) in Slackware Linux.
A initrd is very handy when you need a special module already during booting and you don't want to recompile the entire kernel. So let's get started directly by creating a simple initrd without any particular modules etc:

plex in RECOVER state, subdisk in RELOCATE state

After a 'crash' plexes were in RECOVER state and subdisk in RELOCATE state (the customer updated and rebooted his storages online which causes Veritas to fail).
The system was a HP-UX 11.31. The situation was like that:

Using UUID's and label for partitions

Using label and UUID can be come very handy when you're using multiple disks or change disks frequently (for any reason). Imagine your machine is powered on. Then you connect the first external disk which will appear as /dev/sdb for eg. /usr. The second external disk that will be connected appears as /dev/sdc for eg. /opt. If you disconnect both disks and connect the second disk for /opt first it will appear as /dev/sdb which was the device entry for /usr before. One chance to avoid that is mounting disks by UUID's. Each partition on a disk has it's own UUID. The UUID can be listed with blkid or lsblk:

ORA-01536: space quota exceeded for tablespace xyz

Today I had this error:

ORA-01536: space quota exceeded for tablespace

So it seems that my user couldn't write to his default tablespace. So deceided to check my user:

SQL> select tablespace_name, username, bytes, max_bytes from dba_ts_quotas where username like '%KAREL%';
no rows selected

Replace lilo with grub2

As a Slackware user I use lilo as bootloader by default. But I also like to change things and try out new/other things. One is grub2 which I'll explain a little in this article. The topics of this article are:

Create a backup of your current boot loader
Download, compile and install grub2
Generate a basic configuration and install grub2 into MBR
Define a new timeout
Change the distributor from GNU/Linux to Slackware
Loading the kernel in framebuffer
Changing menu colors
Add a initrd

TNS lookup over LDAP

This article describes how to migrate tnsnames.ora into LDAP. My current tnsnames.ora looks like this:

$ cat tnsnames.ora
...
PINK=(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS_LIST=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=192.168.56.100)(PORT=1521)))(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVICE_NAME=PINK)(GLOBAL_NAME=PINK)))
FLOYD=(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS_LIST=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=192.168.56.100)(PORT=1522)))(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVICE_NAME=FLOYD)(GLOBAL_NAME=FLOYD)))
...

Update your bios with Linux

I was thinking a lot about a bios update for my HTPC lately. The hardware is a ASUS Pundit P2-M2A690G running Slackware Linux 14.0 and XBMC. The bios itself allows a bios update through a special prepared CD and some other options but that was not what I was looking for. I just wanted to download the latest bios and install it. After some research I found a pretty cool software that did the job: flashrom.

Mount a ZFS dataset

Mounting an unmounted ZFS dataset is very easy. Eg I have a ZFS pool called orapool. Within in this pool I have various datasets like u01, u02, ... and u06:

# mount | grep u06
/u06 on orapool/u06 ...

Wake-On-Lan with Linux

I have two systems. One is my HTPC and the other is my notebook (both running slackware as usual). Both system are connected via my home router. My HTPC is connected directly via lan cable to my home router and my notebook is connected to my home router via wireless lan. In my case I want to wake up my HTPC from my notebook. To check if WOL is supported use the tool ethtool: