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:

Slackware as a VM host with qemu

With this article I want you to show how to use Slackware as a host for virtual machine(s) using qemu and kvm. The physical machine I'm using is an old AMD 4000+ single core CPU, has 1GB of RAM, a single 1GBit network interface and is running Slackware64-14.0. I assume that you've basic Slackware and qemu knowledge because this article does not focus to much on Slackware or qemu. The focus of this article is to get both working with each other.
This article covers the following topics:

1. Prepare your physical network interface for bridging
2. Load the kvm module
3. Install qemu
4. Setup a little Slackware sample VM
5. Start/Stop a VM during booting and shutting down the host

ORA-28000: the account is locked

When you try to login as a user to your database and you get the following error:

$ sqlplus "user/password@database"
...
ORA-28000: the account is locked

VxVM vxassist ERROR V-5-1-15304 Cannot allocate space for dco volume

That one gave me a headache and I couldn't find any solution on the internet. So maybe this article might help some one some day.
Story so far: a customer has a RAC envinment based on Veritas CVM. One day a disk was in state FAILING like this:

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: