code-complete - Redhat Linux

Fedora 9 and samsung harddrives: Install fails

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:23:30 -0600

Just a quick note to warn folks of a bug in anaconda, the installer in fedora 9. Machines that sport a Samsung hardrive should not attempt to move to f9 from f8 as the installer will throw an error like this:



Invalid Object Path 

'/org/freedesktop/hal/devices/storage=model_SAMSUNG_HD160JJ/' ends with '/' and is not just '/'

This is because the harddrive's identifier contains the '/' character, and HAL gets confused. This happens whether you are trying to install from DVD or via the preupgrade process.

This is a known bug: here.

I have verified that you can install on this hardware using the Live CD.

Upgrading to Fedora 9 From 8 Using preupgrade

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:05:22 -0600

Since F9 has been out for a bit, I decided to upgrade my Lenovo y410 lappy yesterday. Following are suggestions to make the process a little smoother for anyone else who upgrades.

First of all, there are a few different ways to upgrade. It can be done via yum exclusively, from the dvd, or by using the new preupgrade program. I chose the latter, but I did have an F9 install DVD handy, and I'm glad I did - you'll find out why in a bit. So, on to it.

#1. make sure you're on a reliable high-speed network and run the preupgrade program following all the prompts. this will download a core set of F9 rpms into a /var/yum/cache/upgrade directory.

#2 after that completes, it asks you to reboot. once again, make sure you are on a reliable high-speed network because there's more to be downloaded. if the installer can't recognize your NIC and network connection, you may need to try a USB NIC. Once I got the installer online it downloaded something then began installing the fc9 packages into my system.

#3 I had over 1400 rpm packages that got upgraded to get to the new OS - that took about 2 hours. Once that was complete I got a creen that said "finishing the upgrade process, this may take a little while." Indeed it did: 45 Mins later I was ready to reboot.

#4 on reboot the system loaded up the 2.6.24.7-92 kernel and all the modules loaded except cups, which failed. Also, the gnome GUI was a little strange and some other minor issues were there, but overall, the system was working.

#5 time to get updates. The familiar add/remove programs link was no longer present in the Applications menu (that program has been deprecated) so I used yumex to see what was out there. Well, it turns out the upgrade process did not update my yum repositories, which were still pointed at fedora 8 for updates from fedora as well as livna. To fix this, you need to edit the yum repo config files under /etc/yum.repo.d I just edited my fedora.repo file and livna.repo file changing out refs to f8 to f9 and set the gpgcheck flag to 0.

#6 running yumex again showed a lot of legitimate updates. I decided to update the kernel packages first including development and headers becuase I could not recompile the vbox kernel module with what the upgrade had installed.

#7 Once the updaes were installed, I rebooted. Shit! The machine got as far as black screen with GRUB _ and a blinking cursor. Glad I had the DVD becuase I needed to boot from dvd, go into rescue mode and fix the boot loader which had gotten screwed by the kernel update. Once you are in a command shell the following commands worked to fix grub:



#chroot /mnt/sysimage

#grub-install /dev/sda

#8 reboot and all was good.

#9 still some funky things going on with the GUI so overnight I installed all the updates for f9 from the updates repository and today everything is working like a champ.

Fedora 9 - Released Today

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:46:25 -0600

Get Some Here

using update-alternatives to add additional java versions to /etc/alternatives

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Fri, 02 May 2008 13:38:45 -0600

After realizing I need to use Sun's JVM globally in order to get Flex Builder A3 working under my Fedora 8 install I decided to investigate further how to get it to be an option in the system-switch-java applet. That applet is tuned in to the update-alternatives command. by running the following commands as root, the system was able to switch between the 3 different JVMs I've got installed:



# update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/java" "java" 

"/usr/java/default/bin/java" 3

# update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/javac" "javac" 

"/usr/java/default/bin/javac" 3

# update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/javaws" "javaws" 

"/usr/java/default/bin/javaws" 3

Now I can change JVMs globally using update-alternatives --config java command!

Peripheral Compatibility - Another reason I prefer Fedora to Vista

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:15:59 -0600

My 6-year-old son has this digital camera that we got him when he was 5. He wasn't that into it, but recently has shown interest. It's a disney Pix "toy" camera that comes with specialized software from digitalblue that you need to install if you want to get the pictures off. When I first got the camera, I just plugged the camera's USB cable into my XP machine to see if it would come up in the file system. No luck, I had to install the software, then it worked.

After "upgrading" to vista, it no longer worked even after uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers. This morning, he asked me to get pictures off the camera. I told him it wasn't likely because of the new computer. I was shocked when I plugged the USB cable into my Lenovo Y410 fedora 8 machine and a dialog box popped up asking me if I wanted to import pictures!

Freaking awesome! Cheers to the Fedora community!

Amazon ec2 tools - choosing the right JVM

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:43:00 -0600

I have just gotten around to using the amazon ec2 tools to manage my amazon machine images from my linux laptop. I mentioned before that I am rolling with fedora 8 on a new laptop, and it's been sweet. But there are gotchas here and there and I ran into one today with the ec2 tools.

Turns out that fedora 8 comes with 2 JVMs: GCJ 1.5.0 and IcedTea 1.7.0 - those are installed via yum or selected during the install process. I have no problems with any java-based GUI apps that I have installed like Oxygen and dbvisualizer, but when running the ec2-describe-images command, I got the following error:



Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: 

org.codehaus.xfire.aegis.type.xml.SourceType

at java.lang.Class.initializeClass(libgcj.so.8rh)



etc....

I had my JAVA_HOME set to what redhat and fedora lilke: /usr/lib/jvm/java, which is really a sym link pointing into the /etc/alternatives library of sym links. It's actually a great way to switch globally between JVMs, because you can use the system-switch-java applet to quicky change your JVM if you have multiple versions installed. So I did and switched from 1.7 over to GNU 1.5 and tried again. Same exception was thrown.

It turns out the the ec2 tools really only work with Sun's JVM, which I downloaded and installed via the RPM from sun.com. After installing, uninstalling, reinstalling a few times I determined that for whatever reason the 1.6 JVM from Sun was never going to appear as an option within the system-switch-java applet. So I changed my JAVA_HOME variable from /usr/lib/jvm/java to /usr/java/default, which is what Sun likes.

Now the ec2 command line tools work great!

Final Tweaks to Fedora 8 on Lenovo Y410 Laptop

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:16:45 -0700

I have to admit that over the past couple of weeks transitioning to linux as my primary OS more than once I though to myself that for sure I'd be back on windows soon. I've been admining/using redhat distros since 1995, but always in a server environment. But as I get more and more comfortable with my configuration, I'm looking back less and less. At this point nearly everything is working with 2 exceptions:
1.) when plugging headphones in, sound still comes out the speakers
2.) I have been unable to get the PCCard reader to work (the machine does play well with MMC, MS, MSPro, SD, SDPro and xD cards, however.)

I have also found the following bits to be useful: While getting the webcam to work is outlined below, I found that most apps out there still would not work with the webcam. This is because most of the apps like camstream and gyachi work with Video4Linux and I needed to to use V4L2 with the built in webcam. The solution for this is to roll with Kopete for web camming and IMing. Works great!

I also had some issues getting an external VGA monitors set up and working correctly with spanning desktops. It wouldn't be quite so complicated if I didn't have different screen resolutions between my home monitor and work monitor. Basically, one needs to add some information to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file that specifies you would like a virtual desktop. The video section in my config file looks like this:



Section "Device"

	Identifier  "Videocard0"

	Driver      "intel"

	Option      "monitor-lvds" "lvds"

	Option      "monitor-vga" "vga"

EndSection



Section "Monitor"

	Identifier   "lvds"

	Option       "LeftOf" "vga"

	VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"

	ModelName    "LCD Panel 1680x1050"

	HorizSync    31.5 - 65.5

	VertRefresh  56.0 - 65.0

	Option	    "dpms"

EndSection





Section "Monitor"

	Identifier   "vga"

	Option       "RightOf" "lvds" 

	VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"

	ModelName    "LCD Panel 1680x1050"

	HorizSync    31.5 - 65.5

	VertRefresh  56.0 - 65.0

	Option	    "dpms"

EndSection





Section "Screen"

	Identifier "Screen0"

	Device     "Videocard0"

	Monitor    "lvds"

	DefaultDepth     24

	SubSection "Display"

		Viewport   0 0

		Depth     24

		Virtual   2880 900

	EndSubSection

EndSection

With this configuration, I can now use the xandr command to set up the different monitors. when leaving work I turn off the VGA by calling xrandr --output VGA --off from a quick launch icon, then when I plug in at home i do the same using xrandr --output VGA --auto --right-of LVDS and everything's great.

There is also a KDE applet called KRandRTray that will let you dynamically change screen resolutions.

Finally, because we use Office 2k7 native formats in the office because of the enhanced features I had to figure out what to do. Wine wasn't going to cut it, though I did get Fireworks and textpad running under wine. So I installed VirtualBox, created a VM and gave it 1.5 GB RAM (The box has 3GB) and 32MB Video memory. I was able to cleanly install Vista Home Premium from the recovery CD that came with the machine with no problems whatsoever. I spun up the virtual PC, installed the VirtBox client extensions along with OfficeUlimate 2k7 and TurboTax and Quicken. Everything works flawlessly!

usb video working under fedora 8 on lenovo Y410

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:36:03 -0700

Last piece of the configuration puzzle solved. To get the built in webcam, which has the following characteristics:



Bus 002 Device 005: ID 04f2:b008 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd 

Device Descriptor:

  bLength                18

  bDescriptorType         1

  bcdUSB               2.00

  bDeviceClass          239 Miscellaneous Device

  bDeviceSubClass         2 ?

  bDeviceProtocol         1 Interface Association

  bMaxPacketSize0        64

  idVendor           0x04f2 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd

  idProduct          0xb008 

  bcdDevice            3.25

  iManufacturer           2 Sonix Technology Co., Ltd.

  iProduct                1 USB 2.0 Camera

  iSerial                 3 SN0001

  bNumConfigurations      1

one needs to modprobe the video for linux driver (v4l2-common), which came with the fedora install and modprobe uvcvideo, which is the usb video driver available here:



svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk

Once I modprobed these 2 drivers i was able to get video from the cam by running gstreamer-properties, selecting the video tab and under default input selecting the Video for Linux 2 Plugin, USB 2.0 Camera device and then selecting test.

Fedora 8 on Lenovo Y410 - The Gotchas

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:17:40 -0700

So in my quest to be vista free in 08, I mentioned that I got a new laptop. So far I have installed Fedora 8. It didn't work out so well becuase I couldn't get wireless working (more on that later) and I had no sound. Looking for a quick fix to these problems, I decided to give another distro a quick try to see if it would work out of the box. I installed ubuntu 7.10 and while I was installing it noticed my Function F5 key. this key activates/deactivates wireless on the laptop. Too bad I didn't notice this before when I was focusing energy on the wireless on/off switch on the front of the machine.

So Ubuntu came up and wireless was all good, but still no sound. I looked around for info on drivers for my sound card, which is the 82801H ICH8 HD Audio Controller. There's a lot of info in the ubuntu forums regarding this card, and many, many suggestions on how to get it running. After trying all of them without success, I decided to go back to what I knew best, and that's Fedora.

So I reinstalled fedora from dvd - the wireless working this time out of the box since I had it turned on. But still no sound. After verifying the correct driver was being used (snd-hda-intel.ko), I updated the alsa-utils package to >=1.0.15, which from my ubuntu research I understood could support my card. The I added the following lines in /etc/modprobe.conf:



alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel

options snd-card-0 index=0

options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=fujitsu

Reboot and run system-config-soundcard and audio was working. So I downloaded and installed frog, which provides quick and easy installs of multimedia codecs. After running the ncurses program it updates some package repositories, then says that "it is strongly recommended you allow fedora frog to update your installation now." mmkay, guess that'll do. My updater was telling me there were a couple hundred updates available so I figured I'd let frog do the updates. Very Bad Choice.

Because earlier I was looking for some software using the Add/Remove Software app I had checked the development repository so Frog updated everything on my Fedora 8 to the Fedora 9 alpha versions, INCLUDING my kernel. I was a bit concerned when I saw what was happening, but even more bunched up when I went to reboot and the kernel could not mount the LargeVolume001 or whatever.

Completed a reinstall and selected NO for frog updates.

Next up, I'm installing virtualbox and windowsXP - or I might try the vista cd that came with the laptop...

Nearly done with Vista, and with SP 1 so close..

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:00:14 -0700

After Using Vista as my primary OS for just over a year I can say without a doubt that it has hindered my productivity and caused more heartache that any other OS I've ever used. I am running the 32-bit version of Vista Ultimate on a gateway laptop with Turion64 Processor and 2.5 gigs of RAM. The Vista I'm working with is the result of and upgrade install from XP Media Center 2005, which may be part of the problem, and it was probably stupid to do the upgrade rather than a clean install, but I was lazy and didn't want to have to reinstall all my progs.

I am going to enumerate all the problems:

Slower launching all programs

Initially, I could no longer use a cisco VPN client because their vista-compatible client was not vista upgrade compatible

Now can use the cisco vpn client, but when it's installed on the system it breaks my wireless so I have to uninstall it after I use it to get wireless working

Have to run many progs as admin for them to function - packet sniffers, SQL Server Manager, lots...

Annoying UAC pop ups require more clicks to get things done (ended up disabling User Account Control)

Cannot move files > 3GB to local machine over the network.... WTF?!?

Moving files over the network is much slower than xp/linux/macOS (even after turning off Vista -TCP Auto Tuning)

All MS product short cuts in quick launch and recent programs on the start menu stopped working

My volume control mixer in the status bar area periodically disappears

Intermittent crashes of windows explorer at least one or two times a week

Outlook often hangs/crashes even with all mailbox maintenance performed

TortoiseSVN status cache crashes daily

Windows gets my monitors confused when switching between my home and work configuration about 50% of the time

Acrobat reader 7 posts application warning before starting regarding compatibility issues

The list could probably go on, but just those issues have made me want to move on. So yesterday I bought a Lenovo 3000 Y410 dual core 2G RAM laptop (which will come loaded with Vista Home Premium) and a 250GB laptop sata drive both on fire sale from compusa. I will be pulling the OEM drive, dropping in the 250GB drive and loading up Fedora 8. This will become my primary work computer, and I'm going to see if I can get away with not running windows at all, but I think I'm probably going to have to run XP under VMware because we use a lot of features from Office 2007 and I do use Visual Studio to create dtsx packages pretty often. Then there's Mapforce and Motorola phone tools and probably a bunch of other stuff. Oh and I'll have to somehow get 10 years worth of emails into mbox format somehow. That'll be ugly.

Well, I've almost talked myself out of it - maybe SP1 will solve all my problems. Ohh the pain.

Crontab or CGI Script to Check on CFMX and Restart if it's Hung

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:43:52 -0600

Here is a perl script that can be called via command line in a crontab file or via http post. It takes one paramter, which is host=www.foo.com. This is follow up posting to my earlier code post for checking and restarting cfmx remotely, which was more focused on a windows enviro. The following script is primarily geared toward use in a n*x environment running on the localhost, though it could easily be modified to run on a single host and be invoked to check on and restart multiple servers.

Here it is:



#!/usr/bin/perl



#  SpireMedia, Inc.  Thaddeus Batt thad@spiremedia.com

#  Perl script for restarting coldfusion to be called on a scheduled

#  basis when frequent and unanticipated restarts of a cf server are required

#  

#  Please note that there are 2 ways to use this script

#  it can be set up as a cgi script that is involked by a web browser

#  or it can be run from a cron job directly (this is preferred)

#  if the script is used in cgi mode, you will need to use

#  the telnet method of restarting cf which means you need to

#  enable telnet as well as allow root access via telnet, which

#  may be a security risk for which I take no responsibility

#  USE THIS CODE AT YOUR OWN RISK

#  Date: 10/23/2007



#first lets flush the writes

$|=1;



#bring in the modules we need

use Net::Telnet;

use English;

use HTTP::Headers;

use HTTP::Request;

use LWP::Simple;

use LWP::UserAgent;

use URI::Escape;

use File::Basename;

use POSIX;



$host = 'http://' . GetCgiParam('host');



#you can use this to set up a default hostname

if (! $host) {

	$host='http://localhost';

}



$timeout = 30;

$reload = 1;

$url = '/CFIDE/administrator/';

#if restart_on_err is set the function will restart cfmx services and log the error

$restart_on_err = 1;

#this needs to be set to a directory on the machine where you want the log files to live

$path2log = 'c:\\temp\\';

#this is just to see what's going on from command line

print $host.$url;



#and here we go...

$alive = GetCFMXPageOrRestart("$host$url",

				    $timeout, $user, $pass, $reload);



exit;

		



sub GetPage {

    my ($url, $timeout, $user, $password, $reload) = @_;

    my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;

    $ua->use_alarm(1);

    $ua->timeout($timeout) if ($timeout);

    my $headers = new HTTP::Headers;

    $headers->authorization_basic($user, $password);

    $headers->header(Pragma => 'no-cache') if $reload;

    my $request = new HTTP::Request("GET", $url, $headers);

    my $response = $ua->request($request, undef, undef);



    ($response->is_success,

     $response->code,

     $response->content,

     $response->error_as_HTML);

}



sub GetCFMXPage {

    my $url = $_[0];

    my ($httpstatus, $httpcode, $httppage, $httperrorHTML) = GetPage(@_);

    if ($httppage =~ /TDS stream/) {

	open LOG,">>widelog";

	print LOG "<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<\n$url\n>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>\n";

	print LOG $httppage;

	close LOG;

	$httpstatus = 0;

    }

    ($httpstatus, $httpcode, $httppage, $httperrorHTML);

}



sub GetCFMXPageOrRestart {

     my ($httpstatus, $httpcode, $httppage, $httperrorHTML) = GetCFMXPage(@_);

    my $url = $_[0];

    if ( $restart_on_err ) {

	if ($httpcode != 200

	    || (!$httpstatus && 200 == $httpcode) )  {

	    ($sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year) = localtime;

	    $mon++;

	    my $fname = sprintf( "$path2log%2.2d%2.2d%2.2d-%2.2d%2.2d%2.2d.err",

				$hour, $min, $sec, $year, $mon, $mday );

	    open(ERRFILE,">$fname");

	    print ERRFILE "GetCFMXPage failed at $hour:$min:$sec on $mon/$mday/$year\n";

	    print ERRFILE "starttime=$starttime\n";

	    print ERRFILE "reportcount=$reportcount\n";

	    print ERRFILE "url=$url\n";

	    print ERRFILE "httpstatus=$httpstatus\n";

	    print ERRFILE "httpcode=$httpcode\n";

	    print ERRFILE "httperrorHTML=$httperrorHTML\n";

	    close(ERRFILE);

	    print "\nfile=$fname\n";

	    RestartCFMX();

	    exit;

	    #die "Aborted: $fname\n";

		}

    }

}



    

sub GetCgiParam {

    my ($paramname) = @_;

    my ($request_method, $query_string);

    if (! %cgiparams) {

        $request_method = $ENV{REQUEST_METHOD};

        if ($request_method eq 'GET') {

            $query_string = $ENV{QUERY_STRING};

        }

        elsif ($request_method eq 'POST') {

            read (STDIN, $query_string, $ENV{CONTENT_LENGTH});

        }

        elsif ($ARGV[0]) {

            $query_string = $ARGV[0];

        }

        else {

            die Usage();

        }

        foreach $pair (split /&/, $query_string) {

            my ($key, $value) = split /=/, $pair;

            $value =~ tr/+/ /;

            $value =~ s/%([\dA-Fa-f][\dA-Fa-f])/pack 'C', hex($1)/eg;

            $cgiparams{$key} = $value;

        }

    }

    $cgiparams{$paramname};

}





sub RestartCFMX	{



#the following allow this script to run from cgi, note that you will

#be putting the root user password in here if you run it this way

#this is a security risk - if your webserver ever got it's

#mime-type mappings screwed up this pl could be served as plain text

#exposing your root pawword to anyone who can find it

#you should take security measures appropriate to your situation	



# $telnet = new Net::Telnet ( Timeout=>30, Errmode=>'die');

# $telnet->open('$host');

# $telnet->waitfor('/login: $/i');

# $telnet->print('root');

# $telnet->waitfor('/password: $/i');

# $telnet->print('password');

# $telnet->waitfor('/# $/i');

# $telnet->print('/opt/coldfusionmx7/bin/coldfusion restart');

# $output = $telnet->waitfor('/# $/i');

# print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";

# print $output;



#this is safer code if you are able to run this script via

#the root user's crontab

@args_exe = ("/opt/coldfusionmx7/bin/coldfusion","restart");

system(@args_exe) == 0

   or die "it didn't work:  @args_exe";



print <<HTMLDOC;

<body >

<h1>restarting services</h1>

<PRE>

<p><hr>

</PRE><HR>



HTMLDOC

	

}







sub Usage {

    print <<USAGE;

checkandrestartcfmx.pl host=HOSTNAME

     host is hostname to be prepended to script URLs

     example:  localhost  or 216.87.22  or www.code-complete.com    

USAGE

}

    exit;

To Hell With Gateway - They Should be Paying ME!

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 10:07:13 -0600

So my wifes XP gateway laptop set to run automatic updates received one last week, then blue screened. Then wouldn't boot.

So, I figure the drive has got some problems, let's pull the drive and hook it up to an external IDE > USB to get some data off of it and try and run chkdsk on it from another machine. Pull drive, hook up adapter, plug into USB port and..... what? No daa-dink sound!!? No "installing new hardware" message???! green light is on the adapter - check drive is spinning - uhh, nope. This is truly an Oh FUCK! moment as all my wife's business data is (was) on that drive. I stuck it back in the laptop.

We went to Office Depot and bought a new HP laptop. Thankfully, it booted up. I installed office and all the other programs she needs to run her business and the machine ran fine all day. That evening I instructed the machine to download and install all windows updates. Next morning the machine was in chkdsk mode stuck at 1%. Hard cycled the machine and skipped chkdsk. It turns out it got it's hard drive stuck in a cycle where the dirty bit was set on the C: drive and every time the machine booted up it wanted to run chkdsk. Semi-normal, except that chkdsk would start and never get past 1%. Well, I thought, "That's sketchy, let's get a backup of your data." Apparently windows backup will not run if the dirty bit is set. Did you know that? I sure didn't. Returned the unit for an exchange and reinstalled all software, etc. So far new unit works.

So now the gateway part: the machine is still under warranty, so I call up explain the problem and they brilliantly deduct that the hard drive has failed (yeah, thanks). And volunteer to send out another. I inquire as to what will be on that hard drive and they respond that it will come with XP on the C: partition and the gateway recovery crap on the d: partition just like the original drive.

So off I send the failed drive to a data recovery center, really assuming it would be on the simple side for pros like them to get the data off the disks - after all, there was physical damage to the drive and it never jammed and made those clicking noises, it just stopped spinning up. Of course 4 days later I get this update:



"The current status from the lab is that we are attempting to replace the damage parts inside the hard drive. This is expected to require a higher level clean-room recovery and if we continue, it looks like it will be on the mid-upper range of the recovery ($1600-$2100)"

Then 2 days after that:



"The report from the lab is that they are still having trouble getting the drive to respond with standard recovery procedures and are expecting to move the drive onto another piece of equipment for higher level recoveries. We should have some more news within a few days."

Sweet. Meanwhile, this morning the hard drive from gateway shows up. I shove it into the laptop, happily expecting a fresh system. WTF?!!? The computer does not boot. The computer does not even realize there's a hard drive attached to it. First thought was they sent me a faulty drive. Second thought was, they sent me an empty drive! Emtpy as in not even initialized Empty. Pulling the drive and attaching it to the usb adapter proved this theory to be right. So using vista disk management tools I have initialized the disk, performed a quick format, and am currently running a deep scan (chkdsk /r /f k:) Just make sure the sectors/clusters are all good.

When that's done I'll be putting Fedora 7 on the laptop. What the hell are thinking? Here's what the enclosed note said about the drive:



"Please find enclosed the replacement part that you requested along with easy to read installation instructions."

A. There were no instructions.
B. No regular consumer would know how to deal with a disk that wasn't even initialized.
C. I suspect that if I were to call, they would send out another harddrive and I would be stuck in an infinite loop with gateway support.

So Linux it is. I guess some weeks are just bad computer weeks, and during those weeks, its good to be able to let your geek flag fly!

Peace.

Adobe Livecycle Dataservices Deployed under Tomcat with Sun 64-bit JVM on Fedora 7

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 13:33:51 -0600

As a follow up to my earlier post about getting Coldfusion 8 to run natively in a 64-bit enviro, this post will describe the steps to deploy Adobe Livecycle data services in a 64-bit environment natively.

First, the set up: 64-bit Fedora 7 + 64-bit Sun Java SE Runtime build 1.6.0_02-b05 + Tomcat 5.5.23 Release 9jpp.2.fc7

Initially, I just ran the installer for LiveCycle selecting to deploy as a war. It created the war files flex.war, flex-admin.war, and samples.war. I dropped those into the webapps directory and all the applications deployed automatically. I pointed my browser at http://server.com:8080/flex/samples, which popped right up. Then, when I clicked on the SQLAdmin sample app, kablooeee!

The error that gets thrown is:



09/06 14:17:03 ERROR java.lang.RuntimeException: XPathFactory#newInstance() failed to create an XPathFactory for the default object model: http://java.sun.com/jaxp/xpath/dom with the XPathFactoryConfigurationException: javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactoryConfiguration

Exception: No XPathFctory implementation found for the object model: http://java.sun.com/jaxp/xpath/dom

I realized that this had something to do w/ the Xalan/Xerces java component, but I had installed both components from RPMs. So I was conviced it was a classpath issue. I knew the stuff i needed was on my machine, but the application wasn't finding it. The following jars are what's needed for this to work:



xalan-j2-serializer.jar

xalan.jar

xercesImpl.jar

xml-apis.jar

xsltc.jar

So I ran the locate command for each of these jars and found many som in /usr/share/java/ and some under a xalan-j2-servlet/WEB-INF/lib directory.

I dropped copies of all the jars into my tomcat5/share/lib/ directory and restarted tomcat and viola!

Well, almost - now I was getting a different error:



09/07 11:48:53 ERROR java.lang.InternalError: An error occurred because there is no graphics environment available.  Please set the headless-server setting in the Flex configuration file to true.

But hey, that at least gave some direction on what needed to be changed, so I went ahead and changed the flex-config.xml files for all the applications to true and restarted tomcat. No love. Same error. Upon further log inspection, I found that there was another related error thrown just as the FlexAssembler service was spinning up:



09/07 11:45:54 Information [main] - Starting FlexAssembler...

Xlib: connection to ":1.0" refused by server

Xlib: No protocol specified



Exception in thread "Thread-23" java.lang.InternalError: Can't connect to X11 window server using ':1.0' as the value of the DISPLAY variable.

Okay, so because I was VNCed into the machine when starting up tomcat, the system appears to be disregarding the headless-server setting! So, I logged out of vnc, sshed into the machine stopped and started tomcat while tailing the catalina.out log file. Well, No errors on startup and when I went to the SQLAdmin sample app I saw this:

Adobe Livecycle successfully running.

FC7 + CFMX 8 + Tomcat + 64-bit jvm 1.6 = Sweetness

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:38:41 -0600

Today (well, and yesterday) was primarily spent getting cfmx 8 installed on a 64-bit Fedora 7 box. That normally should take about 10 minutes, but I didn't want the default install. I wanted (as I have for some time) a native 64-bit instance of Coldfusion. And now I have one.

Here is what I needed to do to get this installed, hopefully it can save you some time if you are trying to do the same. The process will be similar on other 64-bit distros, and there are some gotchas for sure.

With this machine, my preference is to install everything I possibly can via yum rather than download and compile source just to make application management easier. So here's a list of the RPMs that were installed in support of the application (not all are needed):

APR-1.2.8-7x86_64
APR-devel-1.2.8-7x86_64
APR-util-1.2.8-7x86_64
APR-util-devel-1.2.8-7x86_64
openssl-0.98b-12.fc7.x86_64
openssl-devel-0.98b-12.fc7.x86_64
http-2.2.4-1.fc7.x86_64
http-devel-2.2.4-1.fc7.x86_64
jakarta-commons-logging-1.0.4-6jpp.1.x86_64
mod_ssl-1:2.2.4-1.fc7.x86_64
tomcat5-5.5.23-9jpp.2.fc7.x86_64
tomcat5-jsp-2.0-api-5.5.23-9jpp.2.fc7.x86_64
tomcat5-servlet-2.4-api-5.5.23-9jpp.2.fc7.x86_64
and finally:
jdk-6u2-linux-amd64 (from Sun)

The default JDK installed with the OS was the 32-bit 1.5 version and in fedora there are Sym links under /var/lib/alternatives - you will need to update these sym links to point to the 64-bit java components if you plan on using the default JAVA_HOME variable (/usr/lib/jvm/java) within the tomcat5.conf file. Alternately, you can add the following lines into /etc/tomcat5/tomcat5.conf AND /etc/sysconfig/tomcat5:



JAVA_HOME="/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_02"

JRE_HOME="/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_02/jre"

Now fire up tomcat using /etc/init.d/tomcat5 start and take a look at the catalina.out log under /usr/share/tomcat/logs/ and check the library path and/or the JRE_HOME being reported to ensure it's using the 64-bit jvm.

Next run the Coldfusion-8-lin.bin installer and select the option for j2ee deploy as WAR and run the install. This will create a cfusion.war and an rds.war package uner /opt/coldfusion8/. Now move the cfusion.war file to tomcat's webapps directory (/usr/share/tomcat5/webapps) and then copy the rds.war to the webapps directory and rename it CFIDE.war.

Tomcat should automatically deploy the cfusion.war file into a cfusion directory. You need to go into cfusion/WEB-INF/cfusion/lib and rename the tools.jar to something else. At this point, tomcat may crash or hang. You should stop it: /etc/init.d/tomcat5 stop. You might still be looking at the catalina.out file if you were using tail -f and you might notice the following line:



Error [ContainerBackgroundProcessor[StandardEngine[Catalina]] - Unable to initialize Security service: coldfusion.runtime.Encryptor$invalidParametersForEncryptionException:  An error occurred while trying to encrypt or decrypt you input striong:  5 trailing bytes.

So now you will need the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlinmited Strength Juristiction Policy Files 6, available from http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp at the bottom of the page.

Backup and replace your US_export_policy.jar and local_policy.jar files from /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_02/jre/lib/security with the unlimited strength files.

Start tomcat: /etc/init.d/tomcat5 start
point your browser here: http://localhost:8080/cfusion/CFIDE/administrator
and hopefully you'll see this:

Next up: Getting the apache/tomcat connectors set up.

Sys Admin Appreciation Day

nospam@example.com (thaddeus) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 10:59:14 -0600

July 27th, 2007 (Last Friday Of July)
8th Annual
System Administrator Appreciation Day

If you can read this, thank your sysadmin

http://www.sysadminday.com/