And so I’ve spent days and days, prolly weeks, to get rid some of the problems I faced in my FreeBSD. Currently running on version 8.0-RELEASE, I’ve upgraded almost all of my installed ports, and get my usb stick to work with the new usb stack. Everything works wonderful, stable and I’m a happy user.

Happy eh?

At least I thought so.

Today it crossed my mind to check how my hard disks are doing and to my surprise, one of the report came back with a failure alert:

# smartctl -d ata -A /dev/ad4
smartctl version 5.38 [amd64-portbld-freebsd8.0] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0×000f   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
3 Spin_Up_Time            0×0003   165   164   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       4741
4 Start_Stop_Count        0×0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       211
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0×0033   065   065   140    Pre-fail  Always   FAILING_NOW 1080
7 Seek_Error_Rate         0×000e   200   197   051    Old_age   Always       -       0
9 Power_On_Hours          0×0032   085   085   000    Old_age   Always       -       11344
10 Spin_Retry_Count        0×0012   100   100   051    Old_age   Always       -       0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0×0012   100   100   051    Old_age   Always       -       0
12 Power_Cycle_Count       0×0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       209
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0×0032   193   193   000    Old_age   Always       -       5447
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0×0032   001   001   000    Old_age   Always       -       1227719
194 Temperature_Celsius     0×0022   097   092   000    Old_age   Always       -       50
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0×0032   101   101   000    Old_age   Always       -       99
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0×0012   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0×0010   200   200   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0×003e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0×0008   200   200   051    Old_age   Offline      -       0

And this makes my heart races even faster:

# smartctl -H /dev/ad4
smartctl version 5.38 [amd64-portbld-freebsd8.0] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
Failed Attributes:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0×0033   065   065   140    Pre-fail  Always   FAILING_NOW 1080

Less than 24 hours? And I happened to be damn lucky to check on my disks today? Since day one I bought the hard disks, I’ve never really checked on it. Today I did, and I got this. Am seriously hoping that it’s just a false alarm (still am gonna do my backups).

And that is my around-2yo WD hard disk. My second WD hard disk. My first WD hard disk failed on me after running for less than a year. Jinx? Lol. Wait. This is not funny! Hmmmpphhhhhhhh..

Anyway, am too frustrated now. My hands are cold, my feet are cold, and all I could think of right now is doing a backup so that I could port my old system to a new hard disk. Which I have to buy..

Speaking of which.. another WD? Seriously I don’t know. Everyone is saying WD is the best, yet 2 of them died (well this one hasn’t died yet but already complaining) fast enough. Maxtor served me for a good 5 years or more, but the reputation isn’t that great either compared to other brands. Suggestion?

Today I decided to install Sun VirtualBox on my FreeBSD 7.1/amd64. The installation from ports is straightforward as usual.

#csup -g -L2 /etc/ports-supfile
#cd /usr/ports/emulators/virtualbox
#make install clean

I got stuck when it failed to fetch this file Dev86src-0.16.17.tar.gz.

#wget ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/distfiles/Dev86src-0.16.17.tar.gz
#mv Dev86src-0.16.17.tar.gz /usr/ports/distfiles/
#make install clean
#hash -r ; ldconfig

Mount proc:
#mount -t procfs proc /proc

Load vbox driver module:
#kldload vboxdrv.ko
#kldstat | grep box
13    1 0xffffffffab46a000 3fb0e    vboxdrv.ko

Launch vbox from menu or command:
#VirtualBox

Done.

This could be one of the bestest news I’ve heard in months!!

Excerpt from miwi:

“Today Virtualbox was committed to the FreeBSD ports tree. After a lot of work we had a good discussion today about how stable Virtualbox is, and after the CTF with take6 we got a lot of good feedback, so it was time to commit.”

Read it here.

Woohoo!!

Yea, there has been a lack of update. I was busy with WebLogic, and Devin.. oh well, he only writes material that meets a certain literary and relevancy standard and he is not that prolific. Lol. Guess you’ll never find him writing anything that will be tagged as rant

Few things happened last week..

Weblogic completed:
Am done with the project last week, which is cool. Haven’t gone through the UAT session with the users yet, so until they say “All’s good”, guess I’ll have to keep my fingers crossed. Weeee!!!!



I lost my handphone:
Yes, my cheap handphone. I can’t believe someone would want to steal it. I bought the handphone for about 300 – 400 bucks, so am surprised that someone would be so keen to steal it. How much does it worth really? 2 small packets of weed? Am not bothered about the phone. Well alright, I am bothered, because it costs money. But what I care the most is the data inside the phone. My contacts, my messages, heck I even have a few audio clips of my cat purring recorded with that phone. Oh well. Fuck you, thief.

Medical checkups:
I had a couple of medical checkups performed last Tuesday and Thursday. Last Tuesday I got all wired up for the holter monitoring test. It was something like a 24 hours of ECG (electrocardiogram) to monitor the electrical activity of my heart. I couldn’t take showers during the procedure because it’ll damage the device. So yeah, am pretty happy with the fact that I don’t have to shower and not feeling guilty about it. Am just plain lazy sometimes.

And last Thursday, I got up very early in the morning and headed to the General Hospital to get my brain checked. It was a quick EEG (electroencephalography), prolly around 20 minutes where I had to blink my eyes numerous times, with bright light flickered directly on me for a few minutes and inhale/exhale profusely for 5 minutes which was tiring since am asthmatic. And oh my, I looked horrible with my hair glued on with all the wires. And I looked even worse after the guy pulled them out. I looked like a woman who is trying too hard to impress a guy by applying extra hair gel. You know the type of hair gel that will make your hair hard and stiff? Gah. I hate it.

I’ll be getting the results this April. I hope everything will be fine, since am always fine, and anyway I agreed to go through all of these medical procedures because my sister told me to. Nothing serious.



FreeBSD upgrade:
Yeah, finally! Upgraded to 7.1. I did it last Saturday, and I was thinking to update this blog on Sunday, but guess what, the update went fine until suddenly I failed to start the X server. Hmmm.. now that’s weird, because this was not the first time I did a FreeBSD upgrade, plus, this was just a minor version upgrade, so what could go wrong? Building world, kernel and installing them went perfectly well. I didn’t forget to run mergemaster, the machine booted up well. Spent a day changing the theme, and all of the sudden it failed (yeah, ironically it failed after I spent the whole day beautifying my desktop, why didn’t it fail sooner?). I realized that it failed just after I ran portupgrade to upgrade my Opera and Firefox. Probably the modules are not synced, am not sure.

I spent the next 48 hours running portupgrade numerous times, until I finally decided to rebuild perl, xorg and xfce4. But to my surprise it failed. I reinstalled my xfce4 and its gang one by one, so they’ll all run on the same version. Reboot the machine and voila, am back. Still, some of my installed packages are broken, so I had to fix them.

So they say, if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. I could’ve just stick to FreeBSD 7.0 and save the 48 hours from the agonizing pain of troubleshooting my machine. But seriously, it was worth it. The performance is so much better, XFCE 4.6 is brilliant with more new features and yes fellas.. flash 9 works

He got engaged:
Yes, he finally got engaged. AmazingCongratulations.

I wish.. lol.

Am very new to weblogic, so am pretty excited to try it on my FreeBSD at home. Well ok, I just managed to install it, but couldn’t get it run. Bleargh. The problem is with the LD_LIBRARY_PATH I think. There’s no native directory under <WL_HOME>/server, so it’ll complain about the missing path when you try to start the domain or node manager. Pfftttt. I’d love to know how to fix this

But anyways, here’s how to install WebLogic 10g on FreeBSD 7. Just installing it, but it doesn’t work lol. I don’t know why I even bother writing this.

1 – FIrst of all, download the installer from the oracle website. Choose HP-UX as the operating system as that’ll provide you with a generic jar installer.
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/ias/htdocs/wls_main.html

2 – While it’s downloading, install eclipse from the port.
cd /usr/ports/java/eclipse && make install clean

3 – Install eclipse WTP. Get it from here:
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/webtools/downloads/drops/R2.0/R-2.0.3-20080710044639/wtp-R-2.0.3-20080710044639.zip

Place the zip file at /usr/local and unzip it. It’ll place all the extracted files in the right directory.

4 – After you’re done with eclipse, you’re ready to install weblogic. Am performing this as a non root user.

I use diablo java, so running java -jar server103_generic.jar alone will not work.

My java -version:
java version “1.5.0″
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build diablo-1.5.0-b01)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build diablo-1.5.0_07-b01, mixed mode)

So execute the installer using sun jdk directory to get it running:
/usr/local/jdk1.6.0/bin/java -Dos.name=unix -jar server103_generic.jar

You’ll have to specify the Dos unix name, else you’ll get the insufficient disk space error, which is very annoying when you actually have tons of free space. You may get lucky with this and the installation will end successfully. As for me, it stuck at 74% while creating the sample domain.

$ /usr/local/jdk1.6.0/bin/java -Dos.name=unix -jar server103_generic.jar
Extracting 0%……………………………………………………………………………………….100%
Exception in thread “Thread-14″ java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
at java.io.BufferedOutputStream.<init>(BufferedOutputStream.java:59)
at java.io.BufferedOutputStream.<init>(BufferedOutputStream.java:42)
at com.bea.plateng.common.util.JarHelper.extract(JarHelper.java:790)
at com.bea.plateng.common.util.JarHelper.extract(JarHelper.java:676)
at com.bea.plateng.common.util.JarHelper.extract(JarHelper.java:634)
at com.bea.plateng.domain.TemplateImporter.generate(TemplateImporter.java:237)
at com.bea.plateng.domain.script.ScriptExecutor$2.run(ScriptExecutor.java:2785)

The error was out of memory exception, so I decided to reinstall it. But first I have to uninstall it first since weblogic detected that it has already been installed at the target directory.I run the installer with the following command:
/usr/local/jdk1.6.0/bin/java -Xmx2G -Dos.name=unix -jar server103_generic.jar

Installation complete!

Alright, now the installation is done, you might wanna try to start the sample domain.

Ahah! Now this is the part where I got unlucky.

It complains that the port is being used, when it’s not! Hmmmmphhhhh!

<Dec 13, 2008 12:25:25 PM MYT> <Notice> <Security> <BEA-090169> <Loading trusted certificates from the jks keystore file /usr/local/jdk1.6.0/jre/lib/security/cacerts.>
<Dec 13, 2008 12:25:29 PM MYT> <Error> <Server> <BEA-002606> <Unable to create a server socket for listening on channel “MedRec Local Network Channel”. The address 127.0.0.1 might be incorrect or another process is using port 7011: java.net.BindException: Can’t assign requested address.>
<Dec 13, 2008 12:25:29 PM MYT> <Error> <Server> <BEA-002606> <Unable to create a server socket for listening on channel “Default”. The address 192.168.0.1 might be incorrect or another process is using port 7011: java.net.BindException: Can’t assign requested address.>
<Dec 13, 2008 12:25:29 PM MYT> <Error> <Server> <BEA-002606> <Unable to create a server socket for listening on channel “DefaultSecure”. The address 192.168.0.1 might be incorrect or another process is using port 7012: java.net.BindException: Can’t assign requested address.>
<Dec 13, 2008 12:25:29 PM MYT> <Emergency> <Security> <BEA-090087> <Server failed to bind to the configured Admin port. The port may already be used by another process.>
<Dec 13, 2008 12:25:29 PM MYT> <Critical> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000362> <Server failed. Reason: Server failed to bind to any usable port. See preceeding log message for details.>
<Dec 13, 2008 12:25:29 PM MYT> <Notice> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to FAILED>
<Dec 13, 2008 12:25:29 PM MYT> <Error> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000383> <A critical service failed. The server will shut itself down>
<Dec 13, 2008 12:25:29 PM MYT> <Notice> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to FORCE_SHUTTING_DOWN>
Stopping PointBase server…
PointBase server stopped.

Well actually there are other errors came out before that but am too lazy to look at it. Lolz.

Now if you try to create a domain, you’ll get the shared library path error:

./config.sh: Don’t know how to set the shared library path for FreeBSD.
Exception in thread “AWT-EventQueue-0″ java.lang.NullPointerException
at java.awt.Container.createHierarchyEvents(Container.java:1366)
at java.awt.Container.createHierarchyEvents(Container.java:1366)
at java.awt.Container.createHierarchyEvents(Container.java:1366)
at java.awt.Container.createHierarchyEvents(Container.java:1366)
at java.awt.Container.addImpl(Container.java:1082)
at java.awt.Container.add(Container.java:903)
at com.bea.plateng.wizard.GUIContext$8.run(GUIContext.java:480)
at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(InvocationEvent.java:209)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:597)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(EventDispatchThread.java:273)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForFilter(EventDispatchThread.java:183)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:173)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:168)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:160)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(EventDispatchThread.java:121)

Same goes if you try to start a node manager.

Ah well.. think I’ll spare some other time playing around with this. Doing weblogic makes me miss websphere. Lol.

I was so damn sleepy last night that I could hardly remember what I did before I went off to bed, but I do remember one thing – I switched off my external hdd without checking if I have safely unmount it from Windows. Actually I was too lazy to check and I forced myself to believe that I have unmounted it.

Back in the office this morning I plugged in the hdd, and surprise, surprise.. Ubuntu recognized only one of the partition (I have two, ‘Work’ and ‘Personal’). It gave me an error stating that it failed to mount due to unclean shutdown.

I remember having the similar error with the same hdd, even worse actually since both partitions failed to be mounted. But that happened after I borrowed my hdd to a colleague who is running on Vista, and it is pretty common to have that error once you try to boot it back on any *nix system. Back then I was using freebsd, and I normally mount it manually using the “mount -t ntfs /dev/da0s5 /mnt/hdd” command. ntfsfix didn’t solve the error, but ntfs-3g worked like a charm.

And so I tried to mount it manually on Ubuntu using ntfs-3g command, but it gave me this error:
fuse: mount failed: Invalid argument

I installed ntfsprogs and tried to fix with ntfsfix. It completed successfully, but my attempt to mount the partition still failed.

I mounted it back on Windows, and checked on the disk management. While it recognized my ‘Work’ partition as ntfs, my ‘Personal’ partition was recognized as raw and unlabeled. So I labeled it, and run chkdsk against the volume. Mount it back on Ubuntu, and it worked! Yay

Moral of the story is - Don’t work when you’re sleepy.

FreeBSD 7.0 is out!

Finally managed to get the flash-plugin to work on Opera. I recently installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on my lappie replacing FreeBSD 6.2 to fulfill the training’s requirement I attended last week (but ended up I used the desktop provided). So back to flash, it was pretty annoying to get it working on Opera. I don’t remember having this kinda problem back when I used Edge. Even linux-opera’s flash plugin works out of the box in freebsd.

The solution is, use flash 7, it’ll work like a charm. Forget about flash 9.

Several times I was asked why do I use unix/linux and not windows. Most of the time I’d give them the easiest and fundamental answer – it’s free.

Logically, why would anyone opt for something that is expensive, when there are better products that come for free? It never really came across my mind before that one wouldn’t use linux because it’s free until I read this article. Funny, weird, but somehow it does make sense afterall.

On a different note, I tried vixta on my vm. First try and it didn’t work out well. Some of the buttons weren’t functioning, but yea it does look like vista. Prolly it behaves like one too