If you’re sleepy, just sleep, don’t do your work.

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.

The art of lying –

to yourself.

So, do you lie to yourself? And if you do, do you do it often? How often? And when do you normally lie to yourself? When you’re depressed? Or when you’re too excited? Or when you’re less sober?

But the main question is, why? Why do you lie to yourself? Did anyone force you? Are you too bored with life that you just have to lie to yourself because you know it’s wrong to lie to anyone else? Too much of spare time? Because it’s fun?

Or, are you in a denial state and you just can’t handle the truth so you lie to yourself to make you feel better?

Temporarily, yes.

Thing is, in the end of the day, you know it’s a lie, and you won’t feel any better.

If there is a true art in lying to yourself that I can master, I would’ve surely dig it. Yes, so that I can feel better.

osx86 on vmware server.

My 3rd attempt in installing osx86 onto my vmware server ended successfully. I know there are a number of guides/howto on this topic, but think I’ll just post the settings that I used in order to get it work.

Machine: DELL Inspiron 640m
Platform: Ubuntu Gutsy
Console: VMWare Server 1.0.4
osx86 version: Jas 10.4.8 AMD Intel SSE2 SSE3
References: PCWiz Computer and AsenDURE

Note: This is just for fun/test purposes.

Virtual Machine Configuration: Custom
Guest Operating System: Other – FreeBSD
No. of processors: One
Access Rights: Make this virtual machine private – checked
Memory: 512MB
I/O Adapter Types: LSI Logic
Disk: Create a new virtual disk
Virtual Disk Type: IDE
Network Connection: Use host-only networking

My vmx file:

##########################################################

config.version = “8”
virtualHW.version = “4”
scsi0.present = “FALSE”
scsi0.virtualDev = “lsilogic”
memsize = “512”
ide0:0.present = “TRUE”
ide0:0.fileName = “OSX.vmdk”
ide0:0.writeThrough = “TRUE”
ide1:0.present = “TRUE”
ide1:0.fileName = “/dev/scd0”
ide1:0.deviceType = “cdrom-raw”
floppy0.startConnected = “FALSE”
floppy0.fileName = “/dev/fd0”
Ethernet0.present = “TRUE”
Ethernet0.connectionType = “hostonly”
Ethernet0.virtualDev = “vlance”
displayName = “OSX”
guestOS = “freebsd”
priority.grabbed = “normal”
priority.ungrabbed = “normal”
powerType.powerOff = “hard”
powerType.powerOn = “hard”
powerType.suspend = “hard”
powerType.reset = “hard”
paevm=”true”

floppy0.present = “FALSE”

##########################################################

Previously on my 2nd attempt I mounted the osx86 iso file using the mount iso command, and point the CD-ROM to the mount point but it just didn’t work. So I skipped the hassle and burned it straigt onto a DVD.

With the above setting I don’t have any problem in booting the DVD. I did configure the VM BIOS though just to improve the performance.

Boot the CD, and the launcher will start. After creating a partition using the Disk Utility, I relaunched the installer: Installer > Restart.

Upon rebooting, you may or may not get a ‘b0 error’. It depends on your boot sequence setting. To solve this, just go to BIOS and set your CDROM as the first boot device. F10, and you’ll get back to the launcher again. This time, you can proceed with the installation. At the end of the installation, the vm will restart. If all goes well, Mac OS X should boot perfectly.

Done 😀

File name truncated – huh?

I was installing WAS v6.0.2 on a HP-UX B.11.31 IA-64 server and had a problem while trying to install the Update Installer for fixpack 25. Now again, the problem did not occur during the patching, but during the installation of the Update Installer itself.

Since WAS v6.0.2.21, IBM decided to separate the update installer package from the fix pack. This is great since this can save up time as it avoids the redundancy of downloading the update installer which normally can be used across the similar product version. But now one must be sure that the he/she has the correct version of update installer to match with the fixpack to be installed – IBM takes care of this with ‘FIX CENTRAL’. As for me, I’m sure I have the correct one.

Now back to the problem with the update installer. Based on the logs it stated that there is a missing file – no such file or directory. Well actually there are more than just one missing file, but the installation will stop each time it failed to find a particular file, and on the next re-run it will detect another missing file and so on. When I went through the directories, I figured that there are few files with their names truncated. So that explains the error of the missing files.

I untared the same file on my ubuntu, checked the file names and they are all in perfect condition. Erms. I’m confused. Why and how were the names got truncated? Probably during the sftp of the installer from my lappie to the server?

A screenshot that says it all:

On a different note, I think it would be nice if IBM could provide a checksum of all the files available for download so that I could just simply check if the files that I downloaded are not corrupted. At the moment I’m keeping a list of my own md5 checksum of all installers that I have downloaded.

Another thing that bothers me is that sometimes I just don’t understand the Download Director that I use to download IBM softwares. While I like it more than http download, I am so confused with the ETA. How do you define a negative value of an ETA? This normally happened when I download multiple files at a time. Gah.

I guess dis ees an important lesson.

Am planning to sit for an exam this year so for a start, I bought these two books last week.

Don’t get me wrong. When you get your brain loaded with all the stuff for the exam, you have to keep it happy too. So am gonna read these books during the interval hours of my study.

But the problem is, I think I stuff my brain with too much of PBS and only work on the exam on interval hours.

Erms.

Install WAS Base/ND v6.1.0 on Ubuntu Gutsy.

There are 2 things that need to be configured in order to install WebSphere Application Server Base/ND on Ubuntu Gutsy successfully – tested using WAS Base/ND v6.1.

1 – Ubuntu Gutsy links sh to dash instead of bash. There won’t be any error during the installation of WAS itself, but you will not be able to create any profile, so it’s useless. Two ways to fix this, either remove the symlink and relink it to bash, or change the shebang line inside the WAS install script from #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/bash. Changing the default shell from dash to bash may cause your system slower since dash is lighter than bash, but I think it is hardly noticeable. More info at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh.

2 – This applies to WAS ND, I didn’t encounter any issue with Base. If you’re having a problem in getting the dmgr server up, and the error in the SystemOut.log is something like this:

…

[3/12/08 15:38:06:539 MYT] 0000000a LogAdapter E DCSV9403E: Received an illegal configuration argument. Parameter
MulticastInterface, value: 127.0.1.1. Exception is java.lang.Exception: Network Interface 127.0.1.1 was not found in
local machine network interface list. Make sure that the NetworkInterface property is properly configured!
at com.ibm.rmm.mtl.transmitter.Config.<init>(Config.java:238)
at com.ibm.rmm.mtl.transmitter.MTransmitter.<init>(MTransmitter.java:192)
at com.ibm.rmm.mtl.transmitter.MTransmitter.getInstance(MTransmitter.java:406)
at com.ibm.rmm.mtl.transmitter.MTransmitter.getInstance(MTransmitter.java:345)
at com.ibm.htmt.rmm.RMM.getInstance(RMM.java:128)
at com.ibm.htmt.rmm.RMM.getInstance(RMM.java:189)
at com.ibm.ws.dcs.vri.transportAdapter.rmmImpl.rmmAdapter.RmmAdapter.<init>(RmmAdapter.java:218)
at com.ibm.ws.dcs.vri.transportAdapter.rmmImpl.rmmAdapter.MbuRmmAdapter.<init>(MbuRmmAdapter.java:76)
at com.ibm.ws.dcs.vri.transportAdapter.rmmImpl.rmmAdapter.RmmAdapter.getInstance(RmmAdapter.java:133)
at com.ibm.ws.dcs.vri.transportAdapter.TransportAdapter.getInstance(TransportAdapter.java:161)
at com.ibm.ws.dcs.vri.common.impl.DCSCoreStackImpl.<init>(DCSCoreStackImpl.java:178)
at com.ibm.ws.dcs.vri.common.impl.DCSCoreStackImpl.getInstance(DCSCoreStackImpl.java:167)
at com.ibm.ws.dcs.vri.common.impl.DCSStackFactory.getCoreStack(DCSStackFactory.java:92)
at com.ibm.ws.dcs.vri.DCSImpl.getCoreStack(DCSImpl.java:84)
at com.ibm.ws.hamanager.coordinator.impl.DCSPluginImpl.<init>(DCSPluginImpl.java:238)
at com.ibm.ws.hamanager.coordinator.impl.CoordinatorImpl.<init>(CoordinatorImpl.java:322)
at com.ibm.ws.hamanager.coordinator.corestack.CoreStackFactoryImpl.createDefaultCoreStack(CoreStackFactoryImpl
.java:82)

…

Chance is you have not assigned an IP address for your hostname, except for the default 127.* address. If this is the case you won’t be able to federate nodes to the Dmgr as well. So edit your hosts file. Since Edgy the hostname was split to 127.0.1.1, so you will see 127.0.0.1 is assigned to a localhost, and 127.0.1.1 to your hostname. Assign your hostname to 127.0.0.1 as well, and problem solved. But if you plan to do some nodes federation, then assign an IP for your hostname. Your hosts file should look something like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost YourHostName
127.0.1.1 YourHostName

Done.

This is not new but anyways..

FreeBSD 7.0 is out!