One of the best methods I’ve found to get hard to find music is google. Now I do buy a shit load of cd’s, but some of the stuff I like just isn’t available any more and is pre cd.. I’m talking old tape here.. so anyway this is the google string I use;

intitle:index.of +”last modified” +”parent directory” +(mp3|wma|ogg) +”Song Name Goes Here” -htm -html -php -asp

Okay so this morning I log into one of our terminal servers to update the Java Virtual Machine and I get greeted with this;

Now I know we’re in a global market melt down and all that rubbish but seriously I think this is going a bit far don’t you. Australia gets the boot but I bet Saudi Arabia is cool. Given my close affinity with Sun I’ve taken this quite personally, so I think I will go kick a Sun Ray while I wait for the apprentice at Sun to fix it.

Saw this asked on IRC today, seemed like an easy one but apparently not very evident. The Gnome “start menu” if you will, in a default Solaris installation contains some quick launch links, whose right contextual menu doesn’t provide for a way of removing them.

Each of these contain a entry in their /usr/share/applications desktop file that looks like;

Categories=Application;Office;X-Sun-Quick-Start;X-Sun-Supported;

it’s the entry of X-Sun-Quick-Start that causes these applications to appear on the top level of the start menu structure, simply removing this entry from the categories line will stop them appearing.

Maybe an option to delete these from within the menu preferences would have been a nice idea in hindsight.

I spotted someone today manually untaring about 45 archives in a single directory this morning and when I asked why they told me they didn’t know any better. So like I showed them, I am posting it here as well;

for a in `ls -1 *.tar.gz`; do tar -zxvf $a; done

This will list all files in the directory ending in tar.gz then run them through the tar utility to extract them, note this is for the bash shell.

As some of you know my wife has been using a Apple iPhone since last December, and as such I have belong the resident iPhone unlocker for all and sundry that needs it done. Just this week I have done six for various relatives of the boss.

Normally this is an annoying and manual task as laid out by http://iphone.unlock.no/ but this morning I found out about a just released tool called ZiPhone. It’s available for OSX and Windows platforms and I must say unlocking, activating and installing apps has never been easier, it is literally a 3 minute process now and takes out all the guess work any idiot could unlock a iPhone now.

Get it now from http://www.ziphone.org/.

** Quick note I’ve noticed Ziphone uses older sources, so the first thing you need to do in the installer is reinstall “community sources” so you are able to install packages other wise you will get a “failing to download package” message.

Functional specifications are not technical specifications. Seems people get these two confused as being one and the same. While I am not aware of any universally textbook definitions for the two I hold the following to be true;

1. A functional specification describes how a product will work entirely from the user’s perspective. It doesn’t care how the thing is implemented. It talks about features. It specifies screens, menus, dialogs, and so on.

2. A technical specification describes the internal implementation of the program. It talks about data structures, relational database models, choice of programming languages and tools, algorithms, etc.

With Zimbra versions before 5.0.3 whenever you do a system upgrade and hence and upgrade of the Zimbra outlook connector it would create a new outlook profile and clobber the autocomplete type settings.

So to combat this backup the following file;

c:\documents & settings\$username\application data\microsoft\outlook\$profilename.nk2

A mate of mine has started to use the OSS version of Zimbra, and asked me how to best back it up this morning as the OSS version misses out on the backup/restore functions of the NE version.

So what follows is my recommendation, I’m sure others are all ready doing it this way so certainly not something new;

Stop Zimbra using “zmcontrol stop” and check it has ended with “zmcontrol status” as the “zimbra” user.

I have a kill all user processes script I like to run as well just to be sure everything has stopped;

#!/bin/bash
USER=$1
MYNAME=`basename $0`
if [ ! -n “$USER” ]
then
echo “Usage: $MYNAME username” >&2
exit 1
elif ! grep “^$USER:” /etc/passwd >/dev/null
then
echo “User $USER does not exist!” >&2
exit 2
fi
while [ `ps -ef | grep “^$USER” | wc -l` -gt 0 ]
do
PIDS=`ps -ef | grep “^$USER” | awk ‘{print $2}’`
echo “Killing ” `echo $PIDS | wc -w` ” processes for user $USER.”
for PID in $PIDS
do
kill -9 $PID 2>&1 >/dev/null
done
done
echo “User $USER has 0 processes still running.”

script usage is simply ./killuser $username, the script will then systematically nuke all processes belonging to that user. First used to free up server resources when I was working as an operator and needed more cpu cycles to speed my tasks up 🙂

right so next run;

1. “rsync -ra /opt/zimbra /backup –progress”
2. “tar -zcvf /tmp/zimbra.backup.tgz -C /backup”
3. “ncftpput -u $username -p $password $server /zimbrabackups /tmp/zimbra.backup.tgz”

make sure your ftp server has space, as my backups run at about 300 – 400 GB.

This is a CRON Job script I use by the way to automate the process;

#!/bin/bash

# Zimbra Backup Script
# Requires ncftp to run
# This script is intended to run from the crontab as root
# Free to use and free of any warranty!

# Live sync before stopping Zimbra to minimize sync time with the services down
# Comment out the following line if you want to try single cold-sync only
rsync -avHK –delete /opt/zimbra/ /backup/zimbra

# which is the same as: /opt/zimbra /backup
# Including –delete option gets rid of files in the dest folder that don’t exist at the src
# this prevents logfile/extraneous bloat from building up overtime.

# Stop Zimbra Services
sudo -u zimbra /opt/zimbra/bin/zmcontrol stop
sleep 20

# Sync to backup directory
rsync -avHK –delete /opt/zimbra/ /backup/zimbra

# Restart Zimbra Services
sudo -u zimbra /opt/zimbra/bin/zmcontrol start

# Create a txt file in the backup directory that’ll contain the current Zimbra
# server version. Handy for knowing what version of Zimbra a backup can be restored to.
sudo -u zimbra zmcontrol -v > /backup/zimbra/conf/zimbra_version.txt
# or examine your /opt/zimbra/.install_history

# Create archive of backed-up directory for offsite transfer
# cd /backup/zimbra
tar -zcvf /tmp/zimbra.backup.tgz -C /backup/zimbra .

# Transfer file to backup server
ncftpput -u $username -p $password server /zimbrabackups /tmp/zimbra.backup.tgz

Just a few notes about SRSS and CAM so I don’t keep forgetting;

• To increase the number of default CAM users from 25 run /opt/SUNWbb/bin/bbmkuser -m utcu 150000 75 (or the number of desired users)
• Increase Worker threads from 8 to 24 in /etc/opt/SUNWut/auth.props
• utdesktop -e “TokenID, Name, Location”
• utxconfig -t TokenID -r “Resolution”