Philipp's braindump

Today I had the problem of displaying the version of the interpreter in a perl and a python script.

Continue reading “Getting Program Version within a script”

After installation of VMware ESX 3.5 on a SunFire X2100 the machine always faulted with a root-fs error.

Looking at the VMware forums, I found a post by rpartmann who provides a script to solve this issue[1].

With the help of his script I found the relevant steps to fix this issue for me:

• Boot into troubleshooting mode (there the SATA controller works).
• go to /etc/vmware/pciid
• edit sata_nv.xml
• As last entry before </vendor> I added:
  <device id=”037f”>
  <vmware label=”scsi”>
  <driver>sata_nv</driver>
  </vmware>
  <name>MCP55 SATA Controller</name>
  </device>
• then I had to rebuild the PCI-ID Table:
  esxcfg-pciid
• regenerate the boot-filesystems:
  esxcfg-boot -r
• reboot

Then I could start without problem on my nVidia SATA chipset.

You might need to do the same procedure after an update of VMware. Haven’t been there so far.

[1] http://communities.vmware.com/message/1011087#1011087

This helps a lot:

exim4 -d+route -bt [email-address]

This week I had to switch a MySQL DB from a latin-1 host to a UTF-8 host (Webserver with Forum/CMS). I have never managed to make this work with only setting the codepages right.

I have put together a perl script that takes the databases and their tables from the one host, encodes it to UTF-8 and inserts the data in the new host.

I hope someone finds this useful: sqlcopyconv.txt

PS: You need to have all the Tables in the new DB created already. But without data.

I got back to playing with Xen again now.

I set up a new box and installed xen via

apt-get install xen-linux-system-2.6.18-6-xen-686.

In the syslog I had heaps of errors like:
Feb 1 11:29:09 test33-10 kernel: 4gb seg fixup, process sshd (pid 2583), cs:ip 73:b7bd59bc
Feb 1 11:29:16 test33-10 kernel: printk: 261591 messages suppressed.

I found out that this was because of libc6-xen was missing. So installing this one, solved the problem for me.

For my other wordpress installation (www.ff-pitten.at) I had the problem, that IE would not break (wrap) a line of many pictures into multiple lines (e.g. http://www.ff-pitten.at/2008/01/06/pkw-bergung-nach-vu-auf-a2/).

The fix for this is to specify “float: left;” in the css for the images.

So easy, but nowhere to be found…

Playing around with WordPress for another homepage which will have a lot of pictures I discovered the slimbox plugin which I think is really nice. Continue reading “WordPress and automatically use slimbox for pictures”

Seems I’ve got myself a new toy now.

I thought about starting a blog since some time already. Now I took the time and did it.

Continue reading “New toy…”