Rescan the SCSI bus under Linux

Sometimes you want to rescan the SCSI bus, when e.g. adding a new virtual disc in a virtual machine…

Here you can find a very nice shell script, which accomplishes the job:

http://blog.sun.com/roller/resources/le/rescan-scsi-bus.sh

On debian based distributions you can find it in the scsitools package.

How to mount your ro system disk as rw again?

Sometimes your Linux boots with your system disk mounted readonly (because of some fs issues for instance).
So if you want to change stuff e.g. in /etc/fstab this becomes quite unhandy.

To get e.g. “/” writeable again, you just remount it with this one-liner:

mount -o remount,rw /

Good luck.
(This is also one of those tings, I can never remember…)

Uninstall Lotus Notes 8.5 from Mac OSX

At some point I wanted to completely erase and reinstall my Lotus Notes 8.5 installation.
Turns out, that dragging the app into the Trash is not enough – the user preferences are still kept.
But finally I found help in the IBM-Documentation-Jungle:

You can uninstall IBM^® Lotus^® Notes^® by dragging Notes.app from /Applications to the trash. This preserves user data. You can also uninstall Notes using the uninstaller application supplied with the Notes install media. This preserves user data. As well, you can also uninstall Notes by dragging the following items to the Apple^® Mac OS X^® trash bin:

• Notes.app
• ~/Library/Application Support/Lotus Notes Data folder (”~” = user’s home directory)
• ~/Library/Preferences/Notes Preferences
  • /Library/Receipts/Lotus Notes Installer.pkg
  • /Library/Receipts/xpdcoreinstaller.pkg

Note To reinstall after uninstalling, you may also need to delete the following items prior to reinstalling Notes:

Note If you installed the Notes basic configuration, rather than the standard configuration, you can uninstall the Notes basic configuration by dragging Notes.app from /Applications to the trash. This preserves user data. You can also uninstall Notes by dragging the following items to the Mac OS X trash bin:

• /Applications/Notes.app
• ~/Library/Application Support/Lotus Notes Data folder (”~” = user’s home directory)
• ~/Library/Preferences/Notes Preferences
• /Library/Receipts/Lotus Notes Installer.pkg

That did the trick for me.
Next time I started the installer, it had forgotten everything and started from scratch:

Dead Space

Today I learned, that there is a rather popular video game called “Dead Space”.
It seems to be one of those harsh sci-fi-horror-ego-shooters and got released in 2008.

Should I consider to buy it?
At least the main character seemed to get named after the infamous Sci-fi writers Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.

Hm.

Anyway, if this is what you are looking for you better get going this way:

http://www.wikipedia.org

Fun with Trash can in Mac OSX

I figured, that at some point – if you have BootCamp installed it might come to the case, that your trash can in the doc looks always  filled, although the trash seems to be emtpy.

If you open up a finder window, all you can see is this strange link:

I managed to work around this, by “ejecting” my BootCamp partition/drive.

Other folks have reported to get this fixed by booting from your Windows partition, right-click on the drive ->Properties ->Tools->Check Now->Automatically fix filesystem errors.

Did not test this on my own.

How to flush DNS Cache in MAC OSX?

Ever wondered, why your fresh entries on the DNS server never seem to appear on your mac right away?

Leopard is caching DNS information quite long. So if you want to flush your cache just take a terminal and hack in the words of magic:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

I can never memorize that, so I wrote it here.

Once and for all.

Dell MD 3000 RAID 6 and Volumes > 2 TB

The last firmware for the MD 3000 provides (from the Release Notes):

• Implemented Generation 2 firmware
• Supports greater than 2TB LUNs
• Added RAID6 support
• Enhanced IPv6 support for all ports
• Included Smart Battery (Smart BBU) management
• Enabled SNTP on management port
• Increased number of snapshots and volume copies per volume from

To get it working you need the latest version of the MDSM, which ships with
an  additional tool for upgrading (MD Cross Generation Upgrade Utility).
You can’t do it via the “normal” upgrade firmware feature.

Note: If you want to install the MDSM on a Windows machine, make sure, the country settings are set to “English”.
Other languages are not supported at the moment.

Get the latest Raid-Controller-Firmware und Resource CD here.

After successfully installing the new MDSM, you need to run the MD Cross Generation Upgrade Utility:

Start-> Programme-> Dell-> MD Storage Manager -> MD Cross Generation Upgrade Utility

Setup your RAID groups on the MD and install the new Drivers on the host and you can soon chuckle about
your new >2TB RAID 6 secured Drives …

Nice.

Lotus Notes – Blessing or Curse?

Ok. They did it. After one year of spending heaps of time in endless meetings, they finally
chose Lotus Notes Domino to be _the_ groupware application in my company.
And guess what – I’m one of the guys who will be responsible for implementing it.

*Sigh.*

I have really mixed emotions concerning this decision.
on one hand the whole domino package is supposed to provide all these neat features like:

• native rich clients (not only for Windows but) for MAC OSX and Linux as well
• fail over redundancy at application level – if one server crashes – no problem – 5 others are already waiting and the best: the user does not even realize
• working sync support for various mobile devices “over the air” – no more: “My phone does not sync with my laptop, Please help.”

on the other hand

• the client is so cumbersome (especially on older systems)  and hungry for resources, that I’ve already heard many of my users claiming that they would not use such a “monster” just for entering a single appointment
• IBM officially supports Ubuntu only, on the Linux side
• you can not connect iCal or Thunderbird lightning or Evolution just like that to it (yes, we _are_ a general store in terms of supported OS’s)
• last but not least it puzzles me to see those Louts-hate-posts out there like:
  http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianweeklytechnologysection

The good news is, that the these posts are from 2006 – so hopefully IBM did their home work in between and we will see a happy ending
for my users…

CUDA 2.0 in Ubuntu 7.10 64 bit

After installing Ubuntu 7.10 64 Bit, I managed to get CUDA running in no time,
following the instructions of this guy.

Nbody6 complies just fine by following the instructions here.

Ubuntu 7.10 and Nbody6?

Installed the CUDA-Framework on an Dell Optiplex 755 with NVIDIA quadro F 370.

Turns out that nvidia provides Version 2.1 Beta only for Ubunutu 8.04.
But Nbody6 does not compile with nvcc 2.1.

Guess I’ll have to get the old Gutsy Gibbon running…