Away for 3 days
I’m preparing for a short, at least I do very hope it will be a short one, 3-days trip to Nizhniy Novgorod to perform SL500 library maintenance. More precisely, I’ll be replacing RLE card but since SL500 is extremely naughty you could never know what another funny thing does it keep in its sleeve. Wish me luck! =)
Sleeping in a /vol
If running “ls -l /” stalls but the same command to any other directory works seamlessly then most probably you’re hitting the following issue. To confirm that use truss:
# truss ls -l
.
.
.
lstat64("/vol", 0xFFBFF8E8) (sleeping...)
Additionally try “grep /var/adm/message” for NFS errors:
# grep NFS /var/adm/messages NFS server for volume management (/vol) not responding still trying
If everything matches then simply “umount /vol” (use -f to forcibly unmount). This issue happens because of the discrepancy between what is written in /etc/mnttab and the actual state of affairs. In my case it was:
# grep "/vol" /etc/mnttab ss5:vold(pid4985) /vol nfs ignore,noquota,dev=5300004 1248249505
But there wasn’t such pid in the process list:
# ps -ef | grep 4985 root 5941 6705 0 13:29:34 pts/5 0:00 grep 4985
Once you manage to umount /vol everything should return back to normal.
A generous road policeman
As far as I know it’s a common practice amongst the drivers all over the globe to warn each other by blinking with upper-beam whenever there is a road-police on an ambush ahead. In my country it looks quite ugly and ridiculous at the same time to watch them lurking in the bushes, behind the trees or even hiding in the old, abandoned and rusty cars parked by the side-road. It all reminds me a “catch me if you can” game. Anyway, that was a preamble and here is the story.
Yesterday when I was on my way home driving through the under-construction part of a highway where the speed is currently limited by 50 km/h. As usual I received few warnings from the cars going in the opposite direction about another ambush when I noticed something very strange and extremely unusual – one of the cars wasn’t just an ordinary one but a road-police car. Sic! It was just beyond my comprehension but made me elated for the rest of the day.
Faint sound from SA
Recently I’ve received few ppictures of myself and my classmates from Sun Microsystems TDC training in South Africa. That was truly awesome two months experience I mentally replay in my head over and over again, not only because it was a great opportunity to visit SA and to meet new faces, but, to a greater extent, from the technical perspective it was an invaluable gain of the new skills and knowledge. So all of the attendees just kept learning from the hefty field experience of your instructors. Btw, all of them were just brilliant teachers inside a class and exceptionally chummy and friendly outdoors. Thank you very much indeed Pieter, Neil, Deon and Eben.
Short weekend trip
Trying to break a monotonous weekend we decided to make a short trip near Moscow and set off to Vereya. Though the place was quite nice but contrary to our expectations, massively based on my friend’s impressions, it wasn’t exactly what we expected to see. The town has radiant and old history but unfortunately very little there could tell a tourist its effulgent story.
Since we’d spent in Vereya less time we initially planned we decided to go to Borodino once again taking more photos on our way.
Kernel Conference Australia
Kernel Conference Australia is kicking off today. This is a three days event which, as appears from the subject, is dedicated to different intricacies of internals of Operating Systems, i.e. Solaris/OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux. And if you’re upset of being unable to participate then here is a live stream so you could enjoy the conference from the comfort of your home cosines. Don’t miss it!
Netbackup’s error 96.
Actually this error is trivially easy to overcome.
# bperror -S 96 unable to allocate new media for backup, storage unit has none available The tape manager (bptm) could not allocate a new volume for backups. This indicates that the storage unit has no more volumes available in the volume pool for this backup. Note that NetBackup will not change storage units during the backup.
All it says is that we’ve ran out of free tapes in our pool. Use the following command to get a list of available recommendations from Symantec.
# bperror -S 96 -r
In absolutely most cases all that you’ll have to do to resolve the issue is just to find an appropriate tape and expire it. Doing so, the expired tape will be automatically placed into the ScratchPool, don’t tell me that you don’t have it ;-), from which it will be lately reused when your backup job starts on the schedule.
# bpmedialist # bpexpdate -d 0 -m BU0001
Easy.
That was quick!
Five minutes ago I received a parcel from Amazon with two books I ordered on Monday. It took only two days to have it delivered from the USA to Russia (Moscow) – I’m deeply impressed! Unfortunately there is always a fly in the ointment. Amazon’s service worked brilliantly but our local DHL didn’t even bother to give me a call beforehand and just dropped it off at our reception desk which is, to tell the truth, situated in a different building though on the same street. As you might have already guessed, it was distinctly said in the shipping address field where the package must be delivered to and it wasn’t the address of our reception but it looks like our DHL had a different opinion on that matter. Since it’s not the very first time they acted in that wacky way I’m slowly getting accustomed so if the next time they deliver a package to the stated address I would be very surprised.
In: Life · Tagged with: book
The Mac Hacker’s Handbook
Have just turned over the last page of “The Mac Hacker’s Handbook” and I’d like to admit that this book is not intended for faint-hearted. To tell the truth, reading this book filled me with controversial sensations. On the one hand, this book has flooded me up with tons of useful information and interesting references, one could/should/must (underscore resting on your preferences) follow to extend their mental outlook and scope of interests. It’s quite coherent and definitely there is a logical in the way it’s laid out, but, on the other hand, don’t even think about finding a clean answer to your “Why? and How?” questions inside this book. Nevertheless there are a lot of code samples it’s drastically lacks the explanation part and that’s why you’ll have to hit up on most everything whilst reading this book. Is it a disadvantage? I’m inclined to believe it’s not but a sort of a hurdle that tries to encourage a reader to do a bit of self-studying. To be honest, after I’m done with reading I don’t feel that I’ve comprehended even one third of the materials presented to me. That’s why, once all the newly obtained knowledge is absorbed, I’ll give it another try to connect all the pieces together.
In: Apple · Tagged with: book, mac os x
Solaris 10 Internals
Just finished re-reading few chapters of Solaris 10 Internals and I must admin this book is truly awesome. It’s not only because it’s well written and very detailed but also spiced with code examples and this fact just encourages you to dive deeper and deeper. Moreover, this book covers some topics (i.e. Memory, The Process Model) which are not Solaris-specific only but relate to Operating Systems in general. Trust me, this book won’t get covered with dust on your bookshelf because it’s also a great reference you will revert to again and again.
In: Solaris · Tagged with: book