DBAN *ERROR /dev/sda (process crash)

So I was using DBAN 2.2.6 beta to wipe the drives on a Dell PowerEdge 860. After typing "autonuke," DBAN would load, but instead of starting the wipe I would get these errors: DBAN finished with non-fatal errors.*ERROR /dev/sdb (process crash)*ERROR /dev/sda (process crash)Press and hold power button to shut down When I loaded DBAN manually (by pressing enter at the boot prompt instead of typing "autonuke"), I would see an "unrecognized device" in the device list. I finally figured out what it was: the DRAC had set up some kind of virtual...

UnsatisfiedLinkError exception loading native library: njni11

So... I was working on automating an Oracle 11.1 db installation on a RHEL 5.5 machine. I automated the software install, but when running dbca to create the database, I kept getting this error: UnsatisfiedLinkError exception loading native library: njni11 I googled it, but all I found were posts on how I needed to make sure I had installed the necessary packages, in particular libaio and libaio-devel. Well, I had all of those installed but I was still getting the error. It finally hit me: I was automating everything (using Puppet), and...

Why Python?

It's occurred to me I haven't posted much on Python, which has been my preferred computer language for the last couple of years. Nothing else compares: it's high-level, object-oriented, actually encourages easily-readable code, and doesn't get in my way as a programmer.Granted, I'm not an expert in the field, but every time I have to program in other high-level languages such as PHP, Java, bash, or (in a worst-case scenario) Perl, I realize how much Python has spoiled me.Here's a link to an amazing article that got me to consider Python (and...

Genie/Vala

You wouldn't know this from reading my blog, but I'm a Python fanboy. Maybe I haven't blogged anything about Python because it's already so completely awesome that there isn't much to blog about. Well, anyway, today I stumbled upon an interesting programming language called Genie:http://live.gnome.org/Geniehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_%28programming_language%29Genie is pretty intriguing for many reasons. It's a high-level language that uses the Vala compiler. What is Vala?, you might ask. Vala is a high-level language that can be used...

ubuntu 10.04 annoyances

well, I just upgraded to the latest version of Ubuntu (10.04), and every time I do, inevitably it seems that something breaks or at least doesn't quite work the way it used to. For instance, in 9.10, grub didn't recognize my /boot partition. I found a bug report for it, but I'm still not sure if it's fixed or not. And in Firefox, every time I'd do a search for text in a page, if it got to the end of the page or there were no search results, the page content would stretch beyond the browser window (I'm guessing it thought the browser was maximized...

jTDS for dummies

I got this error when trying to use a MS SQL data source in Confluence:Cannot load JDBC driver class 'net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver'I had downloaded the jTDS JDBC driver (or so I thought) and put it in the common/lib folder of my Tomcat installation.What I had done wrong is I downloaded the jtds-1.2.5-bundle.jar file thinking it was the MS SQL connector I needed. Apparently I should have downloaded the jtds-1.2.5-dist.zip file, extracted jtds-1.2.5.jar from that, and copied that file to my Tomcat common/lib fold...

balsamiq

I just stumbled upon this really cool program for creating UI mockups called Balsamiq. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. You can also play with it online:http://www.balsamiq.com/builds/mockups-web-demo/One possible open source alternative is called the Pencil Project, but it looks like it's maybe got a little too much going on. One of the main things Balsamiq has going for it is it only takes a couple of minutes to slap together a mockup....

Heimdal 1.3: BAD_ENCRYPTION_TYPE

Solution: Edit the Kerberos configuration file (for me it's /etc/krb5.conf), and add this line in the [libdefaults] section: allow_weak_crypto = true Details: More of the same... (see my posts on Berkeley DB) I compiled the latest version of Heimdal Kerberos the other day (it's the recommended flavor of Kerberos to use with OpenLDAP), and after getting everything set up, I would get these errors when trying to run LDAP searches: SASL/GSSAPI authentication started ldap_sasl_interactive_bind_s: Local error (-2) additional info: SASL(-1):...

Compiling Berkeley DB on GNU/Linux

When compiling Berkeley DB on GNU/Linux (in particular if it's being compiled to be used with OpenLDAP), make sure you compile it with the following flags: --enable-posixmutexes --with-mutex=POSIX/pthreads I happened to run across that buried in the openldap-software mailing list archives. Here are some more details: "On x86 though, they have a hybrid mutex mechanism which is enabled by default. It uses both assembly language spinlocks and pthread mutexes, first spinning in the assembly language lock some number of times before falling...

bacn

Is anyone out there actually using this term other than me? In general, I normally just try not to sign up for stuff that I'm not going to read (mailing lists, etc.), but there is the occasional list that I may not read regularly, but still don't want to unsubscribe from. Especially at work, where I'm supposed to be subscribed to certain mailing lists, but I don't necessarily have time (or want) to read everything they send me, so they go to their own special bacn folder :Dhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacn_(electron...