IT Support Small Medium Business

A few months back, it seemed that main page to sign on to http://www.citicards.com under linux was problematic. The page showed at first, with the desired login form shown on the top left corner as usual. Then, whole screen went blank. Using Firefox under Windows, a few splash went by then you were back at the main page. Searching by Google showed some tricks to toggle off then on ertain JAVASCRIPT options at certain point. I tried and it worked ok.

A month ago, while staring at the blank page, I right clicked on it, only to find a familar Macromedia flash player setting pop-up. I noticed that the ‘Play’ checkbox was not checked. I checked it.

Viola! A few splash later, I was back to the familiar logon page again.  What a hassle!  I am grateful that I don’t have to boot back to Windows  nor have to jump hoops to toggle them JAVASCRIPT options. Read the rest of this entry »

More often nowadays, I found that I need to deal with something ‘foreign’ in unix/linux servers I manage professionally. One thing in particular is an increased number of files whose names have white spaces in them. Most unix/linux utilities use any white space (tab, new line, space) as their delimiter character of choice, hence the problem.

These files are either legal immigrants from the other operating systems (uploads to a CMS/wiki/blog, for example), or some native programs or utilities with “foreign” roots (vmware server).

The common way to deal with it, is to opt to use ASCII NUL as delimiter when invoking command line utilities. This capability is a built-in for  more unix/linux utilities than I knew when I started to research to resolve a problem I had.

• grep -Z
• find . -print0
• xargs -0
• cut –output-delimiter=”\0″

“find . -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ltr” does work well, while ’svn status | cut -b8 –output-delimiter=”\0″ | xargs -0 ls -ltr’ doesn’t. Read the rest of this entry »

As root, I used ’strace64′ to trace system calls of ‘db2icrt’ on a new DB2 UDB v8.2 server running RHEL5 (PPC64) on IBM eServer OpenPower 720 hardware. W/o tracking by strace64, the same command failed right away when a database administrator ran ’sudo db2icrt blahInstanceOptionsHere’. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I attempted to upgrade my CentOS 4.5 desktop to CentOS 5 and was met with miserable failure. ‘yum upgrade’ path failed due to abysmal dependency resolution. Upgrade by booting up with a CentOS 5 dvd-rom failed mysteriously with a big ERROR pop-up window just when the installer finished transfer installation image to the disk. I can only vaguely recall of this kinda trouble/misery when upgrading a RHL 5.2 desktop to RHL 6.0, or something ancient like that. Read the rest of this entry »

In order to prepare a development web server running Redhat Linux 9 for 2007 DST changes, I upgraded its glibc from 2.3.2-27 to 2.3.2-71 to take advantage of tzdata rpm packages updated for 2007 DST changes.

• glibc-2.3.2-64 is the earliest version of glibc RPM that has separated timezone data into a new rpm named tzdata (More details can be found here).
• A backend Sybase ASE server also runs RHL 9, but with a newer glibc-2.3.2-71. The latter was recommended by Michael Peppler for Sybase ASE 12.5 on RHL9 to get around certain bugs in the glibc RPM package shipped with the original RHL9. Read the rest of this entry »