BOLVERK – Tim's Dead Blog

I’ve had to look this up far too many times to not document it now. For user with user_id 1, execute the following on MySQL.

UPDATE user SET user_password =
md5(CONCAT('1-',md5('newpassword'))) WHERE user_id = 1;

or this for Postgres.

UPDATE user SET user_password =
md5('1-' || md5('newpassword')) WHERE user_id = 1;

I just finished setting up a machine with a pair of SATA disks using an onboard Promise controller on Debian Sarge. Steps to configure this follow.

1. Installed disks but do not define a RAID in the controllers bios
2. Boot Debian Sarge installer disk, loading 2.6 kernel via linux26 command
3. Partition creation
   • Manually edit partition table
   • Create one partition on each disk for sway, I did not add these to the RAID so this can be defined as swap. The sum total will be available to the OS
   • Create one partition for /boot, define as RAID.
   • Create one (or more) partition(s) to fill the remainder of the disk, define as RAID
4. Create RAID md devices
   • Create a md device for /boot partitions
   • Format with filesystem of choice
   • Mount as /boot
   • Set bootable flag
5. Create additional md devices with remaining partitions
   • Having only one partition to deal with I formatted ext3 and defined a mount point of /
6. Continue with installation after writing the partition table to disk

I prefer to run testing as I’ve only twice had issues and only one of those was fatal. Had my Linux skills been better at the time I might have been able to recover but that was many years ago. After the initial reboot I start to answer questions and cancel out of one. This will provide the installer menu which will allow me to select multiple APT repositories. After selecting the repositories I’ll skip past the software selection screen to just give a bare bones installation. At this point the /etc/apt/sources.list file can be edited for the distribution of choice, apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade and away ya go.

[This blog is no longer active and this post have been migrated, please leave comments at the new post]

I’ve suddenly started having an issue with a couple of shares on a Windows XP Pro machine and being able to mount them with the Mac. I’ve been actively using these shares for well over a year in exactly the same fashion and it just kind of stopped, I have no idea if there’s any action performed that would have caused this.

Basically, what I got from my Mac when I attempted to mount one of these problematic share is a “connecting to server sorry the operation could not be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code -41)”. When attempting to mount the share via command line the process hung. In searching I found the following error on my XP machine Event Logs.

Product: Windows Operating System
Event ID: 2011
Source: Srv
Version: 5.2
Symbolic Name: EVENT_SRV_IRP_STACK_SIZE
Message: The server’s configuration parameter “irpstacksize” is too small for the server to use a local device. Please increase the value of this parameter.

The times seemed to match my mount attempts. Recall that this only occured on some of my shares, two out of 10+ on the machine. Further research gave the following from Microsoft.

Read more �

As it seems to be usual with Fedora, doing anything with vmware was not completely smooth. Here’s what I found needed to be done to my stock installation of Fedora Core 5. I’m assuming some Linux mojo as I’d think one would have to have some to have the aspiration to do this… Yell if I’m incorrect.

Read more �

So here I sit trying to make a Fedora Core 5 virtual machine, VMware Workstation in my case. Yes, this is what I do for fun…call it pathetic and I’ll kick your ass!

Onward, the installation of Fedora Core failed to recognize the VMware virtual SCSI disk. Solution is as follows:
1) At the warning prompt select “Add Additional Drivers”
2) A dialog will appears that will list the current devices, select “Add Device”
3) Select “BusLogic MultiMaster SCSI” Driver
4) Continue on to a successfull Fedora Core VM installation

I recently ran across a mysql database I needed to do some work on only the root password didn’t seem to be recorded anywhere. On goes the hunt for password recovery solutions and here is what I found that did the trick.

# /etc/init.d/mysql stop
# mysqld_safe –skip-grant-tables &
# mysql -u root
mysql> use mysql;
mysql> update user set password=PASSWORD(“NEW-ROOT-PASSWORD”) where User=’root’;
mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> quit
# /etc/init.d/mysql stop
# /etc/init.d/mysql start
# mysql -u root -p

Truely funny comment from Tom Limoncelli as seen in Google video

“I’m always seeing advertisement, that say, ya know, ‘get out of that old, boring routine’. I’d like to get into that old, boring routine. I’m a sysadmin, I want one boring day. One boring day when the manual is correct, when the servers stay up, where everything just works. That would be the perfect boring day. And Then I’d be able to work on my projects, because projects are exciting. Then you’d get to play with the newest software, the newest hardware. I want lots of things to become boring so I can work on the exciting stuff”

First, this is finally what this website is about. Here I get to detail my ongoing struggles with the world of technology for my own records. If somebody else happens to find this useful all the better.

I just reinstalled Debian Sarge on my workstation. I had some things in mind that kind of necessitated a full reinstall including repartitioning my drives. I did a net install and then immediately upgraded to Etch. Prior to upgrading all was working well but afterwards X Windows would no longer come up. The error was a “preinit failed for input device” on the mouse.

The solution, when I finally found it, was to modprobe and then insert into /etc/modules psmouse and mousedev. This fixed the problem completely and as a perk I even have a functional mouse wheel on my Logitech mouse.

Now, I often don’t install X Windows on some of my Debian boxen but I’ve got a plan for this one. I’m going to start by installating VMWare Workstation and an XP machine on that. Once I’m comfortable I may move to VMWare Server (the free version of what used to be VMWare GSX server). That’s a whole nother story though.

Old but insanely funny. Maybe it’s just insane.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7193470719293309352

Plain ol’ ridiculous but not so far from the truth… http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2376133606367621572

I absolutely hate Microsofts Just-In-Time debugging.

I’m rebuilding some servers for the company I’m leaving in less than two weeks. One of the machines is going to running both SQL Server 2005 and ColdFusion. For some damed reason the Just-In-Time debugger that installs without permissions as a component of Visual Studio 2005 believe that the CF installer is throwing an exception and refuses to let the installer continue. In the spirit of documenting stuff the following registry keys had to be removed to disable the debugging.

*HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug\Debugger
*HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft.NET\Framework\DbgManaged\Debugger

Now I never have to see that dialog box again for stuff that will continue to work when it’s handling it’s own exceptions…

I’ll say it again, Fucking Microsoft.