Inappropriate ioctl for device and Oracle 10.2.0.3

Photo by Cindy_FL

I was trying to setup an instance of Oracle 10.2.0.3 a while back and was running into a strange problem.

I could get 10.2.0.1 to install and run OK, and the upgrade to 10.2.0.3 seemed to work OK. But then when I tried to create a database it would fail and give me a “Inappropriate ioctl for device” error message. And inappropriate what for who ?

Configure wget to use a proxy server

by Jared Klett

I was playing with Ubuntu at work the other day and need to use wget to get some updates. But it wasn’t working because I was behind a proxy server. Now I had set the environment variables HTTP_PROXY and FTP_PROXY up so I though it should work.

But apparently that’s not all you need to do. You also need to add the following line to you  ~/.wgetrc file:

http_proxy = http://donut.unet.brandeis.edu:3128/
use_proxy = on
wait = 15

vi wget and the proxy server.

8 Regular Expressions You Should Know

by Prehensile Eye

I use Solaris allot at work. Being a UNIX operating system its search functions, both in the OS and in VI are quite powerful. They are so good in fact that they can be a bit tricky to use. This is especially so when it comes to regular expressions.

Site net.tutsplus.com has a good post showing not only the 8 Regular Expressions You Should Know but it is also a good explaination of how they work.

How to change hostname in Linux

I’m trying to build an Oracle RAC system at work to understand how it works better. As part of this I had to build three Linux systems. I built one, then cloned it (it was a virtual machine in VMware).

But having done that, it of course kept the hostname of the first machine. So I had to work out how to change that.
It turns out that is quite easy.

• Edit file /etc/sysconfig/network using your favourite editor. In my case is nano.
• Look for HOSTNAME=xxxxxx
• Change the xxxx to the name you wish to set for your computer.
• Save the file and restart the xinetd service. (eg. type service xinetd restart in your shell)
  Or simply reboot.

via How to change hostname in Linux – Techie Corner.

Resetting the root password on a Solaris server

I had to use the following step to reset a the root password on a Solaris system the other day. You will need physical access to the system to use these steps.

1. Press Stop-A on the console or Ctrl-] and send brk from a remote console connection to access the Open Boot PROM (OBP).
   NOTE : If you are using TeraTerm-Pro, you send a break from the menu.
2. Insert a bootable Solaris CD/DVD and boot into single-user mode with boot cdrom -s
   If a JumpStart boot server is located on the system’s subnet, and the system was properly configured for JumpStart, you may instead boot over the network into single-user mode with boot net -s
3. Make a mount point within the /tmp file system by typing mkdir /tmp/mnt
4. Mount the root partition of your boot disk in /tmp/mnt

   e.g. #> mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /tmp/mnt

   NOTE : To check the device name use the format command.

5. Edit /etc/shadow with TERM=vt100 vi /tmp/mnt/etc/shadow
6. Remove the encrypted part of the root password (the second field; fields are separated by colons), save, and exit.
7. Unmount the file system with umount /tmp/mnt
8. Reboot the system and assign a new password at a shell prompt with the passwd command.

If you are unable to run vi above, you can edit /etc/shadow using the ed editor.

# ed /tmp/mnt/etc/shadow
1p
s/:………….:/::/ (Note: there are 13 dots in the second field)
1p
w
q

How to disable the beep in solaris 10

by Pandiyan

I have installed Soalris 10 onto a laptop a few times to see how well it works. It does quite well.

One annoying feature though is that if you backspace all the way back to the prompt and then by mistake try to go one more, like if you hold down the backspace key,  Solaris will make a really loud beep. It gets really annoying,  really quickly.

To turn it off you need to run

/usr/openwin/bin/xset b 0

It also seems to do this at startup. I haven’t figured out how to disable that yet. Do you know ?

via Re: How to disable beep in solaris 10?.

Manually Mount a local or remote CDROM in Sun Solaris

I recently went to try and install Oracle 10g on a Solaris 10 server, and for some reason it wouldn’t recognize the DVD when I put it in the drive. Solaris and UNIX machines in general I think and usually good for this sort of thing. You put a CD in the drive, it detects it, and puts an icon on your desktop for the new CD or at least mounts it to something like /cdrom or /media/cdrom for you.

However, this machine on this particular day, wasn’t playing ball. So I had to figure out how to do it manually.

Here’s what I did.

Adding Second IDE Hard Drive into a Sun Server

Image by isdky

I had to add an IDE hard drive into a Solaris server the other day and couldn’t remember all the commands you need to use to get the system to see the new drive, partition it and format it.

But luckly I found a very helpful page over at http://www. idevelopment.info called Adding Second IDE Hard Drive into a Blade 100/150

As it turns out I wasn’t adding a drive into a Blade 100 server, but all the commands i needed were there and I got it going.

fsck guide

Image by Karsoe

Over in the Sun General Maintenance forms I found a good thread on the uses of fsck called fsck best practises guide. While I wouldn’t necessarily take it as a be all and end all manual on how to use fsck. It does make a good guide or starting point.

You must judge when and how to use fsck yourself given your environment and the scope of the problem you are experiencing.

Dropbox Secure backup, sync and sharing made easy.

Image by DropBox

I was reading a post over on LifeHacker about some the Top 10 Ubuntu downloads and one of the applications they mentioned was Dropbox. I’d seen the name around before but hadn’t gotten around to trying it yet. So I decided it was time.

It’s pretty good. If you use Windows, Ubuntu or Red Hat you can install a client that basically creates a new folder in your Documents or My Documents folder. This folder is actually a kind of ‘web folder’. Anything you put in this folder, that appears to be on your desktop, is actually copied up to the web.

When you go to another computer that also has the dropbox client installed on it and setup with your account, will be able to access the same document(s). I found it sort of like using a USB key, but easier. I can simple copy a file into my dropbox at work and then access the same file at home, without having to search for the USB key in my bag, plug it in, navigate to the drive, etc, etc, etc.

If for some reason you can’t install the client, you can still access it via the web page, which also works well from an iPhone/iTouch for view the documents.

Have you tried DropBox? What do you think?