Solving HDMI droupouts (ATI HD5650 in Acer’s Aspire 3820TG)

After installing a new version of ATI/AMDs driver and Catalyst Center for the Radeon Mobile HD5650 (hybride) my external screen (connected via HDMI2DVI) would occassionally turn black for a second or less. At first, I blamed my screen. I connected another screen but the problem remained, I still observed short, sporadic dropouts.

The solution was getting rid of any ATI drivers on the system and reinstalling the following Acer driver: “VGA_AMD_8.752.0.0_W7x86x64_A”. I downloaded it from Acer’s support Web site.

The download is called:  “VGA Driver (Radeon HD 5650 & Radeon HD 5470) AMD    8.752.0.0    195.3 MB    01/31/2011 “.

Then, I followed this steps to successfully reinstall the driver and get rid of the dropouts:

1. Uninstalled all ATI related software (Catalyst & Co)
2. Uninstalled the drivers of your VGA cards in the Device Manager
3. Deleted all ATI folders on the disk
4. Booted into safe mode and ran AMD Catalyst TwL Cleaner v3.9.2.cmd
5. Rebooted and installed VGA_AMD_8.752.0.0_W7x86x64_A

How to uninstall Adobe Drive CS4

To uninstall Adobe Drive CS4 (and thereby remove the annoying context menu entry):

1. Run “regedit” and locate the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
2. Locate the key-folder that contains Adobe Drive CS4 and copy the hex code from its “UninstallString”-key (something like {A3111194-144A-0000-0000-C128FE0D0000}, copy just the hex code without the curly brackets)
3. Run “cmd.exe” with administrator privileges
4. Execute the following command (including curly brackets):
msiexec /x {PASTE-THE-HEX-CODE-FROM-ABOVE-HERE} /qb ADOBE_SETUP=1

This procedure worked fine to properly uninstall Abobe Drive CS4 on Windows 7 x64

How to start PUTTY or winSCP from Ant (exec task)

I’ve recently automated the deployment of benchmarks on remote machines using Apache Ant.
And if something doesn’t work as it should it is very helpful to be able to start a SSH-session to the problematic server with a double click.
Here we go:
<target name="start-putty">
<exec executable="PATH\\TO\\cmd.exe" failonerror="false" spawn = "true">
<arg line="/K start PATH\\TO\\PUTTY.exe root@${TARGET_IP} -pw ${ROOTPW}"/>
</exec>
</target>

Please note the double backslashes in the path. And of course, you have to specify the correct path to the executables or store it in a variable or ant property file.

The same works for winscp, too. This time I’m using Ant variables:
<target name="start-winscp">
<exec executable="${cmd}" failonerror="false" spawn = "true">
<arg line="/K start ${winscp} sftp://root:${ROOTPW}@${TARGET_IP}"/>
</exec>
</target>

How to find a string in zip files

I have a folder with a lot of subfolders and zip files in it.
Each zip file contains a set of subfolders and textfiles.
I use the following code in order to find a string in files which are stored in zip files:
FIND_THIS_STRING=Mbits
# find zip files recursively
for mFile in `find . -name "*.zip"`
do
# unzip each zip file to the pipe
# find the string in the extracted content and print the line which contains the string
unzip -p "$mFile" | grep "$FIND_THIS_STRING"
done

EC2: Bundling an AMI using the AWS eclipse-plugin

The eclipse-plugin AWS-Toolkit (available from here) is a nice tool for managing your amazon ec2 instances. You can even bundle an AMI from a running machine and store it to your S3-Bucket. Before trying to bundle an AMI make sure that the aws toolkit is configured correctly:
Preferences → AWS Toolkit →Account Number: 111122223333 ← enter your account number here (not your mail address!)
Preferences → AWS Toolkit →Certificate File: path-to\cert-abc.pem ← make sure the path is set correctly
Preferences → AWS Toolkit →Private Key File: path-to\pk-xyz.pem ← make sure the path is set correctly

How to bundle an AMI (Linux):
Start an Instance and make your desired changes.
Right click on the running instance and select “Bundle AMI…”.
Enter your S3 bucket name and path where the AMI will be stored: /mybucketname/AMIs
Enter the desired name of your ami: fedora-11-32bit-perfect-cloud-ami
Click ok.
The eclipse-plugin will transfer your certificate and private key to the /mnt directory of the running instance and then create an image from the running machine.
Finally the image will be segmented and uploaded to the specified S3 bucket.

Important:It looks like the bundling process hangs at 9%, directly after the cert and pk have been transferred. But it doesn’t. It simply takes some time (about 30 minutes) to create the image and upload it to S3. As far as I know the bundling progress bar doesn’t work correctly in eclipse. If you want to make sure that the bundling is still in progress open a bash on the ec2 instance and execute:
ps aux | grep "ec2"
It should list a few processes related to the bundling.

How to install SPECjAppServer2004 on Fedora 8 (JBoss and MySQL)

Last update: August 25, 2009
Installing the SPECjAppServer benchmark software is not trivial. There are a lot of obstacles and the installation and configuration on fedora is really painful. I spent about 14 man-days on this installation – please don’t underestimate the setup!

Goals:
Since I’ve spent a huge amount of time on this installation, this howto mainly aims to preserve my experiences for myself. But if you find it useful you’re invited to use it. This howto shows how to install the SPECjAppServer2004 V.1.08 on a distributed system under test (SUT) with the following components:
– The main application (SPECjAppServer2004 V.1.08) will run on JBoss 4.0.5 GA
– The database will be hosted on a MySQL 5.1 database server
– The emulator (which isn’t actually part of the SUT) will run on Tomcat 6.0.18
All systems will run Fedora Core 8. We’ll use Sun’s JDK 6 Update 13.

How to install apache ant on Fedora 8

If you just want to run ant, install it using yum:

yum install ant

But if you need to execute the optional ant tasks like scp, junit, etc. you need to “install” ant manually. Please make sure that a java runtime is installed and the variable JAVA_HOME points to the root directory of the java installation.

Save this script as “install-ant.sh” and execute it as root:
yum install wget
cd /tmp
wget http://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/mirrors/apache/ant/binaries/apache-ant-1.7.1-bin.tar.gz
tar xfz apache-ant-1.7.1-bin.tar.gz
mkdir /usr/share/ant
cp -r -f apache-ant-1.7.1/* /usr/share/ant/
export ANT_HOME=/usr/share/ant/
export PATH=$PATH:$ANT_HOME/bin
echo"
export ANT_HOME=/usr/share/ant
export PATH=$PATH:$ANT_HOME/bin:$JDK_HOME/bin
" >> /etc/profile
echo "apache ant has been installed."
exit;

If the script fails to download the tarball visit http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi , coose another mirror and replace the url in the script above.

Centreon reporting module shows states as “undetermined”

Problem:
The hosts and services are correctly monitored in the “Monitoring” module but in the “Reporting” module all states are shown as undetermined.
Solution:
To get straight to the point: it is most likely, that a single setting is not configured correctly in the ndomod.cfg:
In the Centreon 2.0 webinterface go to
Configuration > Centreon > ndomod.cfg > Poller Prinzipal (or however it is named)
Now have a look at “Data processing options”. If it is set to “-1” nothing will be written to the database. In order to get it working you need to enter the correct value. Use “67108863” if “everything” should be written to the database. The German company Consol offers a free online calculator for the data_processing_options-setting.
If changing this value doesn’t fix your problem you need to check that your installation meets the following requirements:
1. Nagios is installed (preferably built from source!)
2. NDOUtils is installed
3. The NDO/Nagios database has been created and is accessible by the nagios db user
4. The NDO-daemon (ndo2db) is running
5. The settings for database name, db user, db password, log files, socket, buffer files, etc. are configured correctly in all configuration files (i. e. the values are equal)

How to remove line breaks/new lines in files using “tr”

A google search for “remove line breaks linux” returns 637000 results. I’ve tried at least ten approaches using sed, tr and awk in different combinations.
However, on my Fedora 8 machine only the following command works (in bash scripts):
cat oldfile | tr -d '\n ' > newfile

mysql -h localhost -u root -p myrootpassword produces “access denied” (or similar) errors

If the following command doesn’t work for you
mysql -h localhost -u root -p myrootpassword
and produces errors like:
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost'
or
ERROR 1049 (42000): Unknown database 'myrootpassword '
try the following command:
mysql -h localhost -u root -p Note: NO password is passed to the -p parameter!
You’ll be prompted for your password -> Enter it.

You could also try:
mysql -h localhost -u root --password="myrootpassword"

How to execute sql-script with the mysql console?
If you want to execute a *.sql-file you might try the following command:
mysql -h localhost -u root --password="myrootpassword" --database="mydb" < /path/to/my/sqlfile.sql -- Note: single line!

eclipse-plugin for editing bash scripts

There is a nice eclipse-plugin called ShellEd for editing bash scripts. The most important functionality is syntax highlighting.
Download from SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/shelled

create and format ntfs partitions without using windows tools -> use Knoppix

WARNING: this may damage your computer and waste your data! Do not follow these instructions unless you’re a computer expert and have recently made a backup of your data! I cannot be made responsible for any damages!

If you cannot or do not want to use the windows cd for creating and formatting ntfs partitions you can also use a Knoppix live cd:
Download and burn the ISO-image to a cd and boot your computer with it.
Wait until the Knoppix desktop has loaded:
If you just need to format an existing partition, use qtparted. Click on “Root-Shell” (in one of the menus in the taskbar) and type:
qtparted and format the desired partition.

If you also need to create/delete a ntfs partition before formatting it, use gparted. Open a root shell (see above) and type:
gparted
After creating the partition with gparted accept/apply the changes and start qtparted to format the partition.

Fedora 8: assignment of static ip-addresses doesn’t work

The assigment of static ip-addresses to my fedora 8 machines didn’t work – neither using the NetworkManager (the tool that opens upon clicking on the network-icon in the taskbar) nor the editing the config files manually.

I found the solution to this problem here: http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f9.html#network

Open a terminal an type in the following commands:

su root
/etc/init.d/NetworkManager stop
/sbin/chkconfig --level 35 NetworkManager off
/sbin/chkconfig --level 35 network on
system-config-network
# Now configure the settings for your network card (e. g. eth0), enter the DNS, gateway and hostname and save. Select the network card an click on activate.
# close the configuration tool
/etc/init.d/network start
# check if your configuration has been applied:
/sbin/ifconfig
# check internet access:
ping fastcloud.wordpress.com