Technical musings of an entrepreneur.

Monthly archives for July, 2007

Dell OMSA 5.2 and /opt

Jul18
2007 Leave a Comment Written by Brian

Ran into somewhat of a bug, more of an oversight on Dell’s part today.

I’m loading up a PowerEdge 860 running CentOS5 with Dell’s OpenManage Server Agents (OMSA). On reboot, I receive a udev error about ‘dataeng.hotplug’ not being able to exec early in the system init.

After scratching my head for a few–it hit me: it’s because I have /opt on a separate filesystem as root (/), which isn’t available while udev is initializing. Sure enough, in /etc/udev/rules.d, there’s an entry for Dell’s openmange stuff pointing to a shell script in /opt/dell.

Anyway, if you run into that just place the OMSA install on the root filesystem versus a submounted one and your problem wil disappear. You could also just copy that script out and place it somewhere more appropriate–like /sbin–and modify that udev rules entry.

With great flexibility comes weirdness at times! Dell probably shouldn’t have a sysinit level script running from a filesystem that is probably submounted by sysadmins 50% of the time.

Posted in Computers, Dell, Linux, Tlf

More car work

Jul18
2007 2 Comments Written by Brian

I spent some time up in Crescent City again this weekend, preparing for the imminent rebuild of the 1970 Olds 4-4-2 and the 1969 Mustang I had mentioned tearing down previously.

The nice thing about working up there is having all the tools and equipment to do the job right. The Mustang will be a “nice looking” car, but the 442 will be close to a Conours one. Having the body on the rotisserie makes things easy to examine and work on.

442 on the rotisserie

Anyway, I’m looking for the “Interior Assembly Manual” for 1969 Mustang model year. Apparently not many places even stock it (though 68 and 70 are everywhere). I’m just not sure if Ford didn’t produce one that year, or if it’s just that rare.

If you know where to get one, let me know!

Posted in Cars

Movies on the iPhone

Jul17
2007 Leave a Comment Written by Brian

Super-easy way to get DVDs on your iPhone here.

Posted in iPhone

iPhone bug

Jul17
2007 10 Comments Written by Brian

Found the first reason to throw the iPhone at the wall.

There is a bug in the email setup screen on the iPhone. If you have an outgoing SMTP server that requires authentication, the iPhone will not save your SMTP password no matter how many times you enter it in on the setup screen. It will always revert back to “Optional”.

Well, isn’t that a pisser! Can receive, but not send.

So, after fiddling with it for about 30 minutes and almost tossing it at the nearest piece of sheet rock, I found if you delete all the other SMTP settings (server, username) enter the password first then backfill the user and server name, the password will stick and the SMTP gods will smile down on you.

Posted in Computers, The Interweb

Disks, lots of disks

Jul16
2007 7 Comments Written by Brian

My friends, meet the EonStor A24F-R2224. 12 terabytes of fiber-attached RAID6 happiness sitting on my carpeting. Your 2 gigs of email are no match for it. It fears not your puny 1 gig of website files.

In fact, that blue light on the Dell is being illuminated simply by the eminating kick-ass-ness of the disk array. This geekout moment was brought to you compliments of The Linux Fix.

A24F-R2224

Posted in Computers, Funny, The Interweb
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