EvL Consulting

The board of Microsoft has appointed a new CEO. When Steve Balmer announced stepping down from one of the worlds most influential companies for the last 3 decades the search began. You can say from Microsoft what you want but it has been the company that not only brought computing to the home but also created an entire industry around it. I think there is not a company in the world that has created so many jobs in such a vast variety of businesses, governments, education and numerous other market segments than the computer giant from Seattle. The ubiquity of its products is seen everywhere and has been untouchable for a long time. There have been cracks in its structure though. The company hasn’t been able to make tablets a success even though they announced this technology way before Apple has a crack at it. The handheld PC in the form of a phone has never been a success. Windows was able to hook consumers as it had done on the desktop and laptop. They are trying again now that they’ve bought Nokia. (See here).

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Why partition alignment on disk matters (Linux)

24/01/2014

Linux has been pretty good with and for storage. The sheer volume of options w.r.t. filesystems, volume-managers, access methods (FC, iSCSI, NFS, DAS etc), multi-pathing but also the very broad support of the hardware ecosystem is something to be proud of. The issue with storage support is that you ALWAYS have to maintain a massive backward-compatibility string with previous generations of technology. Not only from a hardware perspective but also the soft-side needs to retain the older technology. I saw a video featuring Linus, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Sarah Sharp and Ted Ts’o over here where Ted mentioned that the KVM feature helped him massively with regression testing for the storage projects he’s involved in. (As you may know Ted maintains the ext(2/3/4) filesystem among other things). That brings me to the bottleneck of history in a technology environment and why the topic I described in the subject is important.

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Australia and the doomed NBN

17/09/2013

In Australia there are basically two camps in the government that promote (or make it seem like they do) very fast internet connection speeds. The Labor party started this off a couple of years ago with the introduction of the NBN (National Broadband Network). Its intention is (or rather was) to provide almost every household in the nation a piece of fibre-glass to the front-door to be able to hook up current and future transmission technologies to be able to provide a multitude of services over the internet. Continue reading →

SUSE stops support for LibreOffice

05/09/2013

On December 3rd SUSE announced it no longer supports LibreOffice as part of its core business. This doesn’t come as a surprise since LO is a pretty beefy environment by itself and requires some significant time and effort for qualification and ongoing support for customers who have bought this from them.
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The forced marriage between Microsoft and Nokia

04/09/2013

Unless you were in hibernation mode the last few days or were snorkelling somewhere in the middle of pacific you most likely have noticed that Microsoft have swallowed Nokia for a whopping 7.something billion dollars. For those who have kept their eyes open for the past few years you would have noticed this was more of less a forced marriage. Continue reading →

Calculator via CLI

03/09/2013

As an engineer dealing with storage I do get a hell-of-alot of info in either binary, hex, octal or decimal format. It’s always a PITA to convert these to human readable format. So i cooked up some bc functions and use these as a function in bash to beat the time wasted firing up the calculator or some weird stuff in LibreOffice Calc. Add the below in the .bashrc file and restart your shell.

function h2d { echo “obase=10; ibase=16; $( echo “$*” | sed -e ‘s/0x//g’ -e ‘s/$[a-z]$/\u\1/g’ )” | bc; }
function h2b { echo “obase=2; ibase=16; $( echo “$*” | sed -e ‘s/0x//g’ -e ‘s/$[a-z]$/\u\1/g’ )” | bc; }
function b2d { echo “obase=10; ibase=2; “$*”” | bc; }
function b2h { echo “0x$(echo “obase=16; ibase=2;”$*”” | bc)”; }
function d2b { echo “obase=2; ibase=10; “$*”” | bc; }
function d2h { echo “0x$(echo “obase=16; ibase=10; “$*”” | bc)”; }

So on the bash prompt:

[1423][erwin@monster:~]$ h2d 0x16
22
[1423][erwin@monster:~]$

Very handy.

Cheers, Erwin

Australian Internet access. (with handcuffs and chains.)

02/09/2013

It may come to no surprise that if you want to rewire a country the size of Australia it’ll take a while. This means that the majority of internet connections is still on ADSL or ADSL2+. The outback is in really bad shape and people over there are relying on satlinks or wireless. This in turn ramps up costs significantly and thats also the reason why telcos and ISP’s are putting caps on subscriptions. Continue reading →

Google Earth on Linux 64

09/08/2013

Linux 1 Comment

I use Google Eearth fairly regularly for all sort of things. I like searching places around the world and looking at additional info from for instance National Geographic. It is therefore most annoying that whenever Google decides to change something GE starts to crash for whatever reason most likely due to conflicts between libraries. The crashlogs you’ll see are like:

Major Version 7
Minor Version 1
Build Number 0001
Build Date Jul 12 2013
Build Time 04:22:47
OS Type 3
OS Major Version 3
OS Minor Version 8
OS Build Version 13
OS Patch Version 0
Crash Signal 4
Crash Time 1375944957
Up Time 0.809264

Stacktrace from glibc:
./libgoogleearth_free.so(+0x23915c)[0x7f1d7c46d15c]
./libgoogleearth_free.so(+0x2393bd)[0x7f1d7c46d3bd]
/lib64/libc.so.6[0x33462359b0]
/usr/lib64/nvidia-304xx/libnvidia-glcore.so.304.88(_nv015glcore+0x0)[0x3b89de8be0]

I’m not smart enough to sort out binary stack dumps but I’m pretty good at troubleshooting and logical thinking. The guys on the GE devteam obviously are very graphically oriented and they take every opportunity to suck out as much juice out of hardware to make the graphical rendering at smooth as possible. They therefore look at the loaded graphics drivers and if possible start making use of any piece of graphical kit they can find to use it.

I have an NVidia card with CUDA cores which can accelerate these graphical screen-gadgets pretty well so if there is a conflict in these libraries you’ll get the program to crash.

Basically what I did was I upgraded the NVidia driver to 319.32 and at least that solved the above issue. Than I ran into the problem of GE itself were it saw some sort of corruption in one or more cached files. I removed these from the ~/.googleearth directory after which GE started. I still get the below messages when I start GE but these do not seem to be of influence of using it.

[0809/130918:ERROR:net_util.cc(2195)] Not implemented reached in bool net::HaveOnlyLoopbackAddresses()
[0809/130918:WARNING:backend_impl.cc(1875)] Destroying invalid entry.
[0809/130918:ERROR:nss_ocsp.cc(581)] No URLRequestContext for OCSP handler.
[0809/130920:ERROR:nss_ocsp.cc(581)] No URLRequestContext for OCSP handler.
[0809/130920:ERROR:nss_ocsp.cc(581)] No URLRequestContext for OCSP handler.
[0809/130920:ERROR:nss_ocsp.cc(581)] No URLRequestContext for OCSP handler.

My version currently is :

Google Earth – 7.1.1.1888
Build Date 7/12/2013
Build Time 4:22:44 am
Renderer OpenGL
Operating System Linux (3.8.13.0)
Video Driver NVIDIA Corporation
Max Texture Size 16384×16384
available video memory 2048 MB
Server kh.google.com

Whenever you run into some other inexplicable issues you might start with clearing the cache at ~/unified_cache_leveldb_leveldb2/*

Hope this helps someone.

Cheers,
Erwin

NVidia driver will not install on FC17 & FC18 & FC19

21/02/2013