Author Archives: Laz

Tools for eBay

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I am sure that just about everyone has at least looked around on eBay if not purchased something from someone through there.  There are a smaller number of us that have actually sold stuff on eBay, and as anyone who has done this can tell you, it ain’t pretty.  The good folks at eBay have tools, ways and means to get your stuff listed for sale, but as easy as it is it’s also very complex and confusing.  You can take some time and figure it out,  but it never hurts to have some help, and this is where third parties have made a small fortune making tools, software and even books that aim to make eBay easier to learn.

I am all for learning and making things easier to use, and I ran across this site earlier today where the author sorts through a bunch of tools for eBay posting only the good ones and giving reviews on the “9 Excellent Free Tools For eBay Buyers and Sellers”.  I took a look and while I can’t vouch for all of the tools, some of them I have used and I can say that I liked what I saw.  So, go check it out and see if any of these tools can help you in your eBay journeys!  Thanks 🙂

Anoying RAID messages in logs on Debian

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Recently I ran into an odd recurring message in the log files of some 64-bit Debian servers I had setup, and although it wasn’t causing me any problems per se, I hate for things to just go on like that and not know why and what to do about it. Now, these were virtual machines (VMs on ESX 4), running the latest Debian Linux 64-bit, and therefore being virtual they had to specialized RAID hardware or anything like that dedicated to the servers themselves. The servers just had your regular virtual SCSI disks as if it was a physical box with single drives in it.

What I noticed in the logs was an error pertaining to mpt-statusd, and that it was detecting “non-optimal” RAID status. Well, duh, there’s no RAID in it! Of course it won’t be optimal. Here is what I was getting, and you can see from the time stamps of this snippet that I was getting quite a few:

Aug  3 18:58:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 19:08:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 19:18:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 19:28:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 19:38:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 19:48:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 19:58:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 20:08:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 20:18:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 20:28:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status

After I did some digging into this mpt-statusd package, I found that it’s main purpose is to check on the RAID status out of mpt and other controllers, which explains why it was complaining since as I said above, there was no RAID installed. Here is the full description of mpt-statusd:

“Description: get RAID status out of mpt (and other) HW RAID controllers The mpt-status software is a query tool to access the running configuration and status of LSI SCSI HBAs. mpt-status allows you to monitor the health and status of your RAID setup. Tag: role::program”

The fix for this is to uninstall mpt-status, assuming you don’t have RAID setup on your server. Once I removed the package, my log files where free from the unnecessary clutter!  I still don’t know what the trigger was that got it installed in the first place, but at least it was easy enough to remove once I found out I didn’t need it.

Bash function for making locate find exact matches

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This is one of the coolest and most useful things to add to my UNIX/Linux profile that I have come across in a long time. I use the locate command a lot (slocate naturally) as I am sure all of us command line monkeys do. How many times have you been frustrated by the billions of lines of results flying by your screen, piping through more or less, trying to find the one nugget of goodness that you really need? Especially when you actually know the correct name of it, just not where it lives? This is where this comes in handy (this is where this? man I am eloquent)! Add this function to your bash profile (for some that’s .bash_profile and for others it might be .bashrc, depending on your nix flavor) and you can stop all of that. I haven’t tried this with other shells aside from bash, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.

Basically, this function uses the locate command to find whatever you are looking for just like you do, only it uses a bit of scriptology to filter it down to the exact match of what you are looking for. Yep, that’s right, the exact match! This little tidbit can really help out when you are looking for something, take a look:

## BASH locate function for exact match
## Thanks Dark_Helmet : http://solarum.com/v.php?l=1149LV99
function flocate
{
  if [ $# -gt 1 ] ; then
    display_divider=1
  else
    display_divider=0
  fi

  current_argument=0
  total_arguments=$#
  while [ ${current_argument} -lt ${total_arguments} ] ; do
    current_file=$1
    if [ "${display_divider}" = "1" ] ; then
      echo "----------------------------------------"
      echo "Matches for ${current_file}"
      echo "----------------------------------------"
    fi

    filename_re="^\(.*/\)*$( echo ${current_file} | sed s%\\.%\\\\.%g )$"
    locate -r "${filename_re}"
    shift
    (( current_argument = current_argument + 1 ))
  done
}

It’s just that easy! Copy and paste this into your profile and add a cool helper addon companion function thingy 🙂 I wish I could say I came up with this myself, but I didn’t, I found it in some forums posted by someone named Dark_Helmet (just like the attribution link in the script). I don’t know who you are Mr. Helmet, but I thank you for your sharing this with us all, and I am passing it on! Enjoy!

Geek Squad Confessions

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<a href="http://www best and safest weight loss pills.solarum.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/geek-squad-1.jpg” target=”_blank”>One of the websites out there that I just love is The Consumerist.  Probably many of you are going to already be familiar with this site, but if not, allow me to digress for a moment.  This site is not only funny as heck based on the writers they have and the wonderful work they do, but also the stories and subject matter that they cover.  It’s humorous, informative, educational, and usually gives the reader a good heads up about something to be wary of.  Another reason I dig the site, is that like me they don’t sell ads or anything like that, they are donation supported, but even more importantly they are there for the consumer.  These guys are in your corner finding out information and exposing scams and fighting for the little guy (you know, us!) all over.  As someone who has always been a huge proponent of good customer service, I have nothing but respect for these folk, so go check ’em out.  Plus they dig up some great dirt on people LOL

This leads me to the purpose of this post, I just had to share this link:

Confessions Of A Former Geek Squad Geek

Check it out, see what you think, then go read some more over there … but don’t forget to come back 🙂

By the way, in case you missed it in previous posts, if you notice the links and logos I have there in the Good Stuff box and a few other places that look a lot like ads when I just said that I don’t sell ads.  Those are links to products and/or services that I use or have used that I endorse because I found them to be of superb value.  No one is paying me to put those there, they are there because I found something good and I wanted to pass it on!

Powerconfig and Windows Hibernation – Part 2

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I wanted to post a followup to an earlier post about Windows and disabling the Hibernation feature.  The original power was useful because in many circumstances (like most desktops) you don’t need to or want to hibernate your system.  So, you can save some disk space (upwards of the amount of RAM in your PC) and some performance overhead of managing that hibernation file, by disabling the hibernation function or feature.  You can read that one here.

Next thing I thought about was, what if you do need that hibernation function?  Well, naturally you can do the opposite of that earlier article to enable hibernation if it isn’t already, although usually it is by default.  But also, you can specific how big the hibernation file (hiberfil.sys) is compared to how much memory you have in your machine.  I would imagine if the file is set to less than your memory it must do some compression and maybe leave some non-essential stuff out, but I don’t know for sure and I am not sure if it’s worth digging into too deeply.  However, if you have some binary real estate (disk space) to spare, and you don’t have too much memory in your machine (you guys with 16GB or something need to ditch Windows and run Linux), set it to 100% and rock out.

Just like the enable and disable, you use the powercfg.exe command, and interestingly enough, still use the -H switch.  But instead of just On or Off, you add another switch ‘-Size’ and a number between 50 and 100 to equate to anywhere between 50 and 100 percent of your memory.  According to what I read, you can’t choose less than 50% or, obviously, more than 100%.  So, I set mine to 100% (it was at 75% by default) and am going to see how well it works.  If I see anything that warrants it, I’ll post a follow up as to whether or not it’s a good idea.

OK, the command to set your hiberfil.sys size to 100% would be:

powercfg.exe -H -Size 100

And there you have it, it’s just that easy!  Hope it helps 🙂

HP kills TouchPad, looks to exit PC business

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Hp-ceoIt looks like the CEO at HP is smoking the crack and not sharing the recipe with the rest of us.  A month after their TouchPad debuts they kill the product because it’s not selling like they want.  OK, it wasn’t selling well at all from what I read, but come on you launched the thing when Apple was releasing the iPad2, what the hell do you expect!?  You have a new and untested product going up against the most wanted toy on the market.  Let’s not put any thought or … I don’t know, work into making the sales of that product better or maybe realizing that you picked the worst time ever to release it.  Just dump that chump and blow through more cash on something else.

Next they are talking about ditching their PC business, which generates 1/3 or their annual income at HP.  I mean, what crazy idea is that, especially when at the same time you talk about buying a database search software company for $10 billion in cash.  What in the world is CEO Apotheker thinking of??  Just by talking about the stuff after kill the TouchPad HP’s stock dropped 12%!  Can you say OUCH!

Read more here …

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