tom's blog

Konverting from VirtualBox to KVM is actually quite easy.

If you use snapshots in VirtualBox, then you will first have to clone the current running state into a new VM (Right clickt -> Clone -> blah -> select only current state)

Then, if you use dynamic growing disks, convert them to raw format

VBoxManage clonehd --format RAW Win7.vdi Win7.raw

Now convert it to qcow2

This HowTo describes my Home-Mailserver Setup. Basically this is a sum-it-all-up article from various resources on the net. 

Used Software:

• Arch Linux OS
• Postfix MTA
• PostgreSQL database backend
• Dovecot IMAP Server
• Roundcube Webmail + Apache Webserver
• Spamassassin junk filter
• Server-side filtering with Sieve
• fetchmail (for pulling all spread accounts in this one place)

Preconditions in my setup:

Our Homepge is written in Java using JSP/JSF and for compatibility reasons we do URL-encode a jsessionid even the client accepts cookies, and also we create a session for every visitor. This causes every link on our pages to include an ugly ;jsessionid=<very long hash>, which search engines tend to dislike.

Heck, some interesting and nice comments have been posted, and landed up in the approval queue. I never got a mail, and currently cannot yet figure out where to configure this in Drupal. Anyways comment approval is disabled now and I published all comments posted so far. Sorry for the confusion.

Currently I have to configure a Sun Enterprise T5220 as our new "developemnt environment", replacing our V440 (Oracle) and the T1000 (Weblogic). We chose a Sun CMT machine as we wanted to stay close to production in regards of architecture (processor type/OS etc).

The machine will have to run an Oracle instance, and some containers for the Weblogic environments (we have an integration env, daily build env + some development environments for projects). The new T5220 ist packed with a 1.4GHz T2 Niagara, 64GB of memory, 2x146GB for the OSes, and 6x300GB for the database and NFS.

If you want to create a youtube video from an audio file, here is how to do this.
All you need is the audio file, a single picture, and ffmpeg.

First find out the lenght of the audio file in seconds, you'll need it. Here is an example with a 420 seconds file:

ffmpeg -loop_input -i picture.jpg -vcodec mpeg4 -r 25.00 -qscale 2 -s 480x360 \
-i audiofile.mp3 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 128k -t 420 video.avi

This will create a Hi-Res MPEG-4 video with 128k audio. The trick here is to use that one picture and loop it for -t seconds.

Took me a while to figure out this one. All I wanted to do is to print the text between two tags/characters/strings.

The IMHO nicer Awk way:

$ echo "bla(foo)"|awk -F'[(|)]' '{print $2}'
foo

$ echo "bla=@@foo@@"|awk -F'[@@|@@]' '{print $3}'
foo

 and with sed:

$ echo "blah(foo)"|sed -n 's/.*(\([^ ]*\))/\1/p'
foo

echo "aaafoobbb"|sed -n 's/.*aaa\([^ ]*\)bbb/\1/p'
foo

Figured.

I just had to restart a webapp in Tomcat without stopping a second app running in the same tomcat instance.

Usually this can be done easily via the Tomcat Manager, but in this case I was not able to access the Manager due to firewall rules. Though I was able to access the server using ssh, but there was no curl installed.

Luckily wget did the trick too!

This is a walkthrough on how to get SAR data into a database, and use OpenOffice.org to create nice graphs using a JDBC connection to that database, and SUN Report Builder to do the graphs.

In this example I will use SAR's CPU utilisation data.

Software used: