How to enable Intel hardware virtualization on an HP xw4600:
* Boot into the hardware BIOS setup
* Got to Security -> System Security
* Enable both types of virtualization (VTx and VTd)
* Save settings, and power-cycle the machine.
I’m running Linux, Fedora 9, and using KVM, so I run the following:
modprobe kvm-intel
Loading that module will fail if hardware virtualization isn’t enabled.
For over a year, I’ve endured a development machine that would lock up under heavy disk I/O. Yesterday, I apparently complained loudly enough that I was given a new machine to replace it. I didn’t want to reinstall Fedora 9, so I transferred my old hard drive to the new machine, as the primary drive. To get it to boot and function properly, here’s what I did:
* Booted with the Fedora 9 install CD into “rescue mode”
* Ran the following commands once I had a shell:
mount –bind /dev /mnt/sysimage/dev
mount –bind /sys /mnt/sysimage/sys
chroot /mnt/sysimage
mv /boot/initrd-2.6.25…i686.img /boot/initrd-2.6.25…i686.img.orig
mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.25…i686.img 2.6.25…i686
* Then I ran ‘grub’, and typed the following:
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
quit
* Ejected the install CD, and rebooted. Once booted, I noticed that my network cards weren’t set up quite right. My new network card was listed as “eth2″ in system-config-network, and I didn’t actually have cards for the listed “eth0″ and “eth1″ interfaces anymore. I didn’t know what file to change to get my new card listed as “eth0″, so I ran the following command to find out what files I might need to edit:
find /etc -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep “eth[01]“
That command listed the following files, among others:
* /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
* /etc/vmware/locations
I edited /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and ripped out the assignments for my old NIC interfaces, and set the new one to be “eth0″, then rebooted and used `system-config-network` to set up my network.
When I ran my VMware guest, VMware Server gave me an error message about not being able to use bridged mode for the selected interface. With my old computer, VMware had used eth1 for bridged networking, and I didn’t have an “eth1″ interface anymore. I edited /etc/vmware/locations and changed “eth1″ to “eth0″, and restarted vmware. This time, bridged mode worked correctly.
I just discovered and installed the xguest package for Fedora 8 and 9. Here’s what it does:
Installing this package sets up the xguest user to be used as a temporary account to switch to or as a kiosk user account. The account is disabled unless SELinux is in enforcing mode. The user is only allowed to log in via gdm [or the fast-user-swiching applet]. The home and temporary directories of the user will be polyinstantiated and mounted on tmpfs.
Here’s how to install it:
yum install xguest
I hit a brick wall when I first tried it. I thought my machine was in SELinux Enforcing mode, when it wasn’t — it was in Permissive mode. I fixed it using system-config-selinux.
It’s possible to change what the xguest user can do using system-config-selinux. I’ve attached a screenshot showing what capabilities can be granted or revoked.
Java development is getting easier under Linux because of Sun’s OpenJDK, which linux distributors like Fedora now include. No more need to go through the hassle of downloading it from Sun. Here’s how I installed it.
yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk-devel java-1.6.0-openjdk-javadoc java-1.6.0-openjdk-plugin
A downside is that the default fonts in some Java applications, like IntelliJ IDEA, look terrible. Fedora 9 includes the RedHat Liberation fonts, which stand in for Microsoft fonts. I went into IDEA’s configuration, and changed the default font from “Arial” to “Liberation Sans”. IDEA’s visual appearance is nearly, but not completely, fontastic compared to what it was before.
I’ve upgraded four systems to Fedora 9 in the past couple of weeks. For those that have NVidia cards, it was a bumpy ride until NVidia released a new driver. To install it as a pre-built RPM package, see this blog post.
For the system that runs VMWare Server, it was necessary to upgrade to version 1.0.6, which supports the 2.6.25 kernel shipped with Fedora 9.
I upgraded from Fedora 7 to Fedora 9 using preupgrade, and then I couldn’t connect to the NoMachine NX Server. It’s due to SELinux, again (I wrote about this earlier). The approach to solve it is still the same, although the policy is different:
Here’s what my audit.log messages looked like:
May 30 07:48:03 localhost kernel: type=1400 audit(1212155283.470:7): avc: denied { getattr } for pid=876 \
comm="sshd" path="/usr/NX/home/nx/.ssh/authorized_keys2" dev=sda2 ino=70976 \
scontext=system_u:system_r:sshd_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 tcontext=system_u:object_r:usr_t:s0 tclass=file \
May 30 08:22:35 localhost kernel: type=1400 audit(1212157355.873:9): avc: denied { read } for pid=872 \
comm="sshd" name="authorized_keys2" dev=sda2 ino=70976 \
scontext=system_u:system_r:sshd_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 tcontext=system_u:object_r:usr_t:s0 tclass=file
Here’s how I created and inserted the policy:
cd /etc/selinux
cat /var/log/audit/audit.log | audit2allow -M nx
semodule -i nx.pp
And here’s the nx.te file:
module nx 1.0;
require {
type sshd_t;
type usr_t;
class file { read getattr };
}
#============= sshd_t ==============
allow sshd_t usr_t:file { read getattr };
Sometimes, I’d like to know what programs on my system are listening to the network, and to quote the Perl motto, “there’s more than one way to do it”. On Linux, there’s lsof -Pi and netstat -p. On Windows XP and Vista, there’s the built-in netstat -b[v] -a and a separate utility called tcpview. I’ve included example usages and outputs.
lsof (Linux)
sudo lsof -Pni
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME
python 1886 root 4u IPv4 6621 TCP 127.0.0.1:2207 (LISTEN)
cupsd 1898 root 3u IPv4 6663 TCP 127.0.0.1:631 (LISTEN)
cupsd 1898 root 4u IPv6 6664 TCP [::1]:631 (LISTEN)
cupsd 1898 root 6u IPv4 6667 UDP *:631
sshd 1912 root 3u IPv4 6711 TCP *:22 (LISTEN)
httpd 20084 apache 4u IPv6 7293 TCP *:80 (LISTEN)
httpd 20085 apache 4u IPv6 7293 TCP *:80 (LISTEN)
httpd 20086 apache 4u IPv6 7293 TCP *:80 (LISTEN)
httpd 20087 apache 4u IPv6 7293 TCP *:80 (LISTEN)
httpd 20088 apache 4u IPv6 7293 TCP *:80 (LISTEN)
httpd 20089 apache 4u IPv6 7293 TCP *:80 (LISTEN)
httpd 20090 apache 4u IPv6 7293 TCP *:80 (LISTEN)
httpd 20091 apache 4u IPv6 7293 TCP *:80 (LISTEN)
netstat (Linux)
sudo netstat -lp --inet --numeric-hosts
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State PID/Program name
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:ssh 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1912/sshd
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:ipp 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1898/cupsd
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:2207 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1886/python
udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:ipp 0.0.0.0:* 1898/cupsd
Where’s httpd? It should be there, and it is, when I exclude the --inet option:
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State PID/Program name
tcp 0 0 :::http :::* LISTEN 2038/httpd
tcp 0 0 ::1:ipp :::* LISTEN 1898/cupsd
TcpView (Windows)
Download and start TcpView. From the menu, choose File > Save. Here’s the output from the file.
Process Protocol Local Address Remote Address State
svchost.exe:1064 TCP jareds-xp:epmapi jareds-xp:0 LISTENING
System:4 TCP jareds-xp:microsoft-ds jareds-xp:0 LISTENING
svchost.exe:976 TCP jareds-xp:3389i jareds-xp:0 LISTENING
nxssh.exe:2032 TCP jareds-xp:11000 jareds-xp:0 LISTENING
netstat (Windows)
Note that this runs quite slowly on Windows.
netstat -bva
Active Connections
Proto Local Address Foreign Address State PID
TCP jareds-xp:epmap jareds-xp.mydomain.com:0 LISTENING 1064
c:\windows\system32\WS2_32.dll
C:\WINDOWS\system32\RPCRT4.dll
c:\windows\system32\rpcss.dll
C:\WINDOWS\system32\svchost.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\ADVAPI32.dll
[svchost.exe]
TCP jareds-xp:microsoft-ds jareds-xp.mydomain.com:0 LISTENING 4
-- unknown component(s) --
[System]
TCP jareds-xp:3389 jareds-xp.mydomain.com:0 LISTENING 976
-- unknown component(s) --
c:\windows\system32\rpcss.dll
C:\WINDOWS\system32\svchost.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\ADVAPI32.dll
[svchost.exe]
TCP jareds-xp:11000 jareds-xp.mydomain.com:0 LISTENING 2032
[nxssh.exe]
TCP jareds-xp:3389 jareds-xp.mydomain.com:0 LISTENING 976
-- unknown component(s) --
c:\windows\system32\rpcss.dll
C:\WINDOWS\system32\svchost.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\ADVAPI32.dll
[svchost.exe]
I’ve had a few occasions where I’ve needed to read Microsoft Office 2007 documents, even though I don’t have Office 2007. There are several approaches.
Office 2007 stores it’s files and a zip archive, with xml files inside. This means that they’re somewhat human readable. I’ve used unzip to extract the file, and poked around until I found the xml file that represented the document (word/document.xml for docx). This works fairly well for Word and Power Point documents, but I’m not so sure that it would be good for Excel files.
Novell has provided a converter that converts Office 2007 documents to Open Office documents, and allows Office 2007 to save in Open Office format. The command line converter appears to work well, in my limited experience. Thanks to this blog post, here’s how I installed it on a Fedora/RedHat system:
mkdir convertercd converterwget http://download.go-oo.org/red-carpet/ooo-680/sled-10-sp-i586/odf-converter-1.1-7.i586.rpmrpm2cpio odf-converter*rpm | cpio -ivdsudo cp usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/OdfConverter /usr/local/bincd ..rm -rf converterRun it as follows:
OdfConverter /i example.docxWindows users with MS Word 2000, 2002 or 2003 can install the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack. For those without MS Word, there’s the read-only word viewer
Mac OS X Tiger office applications reportedly open Office 2007 documents.
Mac, Linux and FreeBSD users can use an online document conversion service such as http://www.docx2doc.com/ and http://docx-converter.com/ — with the caveat it may be unwise to submit confidential or proprietary documents to a third party.
When I got my Palm TX, I didn’t realize that the Palm Desktop software wasn’t completely compatible with Windows Vista. For example, I can’t install new palm apps via hot syncing. Here are some alternative install paths:
While I’m at it, it seems like configuring Linux to hotsync with Palm devices can be a pain. As an alternative, I think I’ll get an SD card and use nvbackup to backup to SD, and then copy the backup from SD to my Linux box and use it with JPilot.
There’s more than one way to do things, especially for a Palm equipped with built-in WiFi, bluetooth and an SD expansion card.
Want to know why your Linux box is sluggish? Some program is probably hogging disk I/O. I just discovered a cool utility that shows what programs are using the most disk I/O: iotop. To install it on Fedora, run
yum install iotop
Otherwise, download and run iotop.py — it requires Python 2.5+ and Linux kernel 2.6.20+