- Published:
- February 8, 2010 – 9:05 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
This is my admittedly minor but I hope useful contribution to the TinyOS development community. TinyOS is an Operating System and development framework for Wireless Sensor Networks and other platforms which has a small footprint and is very energy conscious. The TinyOS source code is available for free online for many operating systems, however it takes a long time to get the environment set up and it is not portable at all. I came across XubunTOS but it did not seem to be in active development anymore, so I endeavored to install TinyOS 2.1 and 2.x from source into a regular Ubuntu image. The most help came from Matt Keally’s Blog. While doing this, I thought it might be useful to many others who wish to develop in the TinyOS framework but might not have the skills necessary to install it. Therefore, I developed this VirtualBox image so that you can….
Categories: Programs,Software,Ubuntu
Tagged: tinyos, ubuntos, Ubuntu, virtualbox
- Published:
- September 29, 2009 – 5:00 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
I was recently tasked with copying speaker’s presentations, files and handouts onto 100s of USB Drives (key drives) for a conference that work is hosting down in Washington, D.C. My first thought was that it was going to be a pain to have to copy/paste the files to each drive. I thought about creating a batch script to copy the files with a double click. But really, who wants to be doing all of that clicking and/or typing? Work smarter, not harder. Then I remembered a neat feature that SyncBackSE, a program I use at home for backups, has available. The backup program – which is basically a file copy process – can be triggered based on the insert of a drive, whether that be a USB Key Drive or an External Hard Drive. Using the program, the only action you need to do to trigger the copy process is….
Categories: Hardware,Other Code,Programs
Tagged: conference, key drive, tips, tricks, usb drive, usb key drive
- Published:
- August 5, 2009 – 9:16 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
You’ve flashed your old WRT54G or other vanilla router with the Tomato firmware. This itself turns your router into a lean, mean routing machine with QOS, SSH and more, but let’s say we want to take it a bit further. What it we want to get some more stats out of it? In order to do this, we first need to set up a way to pull this information from the router. The best way to do this is to install an SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) daemon on the system. The main roadblock we face here is that the system mainly runs in volatile system memory, meaning that every time the system is rebooted the filesystem is reset. Fortunately Tomato provides a way to get around this using CIFS shares. Follow the steps below (as modified from here) to install an SNMP server on a Tomato router. Create a….
Categories: Code Samples,Configurations,Hardware,Linux,Other Code,Other Technology,Programs,Shell,Software,System Administration
Tagged: cacti, firmware, network, router, SNMP, sysadmin
- Published:
- May 3, 2009 – 11:12 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
Zabbix is an excellent system monitoring package. It does everything from basic availability checking to detailed system resource analysis. It is capable of graphing the variables pulled from the system, and alerting admins if there is a problem or something needed for attention. Once you have the Zabbix server set up, you need to install the client on any systems you want to monitor. Windows systems have a precompiled binary to install. On linux, unix or freebsd systems you’ll need to compile binaries. If you have a range of systems that are homogeneous, you can port the binary to those or also compile it with static dependencies. Below are steps to compile, configure and install the zabbix client: Steps to install a Zabbix Client Download zabbix source code from www.zabbix.com; decompress with ‘tar zxvf’ and cd to directory Configure the make program: ./configure –enable-agent Compile and install the program: make….
Categories: CentOS,Code Samples,Configurations,Linux,Programs,System Administration
Tagged: agent, alerts, monitoring, zabbix
- Published:
- December 29, 2008 – 3:58 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
I recently got stuck while trying to install Headless Virtualbox on a Centos 5.2 server per the directions at Howtoforge here. The RPM failed with the error that it couldn’t find the kernel source. I thought I had already installed kernel-devel, and confirmed that I did. The instructions were to define the KERN_DIR variable like so: $ export KERN_DIR=/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-92.1.22.el5-i686/ $ /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup Stopping VirtualBox kernel module [ OK ] Removing old VirtualBox netflt kernel module [ OK ] Removing old VirtualBox kernel module [ OK ] Recompiling VirtualBox kernel module [ OK ] Starting VirtualBox kernel module [FAILED] (modprobe vboxdrv failed. Please use ‘dmesg’ to find out why) dmesg shows this: vboxdrv: disagrees about version of symbol struct_module Interesting! After several missteps, it turns out there is a separate development rpm for the PAE kernel: $ yum install kernel-PAE-devel After that installs, we are good: $ export KERN_DIR=/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-92.1.22.el5-PAE-i686/ $ /etc/init.d/vboxdrv….
Categories: Configurations,Linux,Programs,Shell,Software,System Administration
Tagged: error, kernel, virtualbox
- Published:
- October 1, 2008 – 2:12 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
If you receive this error while opening Excel or other Microsoft Office programs, it is usually caused by an Adobe PDF addon that is having problems. According to Microsoft, this can happen if: 1. The Microsoft Office Startup folder or the Microsoft Excel Startup folder contains either or both of the following Adobe Acrobat PDFMaker add-in template files: Pdfmaker.dot Pdfmaker.xla AND 2. Norton AntiVirus software is installed. To fix it, delete the files from the startup Office folder. There are a few locations it might be, in my case it was in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\XLSTART. See this Microsoft KB Article on fixing the error.
Categories: Programs,Software,Windows
Tagged: dismon, error, module, office 2007
- Published:
- May 27, 2008 – 4:47 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
Updated on 8/26/2008 with corrected information! Window’s simple shutdown command works well, but has some major drawbacks. The major one is that it will only schedule a reboot up to 10 minutes into the future (600 seconds). Linux’s shutdown command makes this easy, just issue the command ‘shutdown -r +60′ for example to reboot an hour in the future. No such luck in Windows, you need to download a separate program to do this. It is a sysinternals program, you might remember sysinternals from such utilies like FileMon and ProcessMonitor. The program we use for this is called PsTools and more specifically the file psshutdown.exe. [Download PsTools here] Place psshutdown.exe into a directory for future use, for this example we will use c:\tools\. Easiest Method: Type the following command into the command prompt: 1c:\tools\psshutdown.exe -r -f -c -t 02:00 /accepteula PSshutdown will respond with: 12345PsShutdown v2.52 – Shutdown, logoff and….
Categories: Programs,Shell,System Administration,Windows
Tagged: sysadmin, tricks, Windows
