A few weeks agoI was trying to find the “rocks” way to uninstall a package included by default in the rocks installer. I ended up calling their tech support line, and they recommended I do the following:
<package disable=”1″>mlocate</package>
I added this to my extend-compute.xml file and that stopped mlocate from being installed on my client nodes.
The 2011 version of our autodesk software has arrived, with a new licencing system which will have to work alongside the old one (hopefully). I’ll be testing it this week.
I’ve spent a bit more time working with printui.dll to install printers, and found some interesting things:
1. Adding a printer to the machine doesn’t seem to automatically make it available to active directory accounts. It does allow the AddWindowsPrinterConnection command from the Wscript.shell object to set up the printer.
2. It can only be run once on a machine for a given printer without giving an error, making it impractical to put into a login script for users (but possibly useful for a remote command or new machine script).
At the moment, I’m leaving it out of the login scripts and just manually adding the printers for windows 7 boxes. If group policy managed print management in windows 2008 works out, I’ll switch to using that to set up printers instead.
I had originally seen this error when I copied a vm image to a larger drive – the ethernet interface had a static I.P. but stopped working. When I created a new interface that worked fine. This time, I look around on the web to figure out what was happening. It turns out that the copied images would change the mac address. Under debian, this would cause the udev system to create a new ethernet interface for the mac address, mapped to ethX (where X is 1 plus the last network adapter it created). By the time I started it on my new vmware server, I had two ethernet addresses, so it created two new interfaces, eth3 and eth4. I was using eth1 for networking so changing it to eth4 enabled internet access.
In /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules is where the information about the ethernet cards and their mac addresses was stored. I compared this to the information from the .vmx config file for the virtual machine to determine what network card was mapped to each ethX interface.
I’ve found some interesting things out about how vmware server works on debian 5.0 . Apparently there is problem with the vmmon module throwing an error when it is higher than version 138. Here’s the error message:
[localized] Version mismatch with vmmon module: expecting 138.0, got 168.0
Several fixes on the internet are available, which patch the source for the vmmon module to allow it to compile. I was successful when I applied the following patch from this link:
http://www.insecure.ws/2008/07/24/vmware-anspecific-specific-557-and-kernel-2626
I applied it after the vmware-any-any-update117d patch I found here:
NEW “How to install VMWare in 2.6.26 linux kernel”
I’m actually sure if the 117d patch was required or not. Doing a diff on the vmmon source, it appears that thevmware-update-2.26-5.5.7.tgz file adds a little perl function that determines what the vmmon version should be, to deal with the issue above.
Install procedure on fresh debian 5 machine:
Still more updating and last minute work to help with the siggraph Asia paper deadline.
• Updating dgpis40 server
• matlab license update
• install octave on cluster
• file server and office 2010 research
While I was building an installer for debian on a usb stick, I ran the following:
install-mbr /dev/sdb
To fix a problem I was having at boot. It worked, but I then presented me with the following after booting the usb key:
MBR FA:
Some googling told me that I need to press “a” and then “1” at the next prompt to get this to boot, but reading the man page for install-mbr told me why I needed to do it in the first place (or at least a reasonable explanation for what happened).
It turns out the install-mbr command sets up a boot loader that will give you a menu if a key is pressed during startup. My best guess is that it reads the boot menu selection as a keypress and stops the boot at the mbr prompt. There are ways to disable this in the man page, but it isn’t worth the effort for me since I can just type a and 1 to proceed with the boot.
I’m mostly concentrating on software updates this week, but if anything interesting happens I’ll add a post about it.
I found another way to see installed software from the command line (provided it’s been installed using a .msi installer).
From:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1482739/batch-script-to-get-specific-installed-software-along-with-version
List all installed Microsoft products:
wmic product where "Vendor like '%Microsoft%'" get Name, Version
*
List installed products that have Office in their names:
wmic product where "Name like '%Office%'" get Name, Version
I’ve been working with Thunderbird 3 in preparation for a deployment at DGP and found an interesting quirk – the message synchronization feature basically turns imap into a cached set of files on the local drive. Since we have quotas on the network space where is data is kept, the file sizes are a big problem (it filled my quota before syncing all the messages). It can be configured through the gui, but I want to change the installer to change this by default.
The best option I’ve seen so far is to change the default preferences file, but I’ll need to get it into the executable installer or change it after the installation. To that end, I created a .cmd file which does a silent install:
ECHO.
ECHO installing thunderbird
ECHO PLEASE WAIT
start /wait \\Wood\SW\Thunderbird\”Thunderbird Setup 3.0.4.exe” -ms
\\Wood\SW\DGPSWscripts\sleep.exe 5
set option=pref(“mail.server.default.autosync_offline_stores”, false);
ECHO.
ECHO installing thunderbird
ECHO PLEASE WAIT
start /wait \\Wood\SW\Thunderbird\”Thunderbird Setup 3.0.4.exe” -ms
\\Wood\SW\DGPSWscripts\sleep.exe 5
set option=pref^(“mail.server.default.autosync_offline_stores”, false)^;
IF %PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE%==AMD64 echo %option% >> “%PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\Mozilla Thunderbird\defaults\pref\all-l10n.js”
IF %PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE%==x86 echo %option% >> “%PROGRAMFILES%\Mozilla Thunderbird\defaults\pref\all-l10n.js