Interesting free educational videos and webinars from Truebit.tv

Truebit.tv is a new online channel which contains exciting new free educational videos and webinars started by W Curtis Preston and Truth in IT.

 To access the site, just register yourself. Here are some useful links.

1. Truebit.Tv Webinar
2. Truebit.Tv Video

Painting /etc/motd with some colour

Adding colours to foreground and background of the /etc/motd is a useful way to hightlight remarks or message that users can take a note. It is not very difficult. Firstly, do take a look at the colour codes.

^[[0m    - Reset the terminal characteristics
^[[1m    - emphasis (bold)

^[[30m    - Foreground black
^[[31m    - Foreground red
^[[32m    - Foreground green
^[[33m    - Foreground yellow
^[[34m    - Foreground blue
^[[35m    - Foreground magenta
^[[36m    - Foreground cyan
^[[37m    - Foreground white

^[[40m    - Background black
^[[41m    - Background red
^[[42m    - Background green
^[[43m    - Background yellow
^[[44m    - Background blue
^[[45m    - Background magenta
^[[46m    - Background cyan
^[[47m    - Background white

The ^[ can be achieved by pressing CTRL-ESC then ESC. Do note that CTRL-ESC then ESC is not the same as directly typing ^[

The steps are as followed

1. CTRL-ESC then ESC and type "[31m" (without the quotation)
2. The Message you wish to convey
3. Terminating the with CTRL-ESC then ESC and type "[[0m"

For example,

^[[31m #########Hello I'm foreground red############  ^[[0m

Purchasing Hewlett Packard HP spare parts in Singapore

 
If you have out-dated HP models and wish to get HP spare parts, you have to go to Servlink Technology Resources Pte Ltd.

Sales Hotline: 62730010
Email: sales@servlink.com.sg

Checking whether IP forwarding is enabled on your Linux Box

Gateway provides a local private network to have access to the internet. To do a quick check whether the IP forwarding is enabled on your machine, do a simple

# cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

If the output is 0, then IP forwarding is not enabled. If the output is 1, then IP forwarding is enabled
If your output is 0, you can enabled it by running the command

# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

Running the command cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward and it should show 1

For more information, do look at the article Installing and configuring a Linux gateway

Price Lists for IT equipment at Sim Lim Square Singapore

Sim Lim Square is one of the largest electronics and computer shopping mall you will find in Singapore. But in case  you wish to check some of the online pricing of computer related accessories, do look at this website.

VR-Zone Price Watch

How come cp still in interactive mode when overiding

When you use the command cp -f -r /somedirectory. Somehow there is still a prompt when you overide. Theoretically, cp -f will overide the interactive mode but somehow it did not.

When it happened, do look at your .bashrc where you have a line

alias cp='cp -i'

This may have caused interactive mode not to be over-written by "cp -f"

Logging out other users in Linux

If you wish to logout other users on your Linux Box, use the command the pkill

Step 1: Check the list of users that are logged on the Linux Box, you can use the following command

# w

OR

# who

Once you know the users, you the command pkill

# pkill -KILL -u userid

Using tar to archive and compress a file or directory

Tar is one of my main tools to archive and compress file. It cannot be any easier

To create,compress and archive a new file, you can just simply use the command

$ tar cvzf foo.tgz *.c *.out

where c = create, v = verbose, z = compress, f = specifies the file name 

To archive a directory testdir, the

$ tar cvzf testdir.tgz testdir

Article - Intel® Solid-State Drive 910 Series Delivers High Performance, Endurance and Reliability for Data Center Tiering and Caching

An interesting article by Intel to address high-performning SSD.......

Intel® Solid-State Drive 910 Series Delivers High Performance, Endurance and Reliability for Data Center Tiering and Caching (Intel NewsRoom)

Another similar article can be found at Intel's PCI-E 910-Series SSD reviewed: blazing fast, even under pressure (Engadget)

Some of the hightlights:

1. PCIe-based 400GB and 800GB Intel SSD 910 Series provides extreme performance, endurance and reliability for rigorous data center demands.
2. Intel SSD 910 Series offers easy-to-install, seamless post-deployment server storage upgrade with no changes to existing server design.
3. Using Intel High Endurance Technology, Intel SSD 910 offers 10 full drive writes a day for 5 years for 30x endurance.*

Identifying the vendor and device id using lspci

Devices are mainly identified using a pair of hexadecimal numbers, like 1425:4801
The 4 first hexadecimal digits represent are the Vendor ID (1425)
The 4 last hexadecimal digits represent the Device ID (4801)


To find the vendor and device id, you can use the lspci command

lspci -n

OR

lspci -nn

Output for lspci -nn

10:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Chelsio Communications Inc T420-CR Unified Wire Ethernet Controller [1425:4001]
10:00.1 Ethernet controller [0200]: Chelsio Communications Inc T420-CR Unified Wire Ethernet Controller [1425:4001]
10:00.2 Ethernet controller [0200]: Chelsio Communications Inc T420-CR Unified Wire Ethernet Controller [1425:4001]
10:00.3 Ethernet controller [0200]: Chelsio Communications Inc T420-CR Unified Wire Ethernet Controller [1425:4001]
10:00.4 Ethernet controller [0200]: Chelsio Communications Inc T420-CR Unified Wire Ethernet Controller [1425:4401]
10:00.5 SCSI storage controller [0100]: Chelsio Communications Inc T420-CR Unified Wire Storage Controller [1425:4501]
10:00.6 Fibre Channel [0c04]: Chelsio Communications Inc T420-CR Unified Wire Storage Controller [1425:4601]
10:00.7 Ethernet controller [0200]: Chelsio Communications Inc Device [1425:0000]
10:01.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Chelsio Communications Inc T420-CR Unified Wire Ethernet Controller [1425:4801]
10:01.4 Ethernet controller [0200]: Chelsio Communications Inc T420-CR Unified Wire Ethernet Controller [1425:4801]

VSphere Edition Comparison

 Since the advent of the VSphere 5, there were some changes in which vmware work out its licenses. I find this chart from VMware Compare Edition helpful when you intend to select the

Compiling AMBER 10 with Intel XE Compiler and Intel MKL 10

If you wish to compile an older version of AMBER such as AMBER 10 with the more up-to-date version of Intel XE and MKL 10, I hope you will find the writeup at my other blog linuxcluster.wordpress.com helpful.
See Compiling AMBER 10 with Intel XE Compiler and Intel MKL 10

Building SCALAPACK 2.0.1 with intel compiler

I have written an simple entry of installing scalapack 2.0.1 on CentO 5 on Linux Cluster. For more information, do take a look at   Building SCALAPACK 2.0.1 with Intel Compiler

Using nslookup to help diagnose DNS resolving issue

If you are having issues to resolve your servers to the designated name servers, you may want to use these 3 tools (nslookup, dig, host) which can help to diagnose the DNS resolution. This entry mentions only nslookup.

Utility 1: nslookup
nslookup is one useful tools to assist in diagnosing problems with your resolving. Unfortunately, this niffy tools is already deprecated or in other words not actively maintained.

# nslookup -debug yournameserver.com

(-debug =  Turn on or off the display of the full response packet and any intermediate response packets when searching.)

# nslookup -debug -d2 yournameserver.com

(-d2 = Turn debugging mode on or off. This displays more about what nslookup is doing.)

Sample output on d2

lock_lookup dighost.c:3173
main parsing yournameserver.com
addlookup()
make_empty_lookup()
looking up starfruit.spms.ntu.edu.sg
setup_system()
create_search_list()
ndots is 1.
........
....... 
success
flush_server_list()
freeing commctx
freeing socketmgr
freeing timermgr
destroy DST lib
detach from entropy
unlock_lookup dighost.c:3219

Resources:

1. Tracking "Server Failed" Error from DNS

Article - No Free Lunch for Intel MIC (or GPU's)

This is an interesting article No Free Lunch for Intel MIC (or GPU's) from Steve Scott on Nvidia site. He mentioned there are 3 major consideration why porting over to MIC will be more challenging than we thought out to be. He mentioned several pointers to look out for that imhibit mass migratio to MIC. Take a read. But do note it is written by NVIDIA a competitor of MIC