Simon Krenger

So lately I have been working a lot more with Linux networking. Consider an iptables configuration like this:

*filter
:INPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
:FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [7752:8249066]
[..]
-A RH-Firewall-1-FORWARD -p icmp -m icmp --icmp-type any -j ACCEPT 
-A RH-Firewall-1-FORWARD -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT 
-A RH-Firewall-1-FORWARD -p tcp -m state --state NEW -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT 
[..]
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited 
COMMIT
# Completed on Fri Nov 21 15:44:47 2014

Ever noticed the brackets right next to the chain? What are those? What do the numbers mean?

*filter
:INPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
:FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [7752:8249066]

The answer is pretty easy and pretty obvious in hindsight. These numbers report

• packet counter for the chain
• byte counter for the chain

So in our example above, the OUTPUT chain matched 7752 packets and 8249066 bytes.

Since Google shut down its Reader service, I am a regular user of the Tiny Tiny RSS reader. Having my own RSS reader installation gives me more power regarding my privacy and the services I am using. Consider me a happy user.

However, there are some issued regarding full UTF8 support when using MySQL. When a feed uses UTF8 emoijs, tt-rss will throw up and report an error. Unfortunately, this only manifests itself with log entries like this:

So often when issuing a emctl (Enterprise Manager Command Line Utility) command, one needs to specify a target type. This is often the case when the command affects a certain target (for example emctl reload agent dynamicproperties ...).

The most often used target types are the following:

• oracle_database (Oracle Instance)
• oracle_emd (Agent)
• host (Host Machine)

However, there are a lot of other target types available. We can get all available target types for Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c if we query the SYSMAN.EM_TARGET_TYPES table in the Enterprise manager repository:

So recently I stumbled across a programming quiz to which I later returned because it somehow fascinated me.

Problem

Finding the first available number (or the smallest missing number) in a list is a common problem in Computer Science (for example for Defragmenting or generating keys) and describes the search for the smallest natural number, which is not part of a set X of natural numbers. X is a set of distinct natural numbers (and being a set, is not ordered).

We are now looking for a function with linear worst-case time complexity O(n).

Example

We define X as a set of distinct natural numbers:

X = {23,9,12,0,11,1,13,7,21,14,5,4,17,19,3,6,2}

So in this set, we find that the number 8 is the first available number (smallest missing number). So running the algorithm over the above set should return 8.

When you install the InstantClient binaries, you often want to use your existing TNSNAMES.ORA file containing all your databases. So how do you specify the location of your TNSNAMES.ORA file?

The Oracle website has the answer:

For Nagios, many, many Oracle plugins are available for checking database availability and performance. But if you just want to check if the instance is up and running (and not add more complexity), you can use the simple script provided here.

In an earlier post, I showed how to install SQL*Plus on Debian and based on that tutorial, I wrote a little shell script to query a database (I called it check_oracle_dual.sh):

Last week, someone at work approached me, stating that he was unable to log into the web interface of a VMware Server machine. I was shocked to learn that we still had a VMware Server up and running. Then, I tried to log into the web interface myself and received an SSL error as well.

It turns out the machine was standing under someones desk and still had one single VM running. In order to migrate the machine to our ESXi infrastructure and fix the problem, I examined the logs on the server and found this:

In a script I was working on, the tar command always reported the following error when I tried to extract an archive:

Cannot change ownership to uid 1000 , gid 1000: Permission denied

But I was executing the script as root! The reason for this error to occur turned out to be relatively simple. Hint: It has to do with CIFS.

In a previous post I showed how to install the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) client for Linux (wmic). In this post, I wish to show a few ways on how to query a Windows-based host using the WMI client.

Using WQL, we can query almost any aspect of the Operating System. Using the available WMI Classes (for example the WMI Win32 Classes), we can easily query performance indicators such as Memory Usage, Disk Usage or the status of a certain process.

With Debian 6, the Debian distribution made the jump to a dependency based boot sequence using LSB tags. So when you update your current Debian installation, you might encounter some problems when your scripts are not properly prepared. Such as the following message:

insserv: script vzreboot: service vzreboot already provided!

The full message reads like this: