Remembering Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie

Early this month, we mourned the loss of the two outstanding persons of the industry - Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie.

Cross-bar installation of Toyota Highlander

I purchased a set of cross-bar for my 2010 Toyota Highlander. After reading the instructions, I was not sure the right procedure to follow; especially in the area of how to remove roof rack leg covers. Then I discovered the discussion forum, which points out that the best tool is the typical paint can lid remover tool. I went to a local Lowe store and bought one. To my relief, it's not that difficult to remove two roof rack leg covers.

See picture 1 - work in progress and 2 - completion.

Fix Solaris 10 ZFS Error 16: Inconsistent filesystem structure.

I just installed Solaris 10 guest (ZFS root) under VirtualBox 3.2.8. After I installed the guest add-on, then rebooted the Solaris 10 guest and I had the following error:

• Error 16: Inconsistent filesystem structure
  

The instructions documented in Bug 5982 appear to work fine. Here's the complete instructions I took:

1) Boot into failsafe mode

2) Select yes to mount the ZFS root under /a:

3) Re-build the boot archive

# rm /a/platform/i86pc/boot_archive
# bootadm update-archive -f -R /a
Creating boot_archive for /a
updating /a/platform/i86pc/amd64/boot_archive
updating /a/platform/i86pc/boot_archive
# reboot 

三国有感之仁义

最近看了新版三国，颇有一番感慨。百年历史，波澜壮阔，英雄辈出。正如杨慎《临江仙·滚滚长江东逝水》所述：
滚滚长江东逝水，浪花淘尽英雄。
是非成败转头空。青山依旧在，几度夕阳红。
白发渔樵江渚上，惯看秋月春风。一壶浊酒喜相逢。
古今多少事，都付笑谈中。

东汉末年，群雄逐鹿，直至魏、蜀、吴三国鼎立。刘备仁义为本，兼是皇叔，可谓民心所向。然而，刘备却为仁义所困，该取荆州不取，失去良机。后来，关羽失荆州被杀；刘备却举国之力以七十万兵力攻打吴国以报兄弟之仇，不料夷陵之战大败于吴，几全军覆没。让人惋惜。倘若刘备始终以仁义和恢复大汉为先，应不至于出兵攻吴。看看曹操，虽被三国演义描为奸雄，却能看透仁义，取舍自如，最终统一北方，奠定魏晋基业。

iPad Wireless Connection Issue

I received my iPad which I ordered two weeks ago. It seems that I may be one of those small number of iPad users who are experience wireless connection issues. The wireless signal fluctuated from strong to weak, while my other laptops and iPhone showed a consistent signal at the same location. In addition, I was asked to re-type the password in order to connect to the wireless network from time to time. I found the Apple knowledge note and changed my WiFi router setting to use WPA/WPA2 security. Hopefully the rest of the connection issue can be addressed in the upcoming iOS release.

Shrinking a VirtualBox image

I followed the tutorial "How to Shrink Your VirtualBox VM" and found it's very useful to reduce the image size. Since I'm using the Oracle Enterprise Linux as the guest, I need to get the zerofree rpm package first.

1) Verify the current disk partition of the OEL guest (e.g. /dev/hda3)

2) Assign a OEL Boot into Linux rescue mode (e.g. using OEL or OVM) and mount the file system as read only.

# mount -n -o remount,ro -t ext3 /dev/hda3 /
# zerofree /dev/hda3

3) Shutdown the OEL VM.
# shutdown -h now
# poweroff

4) Shrink the VM (from the host OS)
# vboxmanage modifyhd EnterpriseLinux.vdi compact

For the guest VMs, such as Ubunutu 9.10 where ext4 file system is used, I can not get zerofree to work; but a good workaround is to CloneVDI tool.

Recover from a failed upgrade with ZFS

Working on my SPARC box, I came across some serious issues during the upgrade and must revert back to a previous boot environment (ZFS as the root file system). So I logged into ILOM service processor, sent a break to bring the system to the OK prompt, then specified the boot environment. Now I'm recovered from a failed upgrade. It's really cool!

-> set /HOST send_break_action=break
Set 'send_break_action' to 'break'

-> start /SP/console
Are you sure you want to start /SP/console (y/n)? y

Serial console started. To stop, type #.
Debugging requested; hardware watchdog suspended.
Type 'go' to resume

{0} ok boot disk -Z rpool/ROOT/snv_134