Baldwin Sung

Blog Test

2010-08-04T19:49:59Z

Blog Test

Changing and/or Updating New York State Corporation

2010-05-26T11:07:28Z

To change or update the information for your New York State Corporation, go to the NYS Department of State Website at http://www.dos.state.ny.us and enter 1556 in the search box. This should lead you to select a pdf formatted form #1556 (Certificate of Change Form).

Fill out the form accordingly and send in the form with a check for $30 payable to New York State Department of State.

Disclaimer: This information could change at any time, the information on this page should always be verified with the New York State Department of State Customer Service team.

Sun Solaris 10 Release Updates

2010-03-06T04:54:59Z

Sun Solaris 10 has been around for over four years now. Over this period of time, Sun has released several updates for Solaris 10. It is often confusing to decipher which release “update” is tied to the “month & year” of Solaris 10. Below is a paragraph detailing the Solaris 10 Updates and their month/year.

Solaris 10 - Update 1 - 1/06
Solaris 10 - Update 2 - 6/06
Solaris 10 - Update 3 - 11/06
Solaris 10 - Update 4 - 08/07
Solaris 10 - Update 5 - 05/08
Solaris 10 - Update 6 - 10/08
Solaris 10 - Update 7 - 05/09
Solaris 10 - Update 8 - 10/09

Type `cat /etc/release` to figure out which OS release the server is currently running.
Remember, applying the latest patch cluster set to Solaris does not mean Solaris now has new features included with the latest OS release.

For example, if you want the newest features in Solaris 10 Update 8, you will need to install Solaris 10 Update 8 not install the latest patch cluster set on your currently running Solaris 10 Update 3 server.

Time Machine Backup Interval

2010-03-05T23:04:55Z

Time Machine Backups internal is setup for every 3600 seconds/60 minutes/1 hour. To verify, change and confirm your Time Machine Backup Interval, here is what you need to do.

Check the current:

sudo defaults read /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval


Change to new interval every 5 hours:
sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 18000


Confirm:
sudo defaults read /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval

find exec mv

2010-01-15T00:51:34Z

Everyday commands

find . -name *.zip -exec mv {} /tmp/. \;

Disable transmitting Bonjour service advertisements on Mac

2010-01-14T18:23:48Z

Referenced: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3789

---

Disable transmitting Bonjour service advertisements. You can use this advanced article if you are a network administrator who needs to disable Bonjour advertising service without disabling Bonjour queries and DNS.

Products Affected

Bonjour, Mac OS X 10.6, Bonjour

Important: Follow these steps carefully. A malformed or problematic mDNSResponder.plist file may prevent your Mac from starting up. As a precaution, perform a full backup of your system with Time Machine.

Make a back up copy of the mDNSResponder.plist file as a precaution.
Open the mDNSResponder.plist file in Terminal using your preferred text editor. Here is a sample command:
sudo nano "/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist"
Add "-NoMulticastAdvertisements" to the array in the "ProgramArguments" section.

In other words:
ProgramArguments
/usr/sbin/mDNSResponder
-launchd
becomes...
ProgramArguments
/usr/sbin/mDNSResponder
-launchd
-NoMulticastAdvertisements

Save the file.

Important: If you edited the file using emacs, you must remove the emacs backup file (the file with a tilde at the end of the name, "/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist~") or your Mac will not start up.
Restart your Mac.

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist

launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist

Additional Information

Prior to Mac OS X v10.6, the only way for a network administrator to disable Bonjour advertising of services was to completely disable the mDNSResponder process, which also disabled Bonjour discovery of services (such as discovering network printers).

Jumbo Frames & Oracle

2010-01-05T15:29:07Z

Ethernet uses a Maximum Transfer Unit (MTU) of 1,500 bytes. This limits the maximum size of an Ethernet packet to 1,500 bytes. Larger I/O requests are split into multiple MTU-sized packets. Transmitting a large number of small packets impacts the host CPU by generating an excessive number of interrupts for each application I/O.
Typical database environments transfer data in 2KB to 32KB sizes which always require multiple 1,500 byte packets per database I/O. Jumbo frames increase the device MTU size to a larger value (typically 9,000 bytes) allowing I/O requests to more frequently fit in one physical packet and reducing the number of frames required for larger I/O requests.

Starting VMware Fusion from the Command Line

2010-01-04T19:27:55Z

open /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS/vmware

Ping Success or Failure using Bash

2010-01-04T18:56:00Z

#!/bin/bash

if ping -c 1 hostfoo > /dev/null
   then
	echo "ping success"
   else
        echo "could not ping hostfoo. exiting..."
fi

Automating SSH public key pushes with Perl

2010-01-04T18:18:28Z

Automating SSH public key pushes to servers.

The code below uses Expect and SSH to create & permission the .ssh directory. Followed by SSH copying the local temp file as the authorized_keys file to the .ssh subdir on the target server .

Be sure to set StrictHostKeyChecking=no in the SSH client side config.

---

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use English;
use Expect;
use Net::Ping;

my $username = "USER";
my $password = "PASS";
my $homedir  = "\/export\/home\/$username";
my $ssh_dir  = "$homedir\/.ssh";
my $ssh_pub  = "
ssh-dss BLAH BLAH use your own public key file entry here.
";

if ( ! $ARGV[0] ) {
        print "$0  \n";
        exit
} 

my $host = "$ARGV[0]";
my $p 	 = Net::Ping->new();
if ( $p->ping($host) ) {
	print "Deploying public key to $host \n";
	create_ssh_dir();
	chmod_ssh_dir();
	push_ssh_key();
} else {
	print "Seems $host is not reachable \n";
}
$p->close();

sub create_ssh_dir {
my $ssh_cmd  = "/usr/bin/ssh $username\@$host 'mkdir $ssh_dir'";

my $timeout  = '5';
my $exp      = Expect->spawn($ssh_cmd) or die "Cannot spawn ssh command \n";
$exp->expect($timeout, ["Password:"]);
$exp->send("$password\n");
$exp->soft_close();
}

sub chmod_ssh_dir {
my $ssh_cmd  = "/usr/bin/ssh $username\@$host 'chmod 755 $ssh_dir'";

my $timeout  = '5';
my $exp      = Expect->spawn($ssh_cmd) or die "Cannot spawn ssh command \n";
$exp->expect($timeout, ["Password:"]);
$exp->send("$password\n");
$exp->soft_close();
}

sub push_ssh_key {
my $tmp_file  = "/tmp/authorized_keys.$$";
chomp $ssh_pub;

open  ( AUTHKEY, ">$tmp_file") || die ("Unable to create $tmp_file\n");
print AUTHKEY "$ssh_pub" . "\n";
close ( AUTHKEY );

my $scp_cmd  = "/usr/bin/scp $tmp_file $username\@$host:$ssh_dir/authorized_keys";

my $timeout = '5';
my $exp = Expect->spawn($scp_cmd) or die "Cannot spawn scp command \n";
$exp->expect($timeout, ["Password:"]);
$exp->send("$password\n");
$exp->soft_close();

unlink("$tmp_file");
}

Write Chinese Characters using Trackpad on Mac

2010-01-04T15:04:30Z

From http://www.apple.com/macosx/refinements

Innovative Chinese character input.

Until Snow Leopard, if you wanted to enter Chinese characters on a computer, you had to type in the phonetic spelling of Chinese words and the computer would convert them into proper Chinese characters. Snow Leopard offers a breakthrough new way to enter characters: You write them directly on the Multi-Touch trackpad in your Mac notebook. They’ll appear on the screen in a new input window, which recommends characters based on what you drew and lets you choose the right one. The input window even offers suggestions for subsequent characters based on what you chose.

Backup & Restore Volume in Linux Single User Mode

2009-12-31T16:08:39Z

service network start
ifconfig eth0 ip netmask
service portmap start

mkdir /tmp/remote
mount -t nfs -o tcp,port=2049 nas:/volume1/share /tmp/remote

rpm -ivh /tmp/remote/rmt*
rpm -ivh /tmp/remote/dump*

dump 0f /tmp/remote/host.dump /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

---

mkdir /tmp/local
mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /tmp/local
cd /tmp/local
restore rvf /tmp/remote/host.dump &> /tmp/remote/host.log &

Getting into B-School — Round 2 Essays — What Not to Do

2009-12-31T14:45:58Z

Following was from the BusinessWeek Forum.

---

Getting into B-School — Round 2 Essays — What Not to Do

From: timpower
To: All

You've seen a large number of posts from us and many others on what you should do with your essays. Knowing what not to do is probably as important, if not more, than what to do and our essay reviewers (alums from Wharton, HBS and Stanford) pulled together the list below for our blog at http://essaycritique.blogspot.com

So, DON'T:

1. Exceed the word count

2. Use "I realized" ad nauseum - we actually have a tool that counts what we call absolutely overused essay phrases and this is top of the list..

3. Gloss over the details - the AdCom is more interested in understanding the specifics of what you did than the broad, high level generalizations that you felt during the situation you are describing

4. Say "I was enchanted" or enraptured or captured or any such magical sounding verb - c'mon, were you really?!

5. Suggest that you were in the epicenter of the financial crisis and helped solve it - unless you really did.

6. Say you volunteered or are a 'community service' type of guy if you are not. If you are, say where, when, how and how much.

7. Use every essay to talk about your career. You need at least one "personal" essay, if not two (depending on the school that you are applying to)

8. Blame everyone but yourself in your 'failure' essay. Even though you might not think you have, revisit it - we can't state how many people do this because its embarrassing.

9. Ignore the question. As plainly obvious as this might sound, after you have written your essay, re-read your answer once to only check for this - have you answered each component of the question that is asked and done it justice?

10. State the obvious. Let your discussion of situations and experiences naturally lead the reader to your conclusions - e.g., after describing a particularly challenging time in your life, don't say "this experience was extremely challenging" - they get it. Hope this helps - you know where to find me!

Tim Power

SSH Client Side Configuration

2009-12-25T00:54:06Z

Host *
     LogLevel=ERROR
     StrictHostKeyChecking=no
     ConnectTimeout=10

Solaris 10 Disable GUI

2009-12-24T06:08:56Z

Prior to Solaris 10, modifying the initdefault in /etc/inittab would determine if the the GUI was loaded upon boot up. With Solaris 10, use

/usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -d
/usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -e