Below is a picture of a server (click the picture for a bigger version). This particular server has space for six sata drives, a slimline optical drive, and a floppy drive. Guess where the floppy drive is.
A user asked to have Java 1.3 installed on his linux workstation. Suspicious of a request for a 5 year old version of Java I stopped by the requester's cube to learn more.
It turned out that one of the companies we were working with provided access to a custom application via a Tarantella setup. Tarantella is a terminal services platform (think VNC or Citrix), and while the web/java client for this particular version of the Tarantella server would load with a modern Java runtime, the application wasn't actually usable because of screen redrawing issues. The user was told that he should use a 1.3 release of Java from Sun.
It of course would have been my preference to tell this company to get with the times (after cursing the creators of Java for the fact that I seem to have more negative experiences with Java than positive ones). But as that was not an option, I went to work out how to have multiple versions of Java available to a browser under linux.
While investigating the feasibilty of this (short answer: While doable under Windows, the solution under linux involves multiple copies of a web browser). It dawned upon me that there was likely a locally installable client that could connect to the server. A quick email to the company hosting the Tarantella server we were trying to connect to got me a copy of the program and I was able to close requestor's bug ticket.
I needed a way to know when our various flexlm licenses would expire. I suppose I could have simply added the dates to my calendar whenever I added/updated the license files. But since I am not the only one to update the license files (and since sometimes the licenses are updated before the actual expiration), I figured a script that checked for soon to expiring licenses would be the correct solution.
Some experimentation with lmstat and some clarifications from the FlexLM Manual led to the creation of lmcheck.sh. The script should work on any unix system with a modern sh.
The output looks like;
/opt/lmgrd/bin/lmcheck.sh running on hostname at Tue 12 Dec 2006 06:53:16PM EST
The following licenses have expired or are expiring within 7 days
VENDOR FEATURE VERSION DATE
------ ------- ------- ----
VENDORNAME FeatureFoo 1.2.3 4-dec-2006
The following configs could not be tested
----------
27001@hostname
Cron runs this daily with the command lmcheck.sh | mail
-S "lmcheck on hostname" email@example.com
We had a power outage at work today. Power was out for at least an hour. My boss was called a few minutes after the power outage happened. Upon arriving, he encoutered a problem. While the keycard reader seemed to have power and even blinked properly upon him waving his card at it, the door lock did not disengage. It seems the card reader system has a battery in it, but the mechanism to power the door lock release is powered by standard building power. Thankfully there were already people in the building to let him in.
