Category: General

I’ve been an on again off again note keeper since my teens. It seems I start keeping notes and then I lose my notebook or forget it at home and just end up using sticky notes or note pads which fall apart and end up in the trash.

For the new year I’m going to attempt to re-kindle my note-taking efforts in an attempt to make my life better organized. I’m hoping this will help me achieve some of the goals I have set out for myself, both personally and professionally.

Right now I’m trying to decide between different notebooks and what the ideal size might be. For simple note taking a small pocket notebook would be ideal but I find they cause me hand cramps if I do any real volume of writing. The flip side is that if I go too big I’m apt to leave it on my desk at home.

I’m going to go out at lunch tomorrow to see what I can find, I’ll do a followup post if I find something I like.

So I recently upgraded my 10-Stable machine at home to get some of the latest fix-ups. I forgot to update the boot code but I figured it would be a big deal since I was going from 10-stable to 10-stable. After rebooting I was greeted with “ZFS: unsupported feature: com.delphix:hole_birth” followed by no bootable zpools found. Ugh.

Downloaded the latest stable memstick image and booted off it to update the boot code.

gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptzfsboot -i 1 ada0

Moral of the story? If you don’t update the boot code on a zfs root machine during an upgrade you’re going to have a bad time.

At $WORK I had a requirement to have all autofs mounts in NIS show up as directories in the filesystem. This means that if you have a NIS map called auto.data file that mounts everything under /data/sharename that sharename has to be visible, even if it’s not mounted. This allows users to have a list of all possible NFS automounts.

In Solaris the default behavior is to make all these mount points visible but in RHEL 6 (and Centos I’m sure) the default is to have this feature disabled. Which means unless a mount is active it’s not visible in /data.

This behavior can be controlled by the BROWSE_MODE=”yes” setting in /etc/sysconfig/autofs. Once this is set just issue an autofs reload and your automounts will populate with their mount directories.

If you’ve come from another operating system like Linux or Windows you may have noticed that there is no real maximize button on OSX windows. The green plus symbol button is called “Zoom” and tries to resize the window to fit the content. Unfortunately this doesn’t always work well and if you’re used to other GUI’s you might be expecting more of a traditional maximize button.

This is where a program called Right Zoom comes into play. It changes your green + (zoom) button into a traditional maximize button. It’s simple, free and does exactly what I want.