POSITION OVERVIEW

The Technical Support Analyst for SunGard InvestOne’s global clients will be responsible for hands-on technical troubleshooting and support across a variety of platforms for a broad customer client base. This position is part of a global team with local responsibilities from 8am to 8pm.

The Analyst will be responsible for Tier 1 level support, which includes break/fix management and communications to internal stake holders regarding status and problem tracking.

He/She will also be responsible for performance, availability and customer satisfaction for all levels of a series of n-tier distributed web based applications.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Monitor error alerts from various systems
• Document incidents as warranted
• Answer client questions relating to technical aspects of the application
• Adhere to change control policies
• Responsible for first level technical system support for multiple customers along with implementation of network connectivity for new and existing customers
• Position is 80% technical and 20% project/customer management
• Participation on an on-call rotation is required
• Occasional weekend work is required

Position Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree, preferably in an IT-related discipline, or the equivalent of education and experience
• Minimum of five years of related, technical experience, preferably in the financial systems industry
• Experience with troubleshooting, diagnosis and resolution of complex technical issues as well as escalation for complex web based applications
• Knowledge of Windows and Linux administration
• Knowledge of WebSphere
• Experience with Transact SQL, preferably Sybase
• Excellent communications skills and ability to translate technical concepts
• Excellent interpersonal, analytical, business and technical judgment, negotiation, problem solving, verbal and written communication skills
• Critical thinking skills and a mature approach to troubleshooting is critical
• Knowledge of investment accounting principles is a big plus
• Previous experience as Java developer is desired
• ITIL certification is desired but not required

Interested? (say I referred you on the application form) or this one

$ restorecon /home

It will correct the SELinux flags on the /home directory.

1. Huge pages is slightly faster than not using huge pages (~10% with 4 winxp virtual machines copying 512MB from one memory location to another).
2. KSM is slightly slower then not using KSM (~5% with 4 winxp virtual machines copying 512MB from one memory location to another).

So, at first glance it would appear that we can use a loose rule of thumb:

1. to consolidate the maximum number of machines, use KSM as it will allow you to over commit the amount of memory on your box.
   1. Risk: if the memory pages are significantly different, you may start swapping in a very bad way. This is where monitoring comes in
2. to give the best performance to a number of machines, use huge memory pages.. does not allow you to over commit
   1. Risk: if you don’t leave enough memory for the host os, you can crash your machine. This is also where monitoring comes in

Add the args line in your /etc/qemu-server/<vm id>.conf file should give you sound:

args: -soundhw

On my Proxmox VE 1.8, I have several virtual audio devices available.   I’ve had the best luck with ac97 with Windows XP/Vista and Win7.

red:/etc/qemu-server# kvm -soundhw ‘?’
Valid sound card names (comma separated):
pcspk       PC speaker
sb16        Creative Sound Blaster 16
ac97        Intel 82801AA AC97 Audio
es1370      ENSONIQ AudioPCI ES1370
hda         Intel HD Audio

-soundhw all will enable all of the above

Dctr Watson explains how:

Installing PostgreSQL 9.0 on Ubuntu 10.04

UEC is the Eucalyptus ‘cloud’ software running on Ubuntu servers. The instances would run under the KVM or Xen hypervisors. Ubuntu’s defaulted to running KVM but isn’t restricted by it.

“Eucalyptus is a software available under GPL that helps in creating and managing a private or even a publicly accessible cloud. It provides an EC2 compatible cloud computing platform and S3 compatible cloud storage platform…” Eucalyptus Beginner’s Guide

This is how a vm works in UEC:

You publish an image that you previously installed all the software you need (or you can download such an image). There can be as many instances of this image running as the hardware supports (spread across N number of backend Node Servers).

All instances are transient. As long as an image is running, it will have a physical presence.. but when it is shutdown, the instance is removed including any work performed in the instance.

“static” storage is available via a Storage Server. After you create an image but before you start it, you have the opportunity to attach storage to the instance.

Diagram courtesy of Eucalyptus Beginner’s Guide – UEC edition

While the management tools for UEC, and therefore Amazon EC2/EM, are primitive compared to VMware, it should be able to scale much higher with far less focus on which ‘virtual machine’ goes where.

Now we need to get an updated license file from Sybase as the NIC mac address has changed..   You can *not* use the mac address from the VMware Server on ESX.  grr.

Twenty hours for the volume shadow copy to complete plus another 12 hours to scp the files to the esx box (esx console access is sloooow).   Keep in mind that the host VMware Server box was rebooting itself randomly so I really couldn’t leave it alone.  Then 3 hours to convert/clone the vmdk files and 2 hours to correct the database…  I’m tired.

It turned out to be an issue with allocating 3.75GB to a VM that was causing the rebooting.  Dropping it to 2 GB resolved the rebooting… who knew?  Nothing in Google and VMware Support wasn’t able to find anything on their side.

Install VMware ESXi 4.0 on an unsupported motherboard (SATA controller must support AHCI):

1. make sure the SATA controller(s) is set to AHCI in the computer’s BIOS
2. download VMware ESXi 4 iso
3. burn the iso to either a cdrom or a USB thumb drive (512mb minimum) using unetbootin
4. boot the computer into VMware ESXi
5. Before you’re prompted to hit Enter to begin, hit ALT-F1 which will get you to a console screen without a prompt
6. Type “unsupported” followed by Enter
7. When prompted for a password, just hit Enter
8. Type “vmkload_mod ahci” followed by Enter.  This will load in the driver for just about any AHCI compliant SATA controller
9. Hit ALT-F2 to finish the installation

At this point VMware ESXi 4.0 will be installed but it won’t start when you reboot.  This is because VMware won’t load the AHCI driver by default.  So… we will have to tell it to load it automatically.  You will need a Linux Live CD such as Ubuntu.

1. Boot into Linux
2. From the desktop you will need to mount the VMware partitions.  In Ubuntu 8.04 and higher, you just need to click on the folders in the drop down menu
3. Locate oem.tgz on the second VMware partition and overwrite it with this oem.tgz.  It includes a system.map file telling VMware to load the AHCI driver
4. reboot and boot into VMware ESXi

You should have a fully working VMware ESXi server installed and ready for you to setup virtual machines!

This is, currently, an undocumented security feature of VirtualBox 3.1x to prevent just anyone from accessing the virtual machine console. For most folk, this might be a very good thing but if you have a team of sysadmins that should have access to the virtual machine consoles, you probably don’t want them to use the same login.

If that is the case, you can add the user(s) that should have access the virtual machine console to the shadow group on the host Linux machine. Be warned though that the user(s) that are added to the shadow group should not be able to log into the host machine else they will be able to read the shadow file where all the passwords to the box are stored. If the users need access to the host box, then they should have a login for host access (not part of the shadow group) and another for virtual machine console access.

Adding linux user jason_vrdp to the shadow group:

Prevent jason_vrdp from logging in to the host or anyone from sudo’ing to it:

(root) # usermod --shell /bin/false jason_vrdp

That’s it

Foundations of Qt® Development (Expert’s Voice in Open Source) is well written. He assumes that you have a little bit of C++ knowledge, avoiding into the trap that so many other authors do. You wouldn’t believe how many technical books I have where the first half or more of the book is simply a rehash of the basics. Forget that!

What I really like is that when he shows you an example of code, he explains why you would want to write it this way and how it differs from the Standard Template Language (STL – see C++ Programming Language, The (3rd Edition)). Where there are performance gains or penalties of using Qt instead of STL, he demonstrates it.

I never realized just how easy it is to write C++ using the Qt framework! Just the Signals and Slots alone make it very very powerful and that’s just the beginning. I’m completely blown away

Step 1:

encode the mp3 files to “aac” (mpeg4) using your favorite converter (I use ffmpeg):

Step 2:

Create a chapters file so that MP4Box can understand it:

* Common syntax : CHAPTERX=h:m:s[:ms or .ms] on one line and CHAPTERXNAME=name on the other – the order is not important but chapter lines MUST be declared sequencially (same X value expected for 2 consecutive lines).

Step 3:

Add the chapters to the audio file (creates Nero format chapter markers):

Step 4:

Convert the Nero chapter markers to Quicktime chapter markers using mp4chaps from the mp4v2 project (you will want v1.9.1 or higher):

Step 5:

Rename the file from .mp4 to .m4b extension so iTunes will see it as an audiobook:

Proof that it works:

and VLC showing the chapters:

Of course, we aren’t putting in any tags such as “author” or “genre” in this example. Use your favorite tags editor to do so.

• Pull the hard drive from the laptop.  On my Dell Latitude, it was simply unscrewing the two screws on the bottom of the laptop marked with the hard drive simble
• Attach the drive to a SATA to USB connector and plug it in to your Linux box
• If you don’t have VirtualBox installed, do so now using apt-get, rpm, or whatever you use to install software
• Follow How to migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox but make sure you specify the entire drive (i.e. /dev/sdh) and not individual partitions else you will miss the hidden partitions that Vista and Windows 7 create

You should have a working Windows 7 Virtual Machine.  You’ll notice that you probably have a huge vdi file.  Let’s shrink that down:

• Within Windows
  • download and install sdelete from Microsoft
  • download and install PowerDefragmenter
  • Run PowerDefragmenter on your c: drive (as administrator)
  • Run “sdelete -c c:” from a cmd window (as administrator)
  • shutdown windows
• On the host
  • run “VBoxManage modifyvdi my_disk.vdi compact” replacing “my_disk.vdi” with the name of your vdi file you created earlier
  • Note that if you get a “Shrink hard disk operation is not implemented” error, then you’ve hit bug #2833 and you will want to download the latest VirtualBox to fix it.

When we processed the files, namely running eye3D, we did so synchronously. Essentially, the file notification came in from the Linux kernel and we processed the file at that time. This may be an issue of overflowing the inotify queue within the Linux kernel if there are a lot of files to process.

A better solution would be to add the file to an internal queue and process the files in a sub process using POE::Wheel::Run. Of course we will limit the number of sub processes

Example output:

On August 12th, 2009 Baires Norte Lug (not verified) says:

If your ffmpeg doesn’t support x264 (video) or aac (audio) encoding, like all Ubuntu Linux distributions, then you will have to recompile ffmpeg.  Don’t worry, it is easier then you think!

FakeOutdoorsman over on the Ubuntu Forums posted the method to build ffmpeg from scratch:

Choose your Ubuntu

0.The instructions on the page are for Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04 and Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10. Separate instructions are also available for other releases:

* Install FFmpeg and x264 on Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS
* Install FFmpeg and x264 on Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 LTS

Getting the Dependencies

1. Uninstall x264, libx264-dev, and ffmpeg if they are already installed. Open a terminal and run the following:

sudo apt-get purge ffmpeg x264 libx264-dev

2. Next, get all of the packages you will need to install FFmpeg and x264 (you may need to enable the universe and multiverse repositories):

Code:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential subversion git-core checkinstall yasm texi2html libfaac-dev libfaad-dev libmp3lame-dev libsdl1.2-dev libtheora-dev libx11-dev libxvidcore4-dev zlib1g-dev

Install x264
3. Get the most current source files from the official x264 git repository, compile, and install. You can run “./configure –help” to see what features you can enable/disable. If you are behind a firewall or unable to use git, then daily source tarballs are also available.

cd
git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git
cd x264
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall –fstrans=no –install=yes –pkgname=x264 –pkgversion "1:0.svn`date +%Y%m%d`-0.0ubuntu1" –default

Install FFmpeg
4. Get the most current source files from the official FFmpeg svn, compile, and install. Run “./configure –help” to see what features you can enable/disable. If you are behind a firewall or unable to use subversion, then nightly FFmpeg snapshots are also available.

cd
svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg
./configure –enable-gpl –enable-nonfree –enable-pthreads –enable-libfaac –enable-libfaad –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libtheora –enable-libx264 –enable-libxvid –enable-x11grab
make
sudo checkinstall –fstrans=no –install=yes –pkgname=ffmpeg –pkgversion "3:0.svn`date +%Y%m%d`-12ubuntu3" –default

That’s it for installation. You can keep the ~/x264 and ~/ffmpeg directories if you later want to update the source files to a new revision. See “Updating Your Installation” below for more details.

Now that we have a working ffmpeg, we can go on to the converting the video files (convert_videos.sh):

The ffmpeg parameters are based off of Using ffmpeg to transcode video for the PS3. Hope his works for you too.

Developing games with Perl and SDL

Get ready to dive into game development! Ars explores the art of SDL game programming with Perl. A dynamic, high-level scripting language and powerful open source SDL bindings make it possible to produce sophisticated games without a lot of effort or overhead.
By Andy Bakun | Last updated February 14, 2006 9:00 PM CT

What is SDL_perl?

SDL_Perl is a perl interface to the Simple DirectMedia Library. It is composed of a both a XS wrapper to the SDL libraries and a series of Perl modules that export SDL functionality in an object-oriented fashion.
One of the biggest benefits of using SDL is that it allows portable media applications to be written without having to be concerned with specific implmentations of media libraries for each target platform. Bringing Perl into the picture takes the portability one step further, allowing media-rich applications to be written in a high-level language that can be targeted to a number of platforms. While programming using SDL requires knowledge of C and access to a C compiler, using SDL_perl does not. This greatly decreases the amount of time it takes to get something up on the screen and working.

Read more

I purchased quite a bit of music from the iTunes store when I ran WinXP as my primary desktop.  Now I can legally convert them to something that Linux (and my Blackberry Storm) can read!

Let me just pull up iTunes and do that.  Can’t find how do upgrade my iTunes music from within iTunes.  Tried help but that didn’t give me any clue.

After much hunting on the apple.com website, I was able to figure out that while iTunes supports the upgrade, it appears that Apple really doesn’t want you to else they would have made it far less obscure on how to do it.  In Apple’s TechDoc HT1711, you will be directed to go to a special link that will activate the upgrade process in iTunes 8.

Excerpt from the Apple TechDoc:

Can I upgrade previously purchased music to iTunes Plus?

Yes. Any available upgrades will be shown on the Upgrade to iTunes Plus page. You can upgrade all of your items at once by using the Buy All button. This replaces all eligible previous purchases with iTunes Plus versions of the same items. You can also choose to make individual upgrades by clicking the Buy button to the right of each item. Song upgrades are available for 0.30 USD, video upgrades for 0.60 USD, and albums for 30 percent of the album price. The counter to the right of the “Upgrade to iTunes Plus” link in the Quick Links box will indicate when additional eligible content become available.

You can view your eligible iTunes Plus upgrade items by clicking here.

After you re-purchase *cough* upgrade your music, iTunes will download the music files (with the .M4a extension) and replace your old DRM encumbered music (with the .M4P extension).  Note that the non-DRM music files will contain enough information for you to identified easily if you should share your music with your friends.  The music files also contain water marks that will also survive if you should convert the non-DRM music files into mp3, ogg or flac files.  So, share your music at your own risk.