Tuesday January 16, 2007

gphoto GP_SYSTEM_IS_FILE problems

I was using gphoto2 with a workstation at home running nv bld55. Gphoto2 was been working perfectly until now... It finds the camera, downloads the data and where I think it is going to save the file I see this:

$ /usr/sfw/bin/gphoto2 -P
Loading camera drivers from '/usr/l... Detected a 'Canon:Digital IXUS 400'.
Downloading 'IMG_5112.JPG' from folder '/DCIM/151CANON'...
ld.so.1: gphoto2: fatal: relocation error: file /usr/sfw/bin/gphoto2: symbol GP_SYSTEM_IS_FILE: referenced symbol not found
Killed

Gphoto2 still works fine on my SunRay@ home also using Nevada.. and ldd on gphoto2 looks the same on the SunRay and on the workstation.

Someone at work had better luck with Google than me and found this . The workaround is to run

gphoto2 --quiet --camera "Canon PowerShot A610 (PTP mode)" --get-all-files

Thanks Kevin.

Wednesday October 25, 2006

A new bathroom

After having replaced the bathroom when we moved in over ten years ago and doing it on the cheap we decided to give it a second makeover. The separate toilet was also upgraded. Most of the work was done while we were on holiday to save us any inconvenience of not having a shower/bath etc. Here are a few tips/ideas for you. I apologise for the bad picture above I had no idea how hard it was to take a decent picture of one of the snallest rooms in the house!

We really like the floor arrangement tilers call it diamond pattern. It uses a few more tiles and it is more work for your builder. But we think it makes the room look bigger and a nice contrast to the wall tiles.

If you have a towel rail heated by your central heating it will be cold in the summer. So the one we got has its own element in it to heat the rail up. On reflection we think we should have installed a wider rail, we had the room. to do so.

We made the decision on the shower ages ago and plumped for a Aqualisa Quartz which we have used when we stayed in pubs/hotels over the last few months. It really is a very good shower and I like the boost button for that extra burst of water. The shower has a neat feature its on light flashes and then stays on when the water is at the temperature you set it.

The new materials baths can be made out of nowadays are really sturdy and attractive. We went for a white bath made by Bette.

We decided we wanted a clutter free room. Given the small amount of store room the basin and accompanying base would provide we went for a long thin mirror covered cabinet for the other bits. The basin base has a very thick surface which is bonded onto the wood and not just a thin laminate which will peel off after time.

Lighting can make a bathroom , so we went for recessed spot bulbs. As above the bathroom is the loft they were easy to install and hopefully maintain. Do make sure you install smoke hoods over them - if you have an existing installation of these lights they could prevent a nasty fire as they run hot. You must keep the area around them clear of anything else you can have fiery problems...

We had problems with the taps as we had ordered high pressure ones and our water system is not pumped. So do make sure you buy the right type for your water system.

We decided to have the taps at the other end of the bath so they are not under the shower. We found over time that they got a lot of scale on them from dripping shower heads. I also like the idea of lying in the bath looking out of the window which is frosted of course.

We had the whole room tiled. We had been told it would make the room seem smaller but we think the reverse effect has happened. It also will be a lot easier to maintain and keep clean.

Apart from the towel rail size the only thing I would consider now - and its easy to fit now is an extractor fan. So we are very pleased.

Saturday March 11, 2006

A quick problem to fix..

I found this handy link to help debug/fix usb problems on Solaris. See here for the information. The manual rebinding is not necessary for Solaris Nevada, though you may see a message indicating "no driver found for interface 0 ...". The camera device should have been bound to usb_mid driver if you check the prtconf -D result.

In latest Solaris Express or Solaris 10 Update 2 and above releases, the manual ugen binding is no longer necessary. The default usb_mid driver for devices without a class driver or a vendor specific driver will export ugen interfaces for the devices and libusb should just work.

Happily all is now well..

Monday August 29, 2005

Paint stain tip

If you have a stain on a wall or ceiling when you paper over it or paint it with emulsion you may find the stain will creep through to the newly decorated surface. The way to fix this is paint the area with one or two coats of gloss. This will seal the stain in and stop it ruining your newly decorated surface when you paint/paper it.

Monday February 14, 2005

My home box running Solaris10... ready to be Live upgraded again soon...

I have an Ultra5 at home that I use for work. It was running Solaris9 and is now running Solaris10. I planned a cunning upgrade I had wanted to use Live upgrade but had not setup my disk to do this. So I booked an Ultra5 in the lab and loaded Solaris10 using a custom install so my disk had two slices for Solaris. All went well but I ignored package warnings about dependendies - big mistake. I then loaded the VPN client software we use onto the box - including instructions and then copied my small home directory from home onto it. I then took the machine home on Friday

I powered the box up, and realised soon that dtlogin was not going to appear. After checking with work dtlogin is not started by SMF we saw the rc2.d/S99dtlogin was missing. I was tempted to give up and take the box into work. But I soldiered on and got VPN going and mounted the Solaris10 FCS image from work onto the Ultra5 and worked out what SUNWdt packages were not loaded. A very small time later I had a running desktop environment. Thank goodness for a one megabit ADSL line..

The lab system then needed to give up its disk to my home system and then a reboot to check all was well. A few more packages had to be loaded from the Companion CD for CD burning etc and I was back up and running. I now need to teach myself all the good things in Solaris10 and try and catch up with the students. Next time Live upgrade will be my friend. I am ready for that now

PS One of my guys rebooted enospc our main nfs server off a Live Upgrade Boot environment over the weekend. So it is now running Solaris10 too. It came up like a charm. Our primary motivation is of course to be running the latest Solaris we can and if we run into any problems we will be logging bugs as we should. Thanks for doing that DC.

Monday November 22, 2004

dtlogin cores on me

Like making the early morining cup of tea I power my home machine on every day to read my emails. I usually come back to a dtlogin screen. But today it is different. No dtlogin but a

Nov 22 07:32:30 miaplacidus genunix: [ID 603404 kern.notice] NOTICE: core_log: dtlogin[300] core dumped: /var/cores/core.0.dtlogin.1101108749

On my screen. I login as root and as I have setup coreadm I know where the core file will be. A quick pstack on it does not reveal anything that points to anything obvious:

# pstack *dt* core 'core.0.dtlogin.1101108749' of 300: /usr/dt/bin/dtlogin -daemon

fef341ec strlen (ffbfed0c, 0, ffbfec60, 0, 0, 0) + 80

fef87a14 vsnprintf (ffbff170, 4c0, ffbfed0c, ffbff8ec, 81010100, ff0000) + 5c

fef52da8 vsyslog (fefc2868, 0, ffbff8ec, ffbff10c, ff1402a8, fef38264) + 4b4

fef528e4 syslog (3, fefa8190, 400, fecb1104, 1d488060, 5f5f756e) + 1c

fef38278 crypt_invoke (0, ffbff964, 471ec, 0, ffbff970, ffbff964) + 290

00018e94 bitsToBytes (fea92300, 10, 0, 2000, 31, fe9a2798) + 50

0001d634 MitGetAuth (12, fe9a26c0, 0, 472b0, 31, 47334) + 64

00017b1c GenerateAuthorization (12, fe9a26c0, 2d310000, 7efefeff, 81010100, ff00) + 2c

00017f94 SetLocalAuthorization (50498, feb822a0, fe9a26c0, 1, 636f6e73, ffbffc41) + c

0001a434 StartDisplay (3f800, 27ff, 48f38, 48ec4, 81010100, ff00) + 104

0001bdd4 StartFbconsole (1a120, 1, 4df40, 400, 81010100, ff00) + cc

0001938c main (2, ffbffdc4, ffbffdd0, 3f400, 0, 0) + 234

00016090 _start (0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0) + b8

If I was running Solaris10 I am sure greenline would have restarted dtlogin but thats another story. So I run dtlogin's init.d script and I can now login.

Using the stack from pstack I poke about in Sunsolve and eventually find a bug id that matches the stack. I then use the bugid in the patch descriptions section of Sunsolve and find the patch to resolve this issue. It is fairly new and only just fixed in the latest build of Solaris10 too. Download from our server and that should be the end of it.

( Nov 22 2004, 12:01:00 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [3]

Tuesday September 28, 2004

Enteprise Backup nee Networker bootstrap info

I have a way of storing this very important data but I let the machine do the work ...

I have a rotating sequence of these files one for each day of the week. I run the cron job on machines we have in other countries for added security. So if my server goes down or its media database is trashed I can quickly find out the latest bootstrap and on what tape to use to get the product up and running again.

I also query the media database about root /var etc backups for the server and its clients again to speed up recoveryif the database is down. If you have the client packages for a laptop you could run the report everytime you put your laptop on the network and know the information is safe.