Reboot command in a VPS

Did you ever try restarting your virtuozzo VPS by hitting the ‘reboot’ command inside the VPS? If you’ve done, you might have had troubles in having it back online automatically. ‘reboot’ command works in a different way inside a VPS unlike a dedicated server. when you issue this command, VPS is stopped and started by a different script in the hardware node which is executed  in every minute.

When you hit reboot command inside the VPS, it invokes reboot system call with argument ‘restart’, which has to be handled by BIOS in normal cases. But since its a VPS, the system call is blocked from within since the VPS shouldnt talk directly with bios, which otherwise can result in a reboot of hardware node! So internelly, the reboot command is being handled this way

1. the VPS is simply stopped when reboot command is issues from within.
2. VPS is started again using a script /etc/sysconfig/vz-scripts/vereboot which is invoked automatically using a cron job specified in  /etc/cron.d/vereboot in ever 1 or 2 minutes depending on the cron

So its a better Idea to go for VZPP to get your virtuozzo VE rebooted rather than issuing a reboot command

Tweekdeck on Ubuntu 9.04

Did anyone of you try to install TweekDeck on ubuntu 9.04 and gave up
just because it did not get downloaded when you try to click on the
download link? even I did, at the first attempt :p

Well, It needs Flash and Air to be installed in the machine. You can
get Flash and Air through the following links.

FLASH

AIR

To install AIR

chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

You might need a reboot to get the download link working.

However, you can get the current ‘0.25′ version by clicking on the
‘Version 0.25 is right corner of tweetdeck.com home page!

Happy tweetting!!

google sms stream

Those who live in India, be happy as you are lucky enough to get a chance to enjoy the google sms stream service!  as its only available for Indian mobile users as of now.sms channels provides you a facility for creating ’sms channels’ of any particular topic, invite people to join the same and get them updated with news. you can group sms the members of your group and  helps you in keeping the members of group updated with happenings.you might need to give a try as this service is free and your service provider is not going to charge you for incoming sms updates.

http://labs.google.co.in/smschannels/browse

google india currently uses a gateway +9198708070. Also you  will need to be careful while chosing channels as these are created by users like you and me, not by google, so there is a possibibility of mobile spams, you dont want to fill in your inox with irrelevemt sms’s, do you?. after all, no basic mobile model has got a spamassassin!!

Windows xp installation with sata drives

All of us know how hard it is to get a laptop with xp installed, all of them have the crappy windows vista preinstalled. Vista do have a pretty good GUI, but there is no other operating system which eats up memory and other resources like vista, to make it worse, most of the applications/software are developed to work with xp and doesnt support vista. So the first thing everybody does is uninstalling vista and installing windows xp.

again, this is not an easy task. Most of the laptop hard disks have sata drives. unfortunately, xp do not support sata drives and supports only ide drives. So the following screen would be shown when you boot up your laptop from an xp cd.

well, dont give up. We have other ways to get around this.

first option - is to install the sata drivers of your laptop vendor at the time when xp boots using floppy diskette, drivers are model specific and you will need to get it downloaded from your laptop vendor.But who in this world has got a laptop with floppy drive! so you need to get an externel flopp drive to get around this. however if you dont have one, I’d suggest you not to spend some 20$ for buyin g an externel floppy drive drive just for this purpose, go for the second option using nlite give below.  those who’s got an externel floppy drive, copy the drivers you have downloaded in to a floppy disk and get the externel floppy drive attached to your Laptop. now insert your xp cd in to the cd/dvd drive and start your laptop. First go to the boot menu and select the cd drive as the primary device so that the machine will boot from the xp cd.Once you restart the laptop, press enter when it asks whether you need to boot from cd,  press F6 to insall the drivers in floppy. Once this is installed and the sata is detected by xp, you are are almost there, continue the installation process of xp.

The second option - the one with out floppy drive, would be the one most of you would prefer to go with. what we need to do here is, bootstrip the windows xp installation cd, integrate drivers with xp and create a new bootable xp cd which supports your hard disk. we’ll make use an application called nlite to get this done.

we’ll go step by step to avoid confusions.

1. get the latest version of nlite software here

2. get the sata driver  downloaded from your laptop vendor’s website, ofcource google is your friend :)

2. Install nlite in your windows machine, you might probably need to install microsoft .net framework if the installer ask for.This is easy like anything, just you need to keep on clicking next and your machine needs to be connected to internet! checkout the screen shots below.

3.insert your xp cd to the cd/dvd drive, start nlite, and  follow the screenshots.

Locate you installed xp cd

You’ll need to give a location for saving the stripped xp files, this this example I’ve given a folder xp_nlite

You can skip the next step

check the drivers and bootable cd options.

In the next step you’ll be asked for the driver location, either select the folder option of single driver file and click next.Well you can now go ahead and give a location for saving the iso image of xp cd with the drivers in it

you may burn the new bootable xp image with sata drivers directly from nlite, or you can use your favourite burning tool to burn the iso file as bootable disk.

Start your machine with the new bootable xp with preloaded sata drivers and you shuld be ready to go :), the sata drived should be detected now, provided you have the right drivers bootstripped to the new bootable xp cd.  proceed with the normal installation steps of winows xp and get a new start with xp!