Oracle announced today that its going to acquire its rival ” Sun Microsystems” for $9.50 a share, or about $7.4 billion.

The agreement with Oracle came about two weeks after I.B.M. ended its talks with Sun. The Sun board balked at that deal after I.B.M. lowered its offer to $9.40 a share from $10. Still, Monday’s deal represented a 42 percent premium over Sun’s closing price of $6.69 on Friday.

Oracle and Sun said in a statement that net of Sun’s cash and debt, the deal was valued at $5.6 billion.
The deal immediately disrupts the traditional relationships formed between some of the technology industry’s largest players and thrusts Oracle into the hardware business. Oracle, for example, has long-standing partnerships with Sun’s rivals, including Hewlett-Packard and Dell. These sellers of server computers work to fine tune Oracle’s database and business software for their computers.

What disturbs me is Oracle has now obtained the MySQL database, which Sun acquired last year for $1 billion , Hope this will have good effect on the shared and dedicated hosting markets, am a fan of MySQL myself and would like to see it progressing, I would be really disappointed if I am forced to move to Postgres or any other database.

Lets all wish for the best.

We faced this kind of errors on one of our servers while reviewing our logs

client 1.2.3.4 view external: error sending response: host unreachable: 7 Time(s)
client 5.6.7.8 view external: error sending response: host unreachable: 12 Time(s)

After thoroughly investigating this it turned out to be faulty firewall rules
So folks edit your APF or CSF or even iptables rules and allow outgoing packets to port 53 (both Udp and TCP) and such errors shouldn’t reoccur .

Try it and tell me how it goes ;)

On some old systems like centos 4.5, 4.7 openssl will need to be upgraded to newest version
Here are the steps to upgrade :

cd /usr/src
wget http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.8k.tar.gz
tar -xvzf openssl-0.9.8k.tar.gz
cd openssl-0.9.8k
./config --prefix=/opt/openssl shared
make;make test;make install

In older versions you just needed :

 service PSA restart ALL 

To restart Plesk, but in the latest version things has gone a little bit different now you should run this:

On Linux like OS

/etc/rc.d/init.d/psa stopall
/etc/rc.d/init.d/psa start
 

On FreeBSD

/usr/local/psa/rc.d/init.d/psa stopall
/usr/local/psa/rc.d/init.d/psa start
 

Linux has a special mount option for file systems called noatime. If this option is set for a file system in /etc/fstab, then reading accesses will no longer cause the atime information (last access time – don’t mix this up with the last modified time – if a file is changed, the modification date will still be set) that is associated with a file to be updated (in reverse this means that if noatime is not set, each read access will also result in a write operation). Therefore, using noatime can lead to significant performance gains.

Using noatime

In this example we will set noatime for the root file system “/”

The list

Assembly Language is a bare engine; you have to build the car yourself and manually supply it with gas while it’s running, but if you’re careful it can go like a bat out of hell.

Assembly Language you are the car.

Basic is a simple car useful for short drives to the local shops. Once popular with learner drivers, it has recently been stripped down to a shell and rebuilt by a major manufacturer, The new version has been refurbished for longer journeys, leaving only cosmetic similarities to the original model.

C is a racing car that goes incredibly fast but breaks down every fifty miles.

C# is a competing model of family station wagons. Once you use this, you’re never allowed to use the competitors’ products again.

C++ is a souped-up version of the C racing car with dozens of extra features that only breaks down every 250 miles, but when it does, nobody can figure out what went wrong.

Fortran is a pretty primitive car; it’ll go very quickly as long as you are only going along roads that are perfectly straight. It is believed that learning to drive a Fortran car makes it impossible to learn to drive any other model.

Java is a family station wagon. It’s easy to drive, it’s not too fast, and you can’t hurt yourself.

Lisp At first it doesn’t seem to be a car at all, but now and then you spot a few people driving it around. After a point you decide to learn more about it and you realize it’s actually a car that can make more cars. You tell your friends, but they all laugh and say these cars look way too weird. You still keep one in your garage, hoping one day they will take over the streets.

Matlab is a car designed for novice drivers going on short trips over terrain similar to the terrain the Mathematica car is usually driven over. It is very comfortable when driving over this terrain, but if you go off the trail even a little the car becomes so hard to drive that more snobby drivers refuse to even acknowledge that it’s a car.

Perl is supposed to be a pretty cool car, but the driver’s manual is incomprehensible. Also, even if you can figure out how to drive a Perl car, you won’t be able to drive anyone else’s.

PHP is the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, it’s bizarre and hard to handle but everybody still wants to drive it. [from "CosmicJustice" off of digg.com]

Prolog is a car with a unique trial-and-error GPS system. It will go down the road looking for your destination, and if it gets to the end of the street without finding it, it will back up and try the next street over and continue until you get where you need to go.

Python is a great beginner’s car; you can drive it without a license. Unless you want to drive really fast or on really treacherous terrain, you may never need another car.

Ruby is a car that was formed when the Perl, Python and Smalltalk cars were involved in a three-way collision. A Japanese mechanic found the pieces and put together a car which many drivers think is better than the sum of the parts. Other drivers, however, grumble that a lot of the controls of the Ruby car have been duplicated or triplicated, with some of the duplicate controls doing slightly different things in odd circumstances, making the car harder to drive than it ought to be. A redesign is rumored to be in the works.

Smalltalk is a small car originally designed for people who were just learning to drive, but it was designed so well that even experienced drivers enjoy riding in it. It doesn’t drive very fast, but you can take apart any part of it and change it to make it more like what you wanted it to be. One oddity is that you don’t actually drive it; you send it a message asking it to go somewhere and it either does or tells you that it didn’t understand what you were asking.

Visual Basic is a car that drives you.

Stage 1: Checking your tables

Run myisamchk *.MYI or myisamchk -e *.MYI if you have more time. Use the -s (silent) option to suppress unnecessary information. If the mysqld server is stopped, you should use the –update-state option to tell myisamchk to mark the table as “checked.” You have to repair only those tables for which myisamchk announces an error. For such tables, proceed to Stage 2. If you get unexpected errors when checking (such as out of memory errors), or if myisamchk crashes, go to Stage 3.

Stage 2: Easy safe repair

First, try myisamchk -r -q tbl_name (-r -q means “quick recovery mode”). This attempts to repair the index file without touching the data file. If the data file contains everything that it should and the delete links point at the correct locations within the data file, this should work, and the table is fixed. Start repairing the next table. Otherwise, use the following procedure:

1. Make a backup of the data file before continuing. 2. Use myisamchk -r tbl_name (-r means “recovery mode”). This removes incorrect rows and deleted rows from the data file and reconstructs the index file. 3. If the preceding step fails, use myisamchk –safe-recover tbl_name. Safe recovery mode uses an old recovery method that handles a few cases that regular recovery mode does not (but is slower).

Note: If you want a repair operation to go much faster, you should set the values of the sort_buffer_size and key_buffer_size variables each to about 25% of your available memory when running myisamchk. If you get unexpected errors when repairing (such as out of memory errors), or if myisamchk crashes, go to Stage 3.

Stage 3: Difficult repair

You should reach this stage only if the first 16KB block in the index file is destroyed or contains incorrect information, or if the index file is missing. In this case, it is necessary to create a new index file. Do so as follows:

1. Move the data file to a safe place. 2. Use the table description file to create new (empty) data and index files:

mysql db_name
SET AUTOCOMMIT=1;
TRUNCATE TABLE tbl_name;
quit

3. Copy the old data file back onto the newly created data file. (Do not just move the old file back onto the new file. You want to retain a copy in case something goes wrong.)

Go back to Stage 2. myisamchk -r -q should work. (This should not be an endless loop.) You can also use the REPAIR TABLE tbl_name USE_FRM SQL statement, which performs the whole procedure automatically. There is also no possibility of unwanted interaction between a utility and the server, because the server does all the work when you use REPAIR TABLE. See Section 12.5.2.6, “REPAIR TABLE Syntax”.

Stage 4: Very difficult repair

You should reach this stage only if the .frm description file has also crashed. That should never happen, because the description file is not changed after the table is created:

1. Restore the description file from a backup and go back to Stage 3. You can also restore the index file and go back to Stage 2. In the latter case, you should start with myisamchk -r.

2. If you do not have a backup but know exactly how the table was created, create a copy of the table in another database. Remove the new data file, and then move the .frm description and .MYI index files from the other database to your crashed database. This gives you new description and index files, but leaves the .MYD data file alone. Go back to Stage 2 and attempt to reconstruct the index file.

I tried to simplify the various commands for the most greater part of the cases. On most systems MySQL databases resides in /var/lib/mysql soYou can run this command safely inside [/var/lib/mysql :

root@server[/var/lib/mysql]# find -name ‘*.MYI’ -exec myisamchk -r {} \;

Here is the steps to install ffmpeg and ffmpeg-php and other needed codecs.

cd /usr/src/
mkdir ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg/
wget http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/essential-20061022.tar.bz2
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/9225/flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6.tgz
wget http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lame/lame-3.97.tar.gz
wget http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ffmpeg-php/ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tbz2
wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/ogg/libogg-1.1.3.tar.gz
wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/vorbis/libvorbis-1.1.2.tar.gz
bunzip2 essential-20061022.tar.bz2
tar xvf essential-20061022.tar
tar zxvf flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6.tgz
tar zxvf lame-3.97.tar.gz
bunzip2 ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tbz2
tar xvf ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tar
tar zxvf libogg-1.1.3.tar.gz
tar zxvf libvorbis-1.1.2.tar.gz
mkdir /usr/local/lib/codecs/
mv essential-20061022/* /usr/local/lib/codecs/
chmod -R 755 /usr/local/lib/codecs/
yum install -y subversion
yum install -y ruby
yum install -y ncurses-devel
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer
cd lame-3.97
./configure
make
make install
cd ..
cd libogg-1.1.3
./configure
make
make install
cd ..
cd libvorbis-1.1.2
./configure
make
make install
cd ..
cd flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6
ruby setup.rb config
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install
cd ..
cd mplayer/
./configure
make
make install
cd ..
cd ffmpeg
mkdir /home/tmp
export TMPDIR=/home/tmp
./configure --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libogg --enable-libvorbis --disable-mmx --enable-shared
echo '#define HAVE_LRINTF 1' >> config.h
make
make install
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavformat.so.50 /usr/lib/libavformat.so.50
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavcodec.so.51 /usr/lib/libavcodec.so.51
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavutil.so.49 /usr/lib/libavutil.so.49
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.so.0 /usr/lib/libmp3lame.so.0
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavformat.so.51 /usr/lib/libavformat.so.51
cd ..
cd ffmpeg-php-0.5.0
phpize
./configure
make
make install
### for cpanel insert in /usr/lib/php.ini
### for other system insert in /etc/php.ini
echo 'extension=ffmpeg.so' >> /usr/lib/php.ini
service httpd restart
php -r 'phpinfo();' | grep ffmpeg

Many people use SSH to log in to remote machines, copy files around, and perform general system administration. If you want to increase your productivity with SSH, you can try a tool that lets you run commands on more than one remote machine at the same time. Parallel ssh, Cluster SSH, and ClusterIt let you specify commands in a single terminal window and send them to a collection of remote machines where they can be executed.

Why you would need a utility like this when, using openSSH, you can create a file containing your commands and use a bash for loop to run it on a list of remote hosts, one at a time? One advantage of a parallel SSH utility is that commands can be run on several hosts at the same time. For a short-running task this might not matter much, but if a task needs an hour to complete and you need to run it on 20 hosts, parallel execution beats serial by a mile. Also, if you want to interactively edit the same file on multiple machines, it might be quicker to use a parallel SSH utility and edit the file on all nodes with vi rather than concoct a script to do the same edit.

Many of these parallel SSH tools include support for copying to many hosts at once (a parallel version of scp) or using rsync on a collection of hosts at once. Because the parallel SSH implementations know about all the hosts in a group, some of them also offer the ability to execute a command “on one host” and will work out which host to pick using load balancing. Finally, some parallel SSH projects let you use barriers so that you can execute a collection of commands and explicitly have each node in the group wait until all the nodes have completed a stage before moving on to the next stage of processing.

Parallel ssh (pssh)
The Parallel ssh project includes parallel versions of the shell (pssh), scp (pscp), rsync (prsync), and kill (pnuke).

pssh is packaged for openSUSE as a 1-Click install, is available in Ubuntu Hardy Universe and the Fedora 9 repositories. I used the 64-bit package from the Fedora 9 repositories.

All of the Parallel ssh commands have the form command -h hosts-file options, where the hosts-file contains a list of all the hosts that you want to have the command executed on. The optional -l argument specifies the username that should be used to log in to the remote machines.