October 31, 2006

New York trip and the state of air travel

Filed under: Eating in Chicago Il, Travel — morgan @ 22:31

I decided to fly to New York last weekend to visit friends. I have been working in Mississippi and it was a nice break from being away from home and working a lot.

I flew Southwest so I could book without risking losing $$ if I was unable to make the trip due to work or other logistics. Southwest does not fly directly from Jackson to New York, they connect you through their hive at Midway in Chicago.

The trip there went without a hitch. I left Jackson at 7:30am and arrived in New York at 3pm. An hour on the m60 across Queens and into Harlem and I was there.

The food highlight was cake from Kitchenette. I somehow managed to avoid taking a photo of it.

The architecture highlight was photos of Broken Angel:

The story is sad though, take some time to read it.

The trip back, from New York to Jackson was another story. We were delayed at LaGuardia because of a maintenance problem. This caused me to miss my connection from Midway to Jackson. Southwest was not sympathetic. The woman at the counter booked me standby on the first morning flight and gave me the number of the airport hotel. She further told me it was unlikely that I could get my checked bags.

Remember that I didn’t have so much as toothpaste as current travel restrictions exclude anything resembling liquid– toothpaste or plastique, the difference is subtle.

I stopped down at the Southwest baggage office to grovel. They immediately informed me that I should wait at carousel 7, my bags would be up any minute. An hour and a half later I went back and was assured they were coming. An hour and a half after that I went back.. They called down and the person on the other end told them he’d send them right up and they did. This of course makes me wonder why they didn’t call when I first came in 3 hours ago.

I find it amazing that an airline that can book online as efficiently as Southwest, offer refunds and credits without so much as a hesitation can’t seem to manage to put my bag on a conveyor belt in less than 3 hours.

I am told that there is an excellent Mexican restaurant across from Midway. I didn’t get a chance to visit but I will go next time.

October 25, 2006

Solaris 10 x86 network card driver configuration

Filed under: Solaris 10 x86 — morgan @ 0:08

Solaris 10 x86 ships with drivers for many cards but often doesn’t include an alias for for the location of the card in your machine. This was the case with my Dell e510.

We installed hardware release 6/06 on Gateway E-4500D today, the onboard Broadcom is not supported. The chip on the board is labeled BCM5752. I was able to configure the card and plumb it but it came up with ether 0:0:0:0:0:0. A few ifconfig commands later the machine hung solid. Fortunately we had a 3com 3c905 on hand.

There’s a list of supported cards and an almost complete how-to
here. Look up your card to determine the driver. The 3com 3c905 is ‘elxl .’

We rebooted, disabled the onboard network in the BIOS and installed the 3com 3c905.

Locate the device-id of the card:


# prtconf -pv
...
                model:  'Ethernet controller'
                power-consumption:  00000001.00000001
                devsel-speed:  00000001
                interrupts:  00000001
                max-latency:  0000000a
                min-grant:  0000000a
                subsystem-vendor-id:  000010b7
                subsystem-id:  00001000
                unit-address:  '0'
                class-code:  00020000
                revision-id:  00000078
                vendor-id:  000010b7
                device-id:  00009200
                name:  'pci10b7,1000'
...

look for ‘Ethernet Controller,’ then note the device-id. In this case it’s ‘9200.’

backup /etc/driver_aliases:


# cd /etc
# cp driver_aliases driver_aliases.061024

edit driver_aliases, search down for the last elxl (see reference above)
copy the last elxl entry and substitute the device-id for everything after the comma:


# vi /etc/driver_aliases
elxl "pci10b7,9200"

load the driver, plumb and configure the interface:


# cd /kernel
# modload drv/elxl
# iconfig elxl0 plumb
# ifconfig -a
lo0: flags=2001000849 mtu 8232 index 1
        inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000
elxl0: flags=1004843 mtu 1500 index 2
        inet 0.0.0.0 netmask 0
        ether 0:a:5e:61:af:c2
# ifconfig elxl0 dhcp
# ifconfig elxl0
lo0: flags=2001000849 mtu 8232 index 1
        inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000
elxl0: flags=1004843 mtu 1500 index 2
        inet 192.168.1.34 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 10.115.1.255
        ether 0:a:5e:51:af:c3
#

Set the machine to dhcp:
defails here.

In brief:


# touch /etc/hostname.elxl0 /etc/dhcp.elxl0

October 20, 2006

JES Messaging backup script

Filed under: JES, Java Enterprise System, Messaging — morgan @ 23:43

I seem to re-invent this wheel over and over. Here’s a script for backing up a small to medium sized JES Messaging server.

simple_jes_mail_backup.pl

October 19, 2006

Good Sushi in Jackson, MS

Filed under: Eating in Jackson MS — morgan @ 17:54

The bartender was chatty, they play Japanese television at the bar. The bartender tells me that Nissan executives come often from the their plant in Canton, MS.

Little Tokyo
876 Avery Blvd
Ridgeland, MS

601-991-3800

ahem..

Filed under: Uncategorized — morgan @ 0:03

tap, tap.. is this thing on?

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