Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
It appears the right-click and ‘Burn to’ menu on an ISO file in Finder that didn’t work a couple of months back has been fixed at some point. I currently have 10.15.2 and it’s now working as expected:
Trying to do a ‘sudo apt-get update’ on my Raspberry Pi running Jessie I got this error:
$ sudo apt-get update
E: The method driver /usr/lib/apt/methods/https could not be found.
N: Is the package apt-transport-https installed?
Seeing posts online with similar errors about the sources configured in /etc/apt/sources.list, I looked in my file and I had this line:
deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ jessie main contrib non-free rpi
I haven’t used or tried to update this Pi for a while so I can’t remember if this line was how it was originally configured or if I changed it.
Replacing this first line with what I think is more typical:
deb http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org jessie main contrib non-free rpi
and then doing a ‘sudo apt-get update’, it updates sources and now I can upgrade and install other packages again as expected.
I’ve needed to do this a few times so leaving a note here on the command to use. If you’ve added a new user account but didn’t create a home dir, create one with:
sudo mkhomedir_helper accountname
From here.
I picked up a “new” (new old stock most likely since I don’t think these chips are still manufactured, and haven’t been for 10+ years) NVRAM timekeeper chip since the one in the Sun Ultra 60 I picked up cheap on ebay was dead. Luckily it seems to still have charge and is keeping the host id and mac address values between power off/on, so that’s great.
To reprogram the hostid and mac address that are stored in the NVRAM memory, following the guide here which seems to be the definite source for reprogramming Sun NVRAMs, I used the following steps to reconfigure the new chip. The value of 80 on line 2 is the machine type for Ultra models:
1 0 mkp
80 1 mkp
8 2 mkp
0 3 mkp
20 4 mkp
c0 5 mkp
ff 6 mkp
ee 7 mkp
0 8 mkp
0 9 mkp
0 a mkp
0 b mkp
c0 c mkp
ff d mkp
ee e mkp
0 f 0 do i idprom@ xor loop f mkp
The odd thing now is I’m running into this issue that I didn’t see before:
I’m not going to type in all this text so it’s searchable, but here’s the text for almost the same error (same issue, different version of Solaris perhaps?) :
Hardware watchdog enabled svc.configd: smf(5) database integrity check of:
/etc/svc/repository.db
failed. The database might be damaged or a media error might have prevented it from being verified. Additional information useful to your service provider is in:
/etc/svc/volatile/db_errors
The system will not be able to boot until you have restored a working database. svc.startd(1M) will provide a sulogin(1M) prompt for recovery purposes. The command:
/lib/svc/bin/restore_repository
can be run to restore a backup version of your repository. See
http://sun.com/msg/SMF-8000-MY for more information.
Requesting System Maintenance Mode
svc.configd exited with status 102 (database initialization failure)
If I could get to a single user logon prompt then I could follow these instructions to repair, but the above error is just looping continuously, so I’m unable to do the repair.
When I first installed Solaris 10 from CDs, I got through the first couple of disks and then the cd drive would just eject any disk inserted, and won’t stay closed. I managed to complete the install by copying across ISO disk images and completing the install from those.
Since I can’t get a physical install cd to stay in the drive, I’m not sure I can boot recovery, so I’m kinda stuck. I think it’s time to pick up a replacement cdrom drive (might as well get a dvd drive) otherwise I’m kinda stuck in the water with this machine at this point.