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.
NVRAM replaced in Sun Ultra 60, but no longer booting
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.
cal-heatmap with more than 6 heatmap ranges
By default cal-heatmap supports 5 ranges of values for the heatmap colors, so this config:
[10,20,30,40]
will give you the ranges:
- 0 to 10
- 11 to 20
- 21 to 30
- 31 to 40
- > 40 (the 5th range)
If you attempt to define more than 5 ranges, cells in the 6th range and above will just have a default background color. In my www.spotviz.info app I tried to create 6 ranges, so the darkest color is for > 6000. On 9/28 and 9/29 (and the other blank dates in October in the screenshot below) have values more than 6000 but are showing as the default color:
The config I had for this was:
legend : [10,100,2000,4000,6000]
The ranges I was expecting from this config was:
- 0 to 10
- 11 to 100,
- 101 to 2000
- 2001 to 4000
- 4001 to 6000
- > 6000
Changing this to 4 values configuring 5 ranges fixed this issue:
legend : [1000, 2000, 4000, 6000]
Revisiting my spotviz.info webapp: visualizing WSJT-X FT8 spots over time – part 7: Redesigning to take advantage of the Cloud
Update following on from part 6.
I completed some of my planned updates recently, in particular moving the AngularJS static content to AWS S3 to serve as a static website, and then also updated AWS Route 53 to point www.spotviz.info to the S3 bucket for this front end content, and then api.spotviz.info is pointing to a VPS running the REST backend. At the same time moving the frontend to S3, I also spent a crazy amount of time migrating to use Webpack to build the frontend, which I covered here.
I’ve now started to pick up some enhancements to the app. The first enhancement is to add a new heatmap to show spots per hour, as a drilldown feature from the heatmap per day. What surprised me at this point is how crazy the original MongoDB query looks now it’s been a couple of years since I was last playing with this. Luckily the update to do counts per hour is only a minor change from the counts per day, so should have that complete soon.