SuperMicro X9DRH-7TF with 836BE16-R920B chassis

16 disk slots for 3.5" disk

A very neat design where there are 2 more disk slots for 2.5" disk at the back. The board also has 2 10GBase-T ports.

With Cover and fans, support 2 CPUs and 16 DIMMs 

1 x PCIe 3.0 x16 (Occupied by the LSI card) and 6 x PCIe 3.0 x8. Also can see the 8 SATA2 ports and 2 SATA3 ports. The board also contain 2 SFF 8087 ports for 8 more SAS2 connections.

Backplane model: BPN-SAS2-836EL1. This is a backplane with expander chip. With only 1 SFF 8087 cable, you can access all the disks. Is an oversubscribe solution but should have more than enough bandwidth (2400MB/s) for fully populate disks (except maybe will face congestion with 6 or more SSDs).

Full specification

Package 'make' has no installation candidate

If you encounter the message stated on the title post when you try to install make on your Ubuntu server as shown below:

abc@abc:/etc/apt$ sudo apt-get install make
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package make is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'make' has no installation candidate

There is a possibility that your source is down and this is what happen to me when i do sudo apt-get update

As you can see there are a lot of "Gateway Timeout" message. So to solve this, i have to manually change the source from sg.archive.ubuntu.com to source like us.archive.ubuntu.com.

Open this file, /etc/apt/sources.list and replace all the sg.archive.ubuntu.com to us.archive.ubuntu.com. After that, do the sudo apt-get update and if the source is workable, you should not see any error messages as shown below:

And now i can install make without problem

abc@abc:/etc/apt$ sudo apt-get install make
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Suggested packages:
  make-doc
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  make
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 119 kB of archives.
After this operation, 324 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main make amd64 3.81-8.1ubuntu1.1 [119 kB]
Fetched 119 kB in 3s (36.6 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package make.
(Reading database ... 84546 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking make (from .../make_3.81-8.1ubuntu1.1_amd64.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up make (3.81-8.1ubuntu1.1) ...

Noisy laptop CPU fan

If you have a laptop that start to generate a lot of noise, this might be because your CPU fan need some lubricant treatment. Steps below show you how i do that to my Fujitsu laptop T5010. (Please note that if your laptop is still under warranty, it is probably wiser for you to contact the manufacturer on this issue before you attempt to do the steps below)

Firstly, you need to prepare the following:

• screw driver
• Singer oil

Singer oil is actually very cheap and i actually got it for just 1 SGD.

After that, you need to start to unscrew the back cover of your laptop. But before you do that, make sure your laptop is powered down and also battery is taken out. Unscrew the screws as shown below with the red arrow.

After take out the back cover. Unscrew your fan as well so you can take it out. You also need to unplug the power connector.

The fan that is used in this laptop uses brushless motor. There is copper wire coil on the main fan frame and magnet on the blade.The change of magnetic filed once the coil is energized is what caused the blade to spin.My explanation is probably a bit brief but if you are rather interested on how this works, you can refer to this link.

So to put the oil to the bearing, you actually have to separate out the blade from the main fan frame. with just a little force, you can take out the blade rather easily, it is attached to the main fan frame with some magnetic force. After you take out the blade, you just need to put the oil onto the bearing and shaft as shown below with red arrow point to it.

After oil is applied to it, assemble everything back and you should be able to enjoy your quiet CPU fan again

Delete all emails before certain date for Gmail

To do this , you need to use some keyword when you search your email.

Example, let say i want to delete emails that contain sitemeter keywords that are older than 31, December 2011, i just enter "sitemeter before:2011/12/31" as shown below.

After that, click the box shown by the arrow to select all the emails and you will see one line of words just above your searched emails that let you select all the emails.

Once you select all the emails, just click the trash bin icon.

A confirmation box will pop up and just select "OK" and your emails will be deleted.

This example use just sitemeter as keyword and this might sometimes include emails that you don't intend to include. A better way is probably to use "from:reports@sitemeter.com before:2011/12/31" so only emails from sitemeter will get deleted. For more options, please refer to this link.

Dell R810 - FATAL: Error inserting acpi-cpufreq

If you encounter the following error when trying to load the acpi-cpufreq driver, there is the possibility that your Dell server BIOS setting is not configured properly.

[root@localhost cpufreq]# modprobe acpi-cpufreq
FATAL: Error inserting 
acpi_cpufreq 
(/lib/modules/2.6.32-131.17.1.el6-0.11.smp.gcc4.4.x86_64/kernel/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/cpufreq/acpi-cpufreq.ko): 
No such device

Go to your Dell BIOS setting and look for Power Management. Once you inside the Power Management window, look for the Power Management setting. Change the setting to OS Control if is different setting. Reboot and you should be able to load the acpi-cpufreq driver successfully.For more information on Dell Power Management, please go to this link and look for BIOS based P-state management. 

Nokia Phone Browser - Operation could not be completed

I first experienced this problem when i upgraded Nokia PC Suite from 7.1.26.1 to 7.1.30.8. There seems to have few solutions available indicated on this forum but you might want to try the repair method also. At least it works for me.

So how to repair? Very simple. Goto Start->All Programs->Nokia PC Suite and choose uninstall. A Nokia PC Suite windows will pop up as shown below.

Choose Repair Nokia PC Suite and that's it, hope this method can help you also. :)

Dell R810

Support 4 CPUs and 32 DIMM slots in 2U casing

2.5" HDD slots, total 6

2.5" SATA HDD (HDD from Seagate)

6 PCIe slots, 2 half heights, 4 full heights through riser card, one more PCIe slot occupy by RAID card

First riser card

Second riser card

RAID card

CPU board configuration

Memory configuration details

Overview

Upload files to Google Drive from other website

If you want to upload file, example a pdf file that resides on another website, you will have to download the file into your local PC before you can upload it to Google drive. To speed up this process, actually you can directly paste the link into open file dialog box and let the Windows OS do the work for you.

When you are in Google Drive, just select upload Files...

In the File Open dialog, just paste the url link directly into File name: box

After you click Open, the File Open box will grey out for a while (depend on your file size and connection speed as Windows is taking time to download the file). Once the File Open box disappear, you will see your file get uploaded to Google Drive.

Get Singapore Stock Market Quotes in Google Docs

*20 August 2018 update: Due to data unavailability for both Google Finance and Yahoo finance, i had created a new Google Apps Script to download and import SGX daily price list data to Google sheets. Please refer to this link for details.

* 24 Feb 2014 update: Recently, i have had some problem with getting the result from Yahoo finance and the cell always show #VALUE! with error - "The data could not be retrieved. Please check the URL". I tried to use GoogleFinance again and it seems like they finally start to support SGX stocks. So to get the price of stock like Keppel Land, just type the following in the cell

=GoogleFinance("SGX:K17")

So the syntax is quite easy, just type in the stock quote name with SGX: precede in front. The only problem is the limitation of 2 decimal points...

For more information on what data can be retrieved, please refer to this link.

=====================================================================

If you are using Google Docs to keep track of your stocks statistics, this will be something very useful to you. By having the ability to import stock market quotes directly, you can manipulate this data further, example - to calculate paper gain/loss quickly.

Google actually provide a useful tool which is GoogleFinance* for this purpose but unfortunately, Singapore stock is not supported. Luckily, there is still this tool call ImportData which we can use to import structured data from other website like Yahoo Finance.

To do this, first,  you need to know your stock symbol. You can get this easily by typing the stock name in the get quotes field. Screenshot shows the list of possible stocks after i type in Keppel Land.

After you know your stock symbol, you just need to type the following in the cell of your spreadsheet document and replace the italic word with your own options. You can go to the following link for all the special tag options.

=ImportData("http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=stock symbol&f=special tag")

For example, if you want to get last trade price for Keppel Land, i just type the following:

=ImportData("http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=k17.si&f=l1")

and that's it, you can see that Google Docs will load the last trade price in the cell as shown below:

Configure ramdisk for Openfiler

Create a new file under /etc/bootloader.d directory. In this new file, type add_options ramdisk_size=32000. Please note that the unit is in kilobytes. The example below shows the new file is called ramdisk.conf and the content of this file.

[root@abc ~]# cd /etc/bootloader.d
[root@abc bootloader.d]# ls
distro-defaults.conf  plymouth-bootloader.conf  ramdisk.conf  syslinux_bg.png
[root@abc bootloader.d]# more ramdisk.conf
add_options ramdisk_size=32000

After the file is created, type bootman to apply the configuration as shown below

[root@abc ~]#bootman

Restart your machine and you can check whether is it successful by typing cat /proc/cmdline as shown below:

[root@abc ~]# cat /proc/cmdline
mce=dont_decode cciss.cciss_allow_any=1 splash quiet ramdisk_size=32000 ro root=LABEL=/ initrd=/initrd-2.6.32-71.18.1.el6-0.20.smp.gcc4.1.x86_64.img BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-2.6.32-71.18.1.el6-0.20.smp.gcc4.1.x86_64

Create a filesystem on /dev/ram0 and mount it up and you will have a 32MB ramdisk.

PowerShell to check MSSQL database status

A very simple Powershell script to check database status.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO') | out-null
$s = New-Object ('Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server') ServerName
$db = $s.Databases.item("databaseName")
"status: " + $db.status + " isaccessible: " + $db.isaccessible

Example output:
Database status is normal

status: Normal isaccessible: True

This output is created by renaming the log file.

status: RecoveryPending isaccessible: False

For more status description, please refer to this Microsoft site.

Useful Linux Command - mkdir -p

-p (parents) option for mkdir gives you the ability to create a multiple levels deep directory with all the intermediate directories created as well.

Example: When you want to create a directory tree like this /a/b/c/d, where a,b,c,d are all not exist before, you need to create each directory independently like

mkdir /a
mkdir /a/b
mkdir /a/b/c
mkdir /a/b/c/d

if you do mkdir /a/b/c/d, you will encounter "no such file or directory" error.

With -p option, you can create /a/b/c/d with just one single line of command as shown below:

mkdir -p /a/b/c/d

Load Brocade CNA driver for Openfiler

1. Download the rpm package from Brocade website. Choose the "Linux - Other Distributions".
2. Perform the following steps to extract the bna files (Ethernet package) out from the rpm package

rpm2cpio bna_driver_linux-3.0.3.0-0.noarch.rpm > temp-file.cpio
cpio -idumv < temp-file.cpio

3. You should be able to see a usr folder in your working path. Copy all the files inside ./usr/src/bna folder to the /usr/src/.

cp ./usr/src/bna /usr/src/ -R

4. Go to /usr/src/bna and execute make.
5. After that, you should be able to locate a file call bna.ko in the /usr/src/bna directory.
6. Run insmod bna.ko to install the module and then you have your Ethernet driver loaded successfully.