Author Archives: mark

About mark

At work, been working on Tandems for around 30yrs (programming + sysadmin), plus AIX and Solaris sysadmin also thrown in during the last 20yrs; also about 5yrs on MVS (mainly operations and automation but also smp/e work). At home I have been using linux for decades. Programming background is commercially in TAL/COBOL/SCOBOL/C(Tandem); 370 assembler(MVS); C, perl and shell scripting in *nix; and Microsoft Macro Assembler(windows).

Another router died.

Posted on September 19, 2014 by mark

Well you may have noticed the website was down for a few days. Another router died. As the cisco branded router had decided to become a brick I grabbed a cheap DLINK DSL-2750B; the first I could get my hands … Continue reading →

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Compressing qcow2 images – important tip

Posted on September 11, 2014 by mark

This probably applies to normal ext4 filesystems as well as LVM ones. This post is because I deleted 60Gb of data from a qcow2 disk, and when I did a compress only got the disk image to shrink about 5Gb. … Continue reading →

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DevStack again, Hmmm, keep off real metal

Posted on September 10, 2014 by mark

I wanted to play some more with openstack. My existing environment was an Ubuntu VM running DevStack, so instances started under OpenStack were effectively VMs running inside VMs. When an OpemStack VM started it resoponded OK but it could take … Continue reading →

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Yippee, more comics

Posted on September 10, 2014 by mark

Popped into the second hand book store in Petone today as I saw a Scrooge McDuck comic in a tray near the front. They had 17 Walt Disney (Donald Duck/Scrooge McDuck/Mickey Mouse/Beagle Boys etc) comics that had been sold to … Continue reading →

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New driving companion, Mr Bear

Posted on August 20, 2014 by mark

In order to avoid looking silly talking to myself when driving I obtained a passenger to chat to. Ok, I really just wanted to buy a huge cuddly bear. Who can only just squeeze into the passenger seat.

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More MVS3.8J control blocks – Job Step control blocks

Posted on August 19, 2014 by mark

Well this was a real pain to work out. There are lots of hits on google on how to find the completion code of prior steps in later mvs releases using the SWAREQ macro… but that macro does not exist … Continue reading →

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The pains of using Fedora again, kernel releases

Posted on August 1, 2014 by mark

Yet again a simple “yum update” totally destroyed my system. That was over a week ago. Since then after trying a newer kernel and spending a little over 120 hours of fsck’ing disks I have everything back; including the website … Continue reading →

Posted in Unix | Comments Off on The pains of using Fedora again, kernel releases

The best purchase I ever made, everybody buy a plunger

Posted on July 11, 2014 by mark

The kitchen sink got blocked solid a few weeks ago, no idea why, water was just pouring down it and suddenly started backing up. Thought briefly about getting under the sink and unscrewing the u-bend as plan-b, but stuck with … Continue reading →

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Installing webacula on Fedora core 20

Posted on June 29, 2014 by mark

This guide is for Fedora core 20 only. The start of course is the “yum -y install webacula”. Do that first. That will amongst other things place an install guide /usr/share/doc/webacula/docs/INSTALL, I skimmed it to find the minimum steps needed … Continue reading →

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Dynamic Disk Allocation in MVS3.8J using SVC 99

Posted on June 28, 2014 by mark

What I wanted to achieve was from within a S/370 assembler program dynamically allocate a DASD device, similar to the JCL statement //DDNAME DD DISP=SHR,UNIT=dddd,VOL=SER=vvvvvv To re-inforce that I wanted to dynamically allocate a DASD device, not a dataset. The … Continue reading →

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