Dmidecode

Dmidecode reports information about your system’s hardware as described in your system BIOS according to the SMBIOS/DMI standard (see a sample output). This information typically includes system manufacturer, model name, serial number, BIOS version, asset tag as well as a lot of other details of varying level of interest and reliability depending on the manufacturer. This will often include usage status for the CPU sockets, expansion slots (e.g. AGP, PCI, ISA) and memory module slots, and the list of I/O ports (e.g. serial, parallel, USB).

DMI data can be used to enable or disable specific portions of kernel code depending on the specific hardware. Thus, one use of dmidecode is for kernel developers to detect system “signatures” and add them to the kernel source code when needed.

Beware that DMI data have proven to be too unreliable to be blindly trusted. Dmidecode does not scan your hardware, it only reports what the BIOS told it to.

Dmidecode was first written by Alan Cox and is now being further developed and maintained by Jean Delvare. It is released under the General Public License (GPL). For more details, you should have a look at the AUTHORS and LICENSE files that come with the source code.

FreeBSD ports: /usr/ports/sysutils/dmidecode

December 5, 2009 • Tags: , , , , • Posted in: FreeBSD • No Comments

MySQL Storage Engine

This patch adds an alternative storage engine that uses mysql as backend, instead of a big file or a spool directory. This makes some interesting setups possible and also allows to ease the disk I/O on the server (by using an external MySQL engine).

To use it, you first need to create a MySQL database, and a table to hold the store messages. We’ll use “kannel” as DB Name and “store” as the table name, but you can choose whatever you want and modify the config file to reflect your setup (more on this later).

To create the “store” table, run the following SQL query:
CREATE TABLE store ( uuid VARCHAR(36) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, message TEXT );

Again, you can rename the fields and modify the config to reflect your environment.

Then, on kannel.conf, you need to add a store-db group, and a mysql-connection pool:

group = mysql-connection
id = mypool
host = localhost
username =
password = database = kannel
max-connections = 1

group = store-db
id = mypool
table = store
field-uuid = uuid
field-message = message

Last but not least, set the store-type to use the mysql storage engine on the core group:

store-type = mysql

As you may have noticed, you can modify the fields table, field-uuid and field-message to suit your particular database schema.

Here’s the patch against latest CVS:

kannel-mysql-storage-engine

This needs further testing (do not use it for production -yet-), please try it and let me know if you find any problems.

December 5, 2009 • Tags: , , , • Posted in: Kannel • No Comments

New SqlBox release: 0.7.2

I’ve just updated SqlBox. Version 0.7.2 adds:

* rpm target (already on the latest snapshot). You can now run ./configure and then make rpm to build an RPM!
* Support for MS-SQL and Sybase over FreeTDS. You need a current Kannel snapshot to support this.
* Some code cleanups.

You can get it from here.

December 5, 2009 • Tags: , , , • Posted in: Kannel • No Comments

Linux Sys Admin

November 17, 2009 • Tags: , • Posted in: Linux, Linux Line • No Comments