Day Two In Surabaya

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This is another of my stories from Surabaya.

This morning I woke up at 6.30 am morning. After take a bath, I was planned to take breakfast, but I got stuck watching Superman Return at HBO. Actually I’ve watch this movie on DVD but this movie is so good, so I watch again. I went to restaurant at 8.10 am. Wow..the restaurant was so full. I couldn’t get table to eat. It’s about 5 minutes I confuse where I must eat my meal. Should I take breakfast with stand up? Thanks God, finally I got table. The restaurant was so full maybe because so many people stay in this hotel in this long holiday. At 9 am, our client’s driver picked me and my friends and taken us go to office.

The big event today is performing user acceptance test. It’s showing to the client how to failover server. Two servers that include in this demo are database server and applications server; the other device include in this demo is storage. This demonstation perform how to failover database server to applications server, vice versa. When database server down, applications server must take over database server’s function. So applications server will perform 2 function in the same time. Not only that, the other way scenario was performed also. How to failover applications server to the database server. Database server will run database jobs itself and run applications server jobs too.

After perform that demonstration, I was busy made some documentations about failover server. All day long we stayed in office. For lunch and dinner, we got meal…our client’s was so generous. A lot of food (snack & meal) given to us 🙂 . We went back to hotel at 9.30 pm. So tired. All day long I just sit in front of my laptop but now I feel so tired…so weird.

Ke Surabaya – part 1

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Pagi ini saya berangkat ke Surabaya. Tadi pagi saya meninggalkan rumah pukul 5 pagi dengan menggunakan taksi menuju bandara. Di terminal 2F pagi tadi cukup ramai. Padat juga rupanya jadwal penerbangan pagi ini. Saya sendiri berangkat dengan penerbangan GA302. Boeing 737-400 yang saya tumpangi lepas landas pukul 7.20. Mendarat di Bandar Udara Juanda Surabaya pukul 8.30. Sampai di Surabaya, saya dijemput sopir dari kantor klien yang akan saya kunjungi. Pagi ini cuaca Surabaya panas terik ketika saya dalam perjalanan keluar dari bandara.

Saya lalu diantarkan ke kantor klien di kawasan Industri Margomulyo. Klien ini adalah perusahaan pengolahan udang dkk, nama perusahannya Bumi Menara Internasional. Seharian saya bersama 2 rekan yang sudah lebih dulu berada di Surabaya bekerja di sana. Pekerjaan saya hari ini adalah mengganti memori server yang rusak, menambah memori baru, mengkonfigurasi ulang RAID 5 dan mengatur volume dalam storage. Oh ya servernya adalah Fujitsu Primepower 450 dan 650, sementara storagenya adalah Fujitsu Eternus 3000. Sementara 2 rekan saya yang lain mengurusi konfigurasi SAP.

Yang memakan waktu paling lama adalah mengkonfigurasi ulang multipath pada koneksi server dengan storage. Ini sekilas cerita tentang multipath :

Salah satu server dihubungkan pada sebuah storage (external disks) melalui 2 buah kabel fiber. Di server terdapat 2 buah fibre channel PCI card. Server mengakses beberapa buah volume yang ada di dalam storage. Multipath di sini gampangnya adalah mengatur redundancy koneksi storage dan server. Dengan 2 buah fibre channel card, server akan membaca sebuah volume sebagai 2 volume berbeda. Dengan menggunakan multipathing, server akan mengenali volume sekali saja, sebagai sebuah volume tunggal. Keunggulan multipath adalah jika salah satu kabel putus atau salah satu card rusak, koneksi antara server dan storage tetap terjaga. Ini yang memakan waktu paling lama. Itupun sudah bertelepon-teleponan dengan rekan saya di Jakarta (untuk mohon petunjuk 😀 ) Baru sekitar pukul setengah 7 malam saya sukses mengkonfigurasi ulang multipath ini. Ah memang saya harus belajar lebih banyak lagi tentang multipathing 🙁 .

Malam ini saya menginap di Somerset Hotel. Hotelnya cukup nyaman, sayangnya cukup jauh dari keramaian kota. Setelah mandi, saya keluar untuk makan malam. Saya dan rekan memilih untuk makan di dekat hotel. Ada warung mie Ujung Pandang. Celakanya ternyata mie disajikan dengan taburan daging babi #-o …rusak deh selera makan saya malam ini. Itu saja cerita saya hari ini. Besok akan saya ceritakan pengalaman yang lain lagi selama di Surabaya 😀

My New Flash Drive

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usb flash drive Two days ago I just received USB Flash Drive from my friend, Mertanus. It’s 1 GB flash drive which name PenDrive Mini. This flash drive is have USB 2.0 interface. It has 5.5 cm in lenght and 1.8 cm width, and it has 0.7 cm in thickness. I like the color of my flash drive, white. It came with one neck stripe to bring this flash drive easily. I’m glad because it came with 5 years warranty. In the package, there is one warranty card. In that card, there is an explanation how to activate warranty. I choose online method. I browse the official website and follow the instruction for registration.

This is my fourth flash drive I’ve ever had. My first USB flash drive was have 64 MB memory capacity, it has brand U-Disk. I got it as a bonus when I bought Dell Latitude C600 three years ago. That flash disk already broken at 2005, I don’t really remember what did I do that cause my first flash disk broken.

My second USB flash drive was Apacer 128 MB. I bought it at April 12, 2005 at BEC (Bandung Electronic Center)…when I bought it, the price was Rp190.000,-. I like this type of flash drive because it has string that connect the cap with its body, with that design I never worried to loose flash drive’s cap (it happen to some of my friends). My Apacer broken when I bought that for printing a poster at one of printing center at Taman Sari street Bandung. I guess the operator at that store forgot to safely remove my flash drive X-( .

The third USB flash drive that I bougth is DChord USB flash drive + MP3 player. Yes, it was actually a MP3 player. It has 256 MB capacity. I bought this gadget at BEC again at October 18, 2005. This flash drive still working fine until now, so now I can say that it has longer live rather than two other flash drive I ever had 🙂 . I had bring it to many place in Indonesia 😀 , when I was travelling I used it to hear music. But the main function that MP3 player did for me is for saved data, not as MP3 player but as a common flash drive. I just used that for hearing music when I was in travelling. Two months ago, my little sister asked me for buy a USB flash drive for him. So for some reason, I gave my DChord to my sister. From the time I didn’t have USB flash drive.

One month ago I ordered a new flash drive to my friend, Mertanus. I was ordered to him any flash drive that has price about Rp150.000,- . Why I limit the price, because I just have budget as big as Rp150.000,- for buying a new flash drive :-p . I paid the USB at the begining of this month. Since Mertanus always do bussiness travelling, I just received my order two days ago. I hope this USB flash drive can has long lifetime in my hand 😀 .

Which One More Faster?

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This morning I did a little experiment to compare which one more fast, my PC or my laptop (my office’s laptop exactly 😀 ). It’s really dummy experiment by the way. I’ve tried to run Ubuntu 7.04 Live CD on both computer.My PC is spesifications are Intel Pentium IV 2,66 GHz with 512MBmemory installed. No additional graphic card used, just using onboard graphic card. My laptop is Fujitsu S Series with Intel Pentium Mobile inside; it has 1,6 GHz processor speed. It has same memory size with my PC, 512 MB.

With my cellphone as stopwatch, I write down that my PC run Ubuntu faster than my laptop. Since boot until desktop ready to use, it just need 2 minutes and 15 seconds. My laptop need more time, it’s need 4 minutes and 9 seconds.

Before run this dummy experiment I guess that both of them will need same time to run live cd Linux. The reason I thought like that because two computer have some memory size. But I was wrong, in this situations (two system have same memory size) processor speed was take more responsibility to system performance. He..he..he..really a dummy experiment.

Maybe there are some other factor that I didn’t measure in this experiment, like optical drive speed and total hardware inside the system. Optical drive speed should gave impact to system that run live cd operating system, because all part of operating system was lay on cd. Total hardware that installed in the system maybe become another factor, more hardware will cause OS need more time to recognize each of them. My laptop have more hardware like bluetooth adapter, wireless adapter, firewire, modem.

So I think it’s not fair to say that my PC is more faster than my laptop if we count two last factor that I explain above. For conclusion let say if two system have same configurations except processor speed, we can guess system with faster processor will running live cd operating system more fast than the other one.

Problem With X Server – part 2

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Last night I reinstall OpenSUSE in my laptop (you can read here for background story).

Today in office I tried to install Yahoo Messenger again in my OpenSUSE. From information I read last night, Yahoo Messenger for Linux is suspect for problem like that. Just for make you understand, yesterday when I installed Yahoo Messenger for Linux, I didn’t reboot my laptop until I went home. So that I just realized that my Linux crashed when I was in home. This afternoon, as soon as I finished install YM, I reboot my laptop….guest what? Same problem came back.

Thanks Gods, I found several good posts in Internet that discuss about problem like one I have…see here and here for example. From several source, I tried to take conclusion : I think at least there are 3 step that can save me from reinstalled my Linux 😀

  1. Delete file .ICEauthority and file .xinitrc on my home directory.
    # cd /home/tedy
    # rm .ICEauthority
    # rm .xinitrc
  2. Delete /tmp directory and create another one :
    # su - root
    # rm -rf /tmp
    # mkdir /tmp
    # chmod 1777 /tmp
  3. Run sax2 tool for reconfigure X86Config file.
    # su - root
    # sax2
  4. Restart X session manually using this command :
    # su - root
    # rcxdm restart
  5. After X session appears, I reboot my laptop and when it came up I could login successfully into my OpenSUSE.
  6. To make sure that OpenSUSE was fine, I tried to reboot my laptop several times. Until now, it running well.

Yahoo Messenger for Linux create .xinitrc file for make YM start when Linux startup. This one the root cause of these problem. Thanks for all you guys that share your experiences and your skill in the Internet ^:)^ .