Anyone with those devices are clamoring for an upgrade to Android 4.0. Users should not be optimistic on this Android devices as it won’t officially be updated to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

There are two main reason why Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab will not get official Android upgrade to ICS. It is summed up basically as a) those devices have older hardware and b) customizations which makes it difficult to change like TouchWiz.

People are hoping for some partial Android 4.0 upgrade in the form of a ‘Value Pack’ for Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab, but Samsung is even discounting this idea. Thus, the best approach will be installing custom ROM hack of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system.

There’s no doubt that a work around will rise up to this demand. Don’t easily discard Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab mobile internet devices as it can still have new life Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade unofficially.

There are times when, I receive email attachments with “docx” file extension. It’s difficult to open those attachments with a bare bone computer running Windows XP operating system without MS Office Suite installed.

A way to open MS 2007 document file is to use the document viewer integrated with Google’s mail. If you don’t have a Google mail account then it might be difficult to open the file. I’ve experienced this with my office webmail program. Firefox could not recognize the file extension “docx”.

I searched for an open source application software to open MS Office 2007 document. I found a Firefox docx viewer plug in The OpenXML Document Viewer is free Firefox plug in, which Firefox to open Office documents.

At times email document attachment doesn’t have the right or correct file extension. I have received an email with a document attachment regarding buying a franchise, but the file extension is “partly”. It’s a bit odd, but opening the web based email using the Firefox browser failed to open the file.

Surprisingly, when I tried to use MS Internet Explorer browser the file extension was automatically detected, and the right client program MS Office 2007 opened the file inside the browser without any issue.

The document viewer software is a very useful Firefox plug in for opening “docx” file extension attachments. This applies especially to those who haven’t installed MS Office suite on their desktop computer. I find that with the Firefox viewer plug in opening MS 2007 email attachments are no longer a problem.

While this is not true for computer servers as system administrators keen on computer security. What do we need to do when we lost or forget root password of the computer server. Can the root password of a Redhat Enterprise Linux box be reset? I encountered this situation when the Redhat Enterprise Linux server which hosts our database was handed over from an administrator that left the job.

Actually, removing the root password would be relatively easy, if you have physical access to the Linux server. It only requires direct access to the “shadow” file. To access the file, I used an Ubuntu Live CD to boot and mount the fixed disk. Luckily, after loading the Ubuntu, I went to the “media” folder and found that the fixed disk was mounted automatically. The partition or folder I was interested was the one containing the “etc” folder which host the “shadow” file. This was located under “/media/disk/”.

I navigated to “/media/disk/etc/” and using the a text editor edited the “shadow” file. You can find the line which starts with “root” as shown:

root:$B7mx0LiRQrf7micb1$acb.nztB.8H68Bx0L:20102:0:99999:7:::

The cryptic mix of alpha numeric and special characters is actually the password. Thus, by deleting that value “$B7mx0LiRQrf7micb1$acb.nztB.8H68Bx0L” between the semi-colon, the root password will be removed. The line will look like the following after editing:

root::20102:0:99999:7:::

You can save the “shadow” file and restart the Redhat Enterprise Linux and remove the Ubuntu Live CD. You can now login to the Linux box with user root without any password.

Thus, server uptime is very important and the goal of system administrators is to have minimal or no downtime at all. A particular downtime could lead to a loss of revenue or profit. There is some mechanism developed that will minimize the impact on the site visitors whenever a glitch is the computer system or computer network happens. System fail over, server load balancing, site redirection is just some of the techniques employed.

Monitoring server uptime in order to minimize downtime and maintain availability could be done by server monitoring software. This software could send an automatic alert through email, pager, and messengers when there is a problem with the computer system, service, device, switches, and more. Computer specialist will be notified immediately whenever the website or server is down or having an access problem.

We’ve use Nagios open source web monitoring solution software for creating a comprehensive IT infrastructure monitoring. Depending on service provided by the server the Nagios monitoring software can check different protocols like HTTPS, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, DNS, Telnet, SSL, TCP at regular intervals. Checking can be done for multiple servers with various operating systems like Linux, Windows and others. A small client application could be installed on the tracked server for detailed ports and services scanning

Having an automatic alert from a server monitoring software makes a difference in reducing downtimes. It also improves customer trust and reduces business loss.

Many have frowned before on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, for the lack of multitasking features. The recent iOS 4 update though brought multitasking to iPhone and its siblings. Google’s open source mobile device operating system Android has been getting more support from developers. On the other hand, application developers face some challenges working on Apple’s proprietary OS.

The consequence though are the increasing security threats from malware and viruses. Smart phones are becoming powerful and hackers are attracted to these mini computers. Android open source mobile device apps store has thousands of apps available. Security expert research shows that some of these mobile device applications are devious malware.

Downloading free applications, especially on Android based mobile phones should be done carefully. Mobile devices should have a reliable protection program. It’s a wise investment, especially when the smart phones are used to sync data with corporate servers. Malware and virus threats on mobile devices are surely for real.

Nobody can really say that Google Chrome security features are better than say, Windows, Mac OS or Linux. Google has moved to push Chromium OS for netbooks and mobile devices. The security is a key feature and a critical factor that have made Google a success. The modular architecture for Chrome has made it a popular choice over other browsers, which is the same rendering engine is used in the Chromium OS.

Google’s lightweight Chromium OS, is geared toward laptops, netbooks and mobile devices. All applications running in Chromium OS will be taking place within the browser and much of the data storage would be located online. This would mean no conventional desktop applications to install and manage. All Chromium OS security updates are immediately done. This makes Google’s open source lightweight Chromium OS ideal for netbooks and mobile devices.

First is to change the hostname without restarting the computer. This could be achieved using the hostname command as follows:
$sudo hostname newhost.domain.com

Second is to have the hostname stay even when the RedHat Linux server is rebooted. This could be done by editing hostname found in the system configuration network file as follows:
$sudo vi /etc/sysconfig/network

Lastly is to check and change the hosts file which sometimes contain old hostname. This could be done by editing the hosts file found under the “etc” folder as follows:
$sudo vi /etc/hosts

The above steps are the way I configure the RedHat Linux test server environment hostname. I find that conflicts can be avoided when hostnames are changed prior to plugging a test server to the working network.

In Linux, a way of finding the location of a file is through the use of an easy to remember “locate” command. Issuing the command followed by a space and the filename returns a list of location where the file could be located. It’s usually required to have root privileged to run the “locate” command. Sometimes though the command returns an error message: locate: can not open ‘/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db’: No such file or directory.

fixing locate: can not open '/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db': No such file or directory

The common reason for this error is that the database which locate command uses to store the list of file locations was not yet updated. It’s important to issue the “updatedb” command without any parameters with root privilege. Failure to run the “updatedb” command before using “locate” command will result the error locate: can not open ‘/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db’: No such file or directory.

TNS-12541: TNS:no listener and TNS-12560: TNS:protocol adapter error

Debugging of Oracle ERP Applications are dangerous to do on production servers. Thus, Oracle testing environments are pretty important for system administrator work. A separate clone Oracle database server with Oracle ERP Application running is a must for worry free debugging and testing. At work RedHat Enterprise Linux kernel version 2.4.9-e.62 host both the Oracle Database and Oracle ERP Application. Recently, we’ve copied the Oracle database and ERP Application from a Linux box to a virtual container for testing.

The copy process using rsync went smooth. We’re confident that everything would work perfectly fine as it’s a clone of the production system. After changing some basic things like hostname, listener.ora and tnsnames.ora file; I was surprised to encounter the message Oracle TNS-12541: TNS:no listener and TNS-12560: TNS:protocol adapter error when running the listener. TNSPING returns also the no listener error.

I am pretty sure to cover the basic configuration and to make things complicated is the Linux Error: 111: Connection refused. I did several check on hostname, iptables and other related stuff, but could not find the solution. Comparing the files between production and clone have shown the problem. The cause is not even close with network connectivity, but with Oracle failing to create temporary files.

In the cloning process the copying of Linux /var/ folder was skipped as the system usually recreates the entries during start. Well, anyway, the error was traced to the missing Oracle temporary file folder /var/tmp/.Oracle. I am not sure what is the connection here, but creating the /var/tmp/.Oracle folder with the Oracle system user right have solved the issue of TNS-12541: TNS:no listener and TNS-12560: TNS:protocol adapter error.

The good thing about virtual machine is that you could change the memory size or the disk space if necessary. I used VMware virtualization software which comes with a tool vmware-vdiskmanager disk expansion software. I delved into increasing the virtual machine disk space, as everything looks straightforward and easy.

I made a backup copy of the virtual disk for insurance. Increasing the disk size was cool. No sweat, but it was not recognized by the system. There are instructions on how to use the extra partition to be part of the main system partition with disk expansion. I followed the outlined task. Surprise !!! Windows XP was unable to boot, screen turns blue and restarts the virtual machine automatically after a few seconds.

The good thing is I made a backup copy, before I DELETED the virtual disk (which is a really dumb thing to do). I copied back the virtual disk backup copy into the same location. Everything worked fine with Windows XP starting up, but the backup copy of the virtual disk seems to be old. I noticed, some latest installation and setup of important software are not there anymore.

The process which started with increasing virtual machines disk size ends up as disaster recovery problem. There’s no guarantee that everything will work fine when it comes to this kind of computer operation. So, I tried to recover the over written virtual disk file with the use of open source TestDisk Photo Recovery Software. I was not lucky with it. So, maybe I’ll try it with the use of commercial file recovery software like Active Undelete.