Thursday, April 27, 2006

back in KL

finally, i'm back in KL.
since i can't wait to go to mamak to have teh tarik, right after landed in KLIA i went to their food court to get one. without realizing how much is the price, i ordered 2 teh tarik.
it cost me RM11.80!!! mahal giler! tak sedap lak tu!!! buat spoiled jek...

anyway, really glad to be home :)
jom lepak2 kedai mamak pekena teh tarik sambil membuang masa :P

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

roaming in rome

3 days 2 nights in roma, italia was really not enough to see all the rome. a lot of things to see in here! but at least enough to cover the main ones :)

The great coleseum!
Maximus! The general who became a slave. The slave who became a gladiator. The gladiator who defied an emperor!
we arrived on friday afternoon at Fiumicino Airport and took a train to Termini. first impression when arrived at Termini was its quite a dirty place with all the rubbish loitering around & hardly see a dust bin anywhere. they are crazy drivers as well even though the roads are a bit narrow. not like in nederlands where bicycle is the main transportation, here is scooter beside metro & bus, you can see them everywhere, cilok sana sini and somehow italians hardly speak english. so its quite challenging.
Read more...
we made a booking to stay in one of the hostels here (murah maa), so the owner told us to wait for her at 4pm at the hostel, actually one of her apartments. we eventually found the place (thanks to internet, printed all the maps already) & waited there for 2 hours but she never showed up. called her but no one picked up. damn! time now at 7pm, so no choice have to find other hostel/hotel. lucky us, we got a hotel for 65euro per night but shared bathroom. good enough! but actually we waited at the wrong apartment hahaha (miscommunication! blamed colbert_frommers_wannabe)

kat mana ni??? sesat!!!? :P


siang



malam


anyway, apart from that Rome is actually a beautiful city, especially at night. the city itself was old with historic buildings, fountains, castles, palaces, structures & statues everywhere as well as the paintings, yup its really in every corners in the city.

really impressed with the architectures, especially all the carve. made me wondered how they build up these things last time. i think i should read their history then :)

the weather was very good on that time so we were able to walk around the city but sometimes we took a bus or metro (penat giler jalan). even though not all, basically we managed to visit all the main attraction places such as colosseum, vatican city, etc, yada2 (refer to the pictures).

but the most important thing is we had the real italian pizza & cappuccino :P



vatican city. look at the crowd! its actually a queue to go inside, eventually we also joined the queue & wasted almost 2 hours before managed to go inside!

the rest of the pictures here and here
enjoy!

it really was a good trip & nice place! i wish i can come here again.
Roma, grazie. ciao!

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

crond ORPHAN (no passwd entry) error message

one of the users complaining that his cron job is not running. upon checking at the cron log, i found these errors:
Apr 5 01:20:00 my_server_name crond[19123]: (username) RELOAD (cron/username)
Apr 5 01:20:00 my_server_name crond[19123]: ( tmp.7440) ORPHAN (no passwd entry)
Apr 5 01:20:00 my_server_name crond[19123]: (tmp.16094) ORPHAN (no passwd entry)
Apr 5 01:20:00 my_server_name crond[19123]: (tmp.16095) ORPHAN (no passwd entry)
Apr 5 01:28:00 my_server_name crond[19123]: (username) RELOAD (cron/username)
Apr 5 01:28:00 my_server_name crond[19123]: (tmp.7440) ORPHAN (no passwd entry)
Apr 5 01:28:00 my_server_name crond[19123]: (tmp.16094) ORPHAN (no passwd entry)
Apr 5 01:28:00 my_server_name crond[19123]: ( tmp.16095) ORPHAN (no passwd entry)

and somehow there are a lot of crond processes:
# ps aux|grep -i cron
root 18855 0.0 0.0 4100 1844 ? D 01:16 0:00 CROND
root 18856 99.9 0.0 4100 1844 ? R 01:16 2:07 CROND
root 18922 0.0 0.0 4100 1844 ? D 01:17 0:00 CROND
root 18923 99.9 0.0 4100 1844 ? R 01:17 1:08 CROND
root 19123 0.0 0.0 4104 1828 ? S 01:18 0:00 crond
root 19863 0.0 0.0 4104 1844 ? S 01:19 0:00 CROND
root 19917 0.0 0.0 4104 1844 ? S 01:20 0:00 CROND
Read more...
after some googling, i found out this error normally because of the user doesn't exist in /etc/passwd
but the user is exist in the /etc/passwd, so should be no problem then!
back to google & google & google again and the solution is - if your servers are integrated with LDAP or AD you better make sure you are using nscd service as well.
in my case we are using AD but the nscd process is not running, somehow dead! start the nscd service & the cron jobs are working fine now.
lesson learnt - make sure all the processes that you expect to be running, all are running well.
in case you not sure what nscd is, here is the man page:
# man nscd
nscd(8) nscd(8)

NAME
/usr/sbin/nscd - name service cache daemon

DESCRIPTION
Nscd is a daemon that provides a cache for the most common name service
requests. The default configuration file, /etc/nscd.conf, determines
the behavior of the cache daemon. See nscd.conf(5).

Nscd provides cacheing for the passwd(5), group(5), and hosts(5)
databases through standard libc interfaces, such as getpwnam(3),
getp-wuid(3), getgrnam(3), getgrgid(3), gethostbyname(3), and others.
Each cache has a separate TTL (time-to-live) for its data; modifying the
local database (/etc/passwd, and so forth) causes the cache to become
invalidated within fifteen seconds. Note that the shadow file is
specifically not cached. getspnam(3) calls remain uncached as a
result.

Monday, April 10, 2006

dutch sightseeing

an afternoon outing for dutch sightseeing in Keukenhof and Zaanse Schans .
"its 100% dutch! so dutch, that most of the dutch people won't go there" said my dutch colleague.

basically Keukenhof is a park that have millions of tulips and other bulb flowers. an overwhelming display of colour in a beautiful setting covering an area of 32 hectares that incorporates elements of traditional and modern landscape gardening.
not really my type of spot, tapi sedap la mata memandang :)

mat bunga :)

Read more...



while Zaanse Schans in the other hands, reflects its 17th and 18th century roots with painted wooden houses, windmills and warehouses along the Zaan river.





inside the windmill



demonstration on how to make the wooden shoes


Burcht castle on our way to have dinner. This is in Leiden.

the rest of the pictures here and here
enjoy!

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

vim tip: search for a word

normally in vim you can search a word by entering / or ? then enter a word, press n or N to go to the next & previous matching word.
but you can also use * or # to search for a word under the cursor in the current file.

same with / and ? , * key will search for the word from the current cursor position to the end of the file and # key will search for the word from the current cursor position to the top of the file. just keep on pressing * or # to go to the next & previous matching word.