• JBOD will have multiple enclosures, and each enclosure will have a ses device. Subset of disks in the JBOD will be attached to one enclosure.
• Each SAS card will be recognized as a device even though there are multiple phys in it. scbus# depends on the placement of PCI slot of SAS card. All ses and disk devices discovered through that SAS card will have same scbus#.
• Target id of a device can be different between (port 0 of SAS and port 0 of JBOD) connection and (port 0 of SAS and port 1 of JBOD) connection. target ids of a device depends on the JBOD/SAS card slots which are connected.

My first patent that got approved at USPTO

"Techniques for validating and sharing secrets " is my first patent title that got approved at USPTO. Link is here. It is filed in 2008 with co-author as Puthali. More than the title, I have few things to log here:

1. It got approved on May 1, 2012 which is Labour day and holiday. Thats fine.

2. Its under the name of Apple Inc. hmm.. looks like, during the acquisition of Novell, this patent went to them. Thats also fine.

3. It got approved just the next day after I left Novell. My last day at Novell was April 30, 2012. Isn't it a big thing to happen?

4. May 1, 2012 is the only day I was unemployed in my 6+ years career. I feel, this is a big thing.

Why so many coincidences around this patent? What ever, just thought of logging these so that I won't miss them.. :)

Fed up of searching small information in big packet capture file?

I usually face this problem where I need to find for some information in a very huge file. And, it takes lot of time to filter and show the results.
Now, I got different kind of problem, but, similar. Customer sent set of capture files, around 80, each of 25MB (looks like, he knows that opening a big file and debugging using it is very frustrating). Just thought of using some command lines and there are some already.
We can use tcpdump over a network packet capture file like tcpdump -r filename and we can apply filters using -R. Filter is similar to that of wireshark, but not same.
Something like 'tcpdump -r output.cap$i host 10.240.111.29 and host 10.240.115.55 and port 80 and port 16876 >> filteredData'.
Even Wireshark have command line tool. Hadn't explored yet.

Facing problems with firefox

Last few months, I was facing different kind of issues with firefox. History navigation (back, forward) buttons won't appear. History of urls accessed won't get saved. Cannot bookmark pages, search box on the left side doesn't work. Reason looks to be corrupted database files in the mozilla profile directory. In Linux, it will be $HOME/.mozilla/firefox//.
Close all browser instances, remove the files like places.sqlite (for navigation, bookmarks not working), formhistory.sqlite, search.json, search.sqlite (if search bar is not working). Hopefully, things works fine. If still not, create new profile and start using that.

Java plugin for Firefox

Instructions to install java plugin in linux at location: http://www.java.com/en/download/help/linux_install.xml#rpm
Its easy to get this link from internet, but, I want to put it here so that I can quickly get this whenever I need it.

GCC

"/usr/lib/gcc/i586-suse-linux/4.3/collect2 --verbose" gives us good data while using gcc for compilation. gcc tries to find lib*.so but not lib*.so.* during linking. This is same as /usr/bin/ld.

editcap

vim, less and any other file manipulation commands take lot of time to load or search in very big files and so we use split such big files into small to analyze them.
Similarly, we used to face problems in analyzing network packets captured files. To cut the files or to filter some packets from the network traces captured files, you can use editcap. Its command line oriented provided along with ethereal/wireshark.
Also, there are few perl scripts available in Internet which are based on libpcap. I yet to install and try that. Looks like that give us more control in filtering the packets.
If some one know or have idea about using libpcap, share it with us.