See a USB or CD/DVD drive in Terminal on OSX
Here’s a quick tip that will allow you to see a a mounted USB drive or CD/DVD from the terminal in Mac OS X Snow Leopard (though this probably works in all versions of OS X)…
cd /Volumes
This is the location of all mounted drives, including CDs, DVDs, USB Hard Disks, Flash Drives and even Mobile Me’s iDisk – they should all be available as folders below “/Volumes”.
Business Objects: Change FRS Location without the CMC
Today I had a situation where the one of my file servers went down, the failure was significant and required a rebuild so it was going to be down for a good day or so and whilst most of the data on that server wasn’t regarded as critical for my department it did host the Input and Output File Repository for Business Objects (where all of the reports, etc. are stored). Obviously we had a backup of the data so I had it restored to another location then went to re-point Business Objects to the new directory, normally this is done using the Central Management Console (CMC) as follows:
Unfortunately, because the original server was unreachable the IFRS and OFRS services had failed and despite my attempts in the Central Configuration Manager (CCM) to restart them they would not come back up. After putting in a support call with our BO partner one of their consultants found the answer, there is a command-line switch that can be added into the service properties (viewable via the CCM or services.msc) that allows you to over-write the location stored in the CMC which would look like the following…
“\\BusObjServer\C$\Program Files\Business Objects\BusinessObjects Enterprise 11.5\win32_x86\inputfileserver.exe” -rootDir \\NewFileServer\Filestore\Input -service -name Input.BusObjServer -ns BusObjServer -restart -requestport 40020
It was quite a weird problem but that worked a treat.
Categories: Business Objects Tags: BO, business objects, CCM, CMC, FRS
Privacy Tool: Disposable Email Address
From time to time I find myself forced to provide an email address to register on a website to get some content (a solution to a problem, a whitepaper, etc.), generally I’m loath to spread my email address around because (a) it’s a personal identifier and (b) I’m likely to end up with even more SPAM than I have now.
Well, there’s a great solution – you can use a temporary email address. There are several sites out there that will randomly generate an email address that become valid for a fixed period of time before the account (and all of the mail) is deleted. One thing that you should know is that the content of the emails themselves should not be personal since there there is often no authentication, it’s really just a quick and easy solution and is not secure in itself.
The site I tend to use if Guerrilla Mail, their temporary addresses last for 60 minutes but can be extended and they also let you pick your own address or take a randomly generated one. There are other sites out there but the only one I’ve had any experience with is 10 Minute Mail, I’m sure some quick googling will bring up a load of alternatives.