Tech Adventures

On a new centos 5 install must things to do first

2011-12-27T04:41:00.000-08:00

Before you start using the linux box, install system updates.

If you are a engineer working on software development you must run both these commands, this will save you a lot of time later

yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'
yum groupinstall 'Development Libraries'

cvs update failed to create lock #cvs.lock

2010-10-18T07:34:00.002-07:00

Though there are lot of options available if you google for the same that says change ownership permission for cvs directory etc., but if your problem is not solved even after trying all the other methods do this, it may save your day.

chmod -R 777 <cvs path>/<project directory>

e.g., chmod -R 777 /cvs/myproject

macro `AM_PATH_CPPUNIT' not found in library

2010-08-12T05:11:00.000-07:00

If you happen to get this error just install the following programs

cppunit
cppunit-devel

rerun your program and it should run without any problems.

Catastrophic: event fd doesn't match conn fd!

2010-05-07T04:33:00.000-07:00

Install libevent greater than 1.4.x
Compile memcached and use --with-libevent=[ place where libevent is insalled ]
before you start memcached create link in /usr/lib for all the libevent library files.
You are good to go.

Command to list directories/folders in linux

2010-04-10T12:37:00.000-07:00

To list directories under current path use the following command

[root@192.168.1.1]$ ls -l | grep ^d

This lists all the directories under the current directory.

How to fix SVCHOST.EXE REGSVR32.EXE Application Error Memory Could not be written / read

2009-12-15T21:03:00.000-08:00

I have been seeing a window pop up with this error message every time I start my system "Generic Host Process: Application error - [ Memory Address ] referenced memory at [ Memory Address ]. The memory could not be 'written.'" even after I removed a trojan W32.Spybot.ATEW. Regular scans by Symantec AV and also Trojan Remover didn't report any malware. I searched for SVCHOST.EXE and I found this prefetch in %SystemRoot%\Prefetch

SVCHOST.EXE-3530F672.pf

I deleted it and rebooted my system. The error has disappeared.

For all kind of memory related problems for any of windows OS applications like svchost.exe, regsvr32.exe, etc., you can follow this article to resolve it. Say, if you have cleaned your system of Trojans and Viruses, you must also check the prefetch folder under WINDOWS directory for the file names that have similar file names as the application name displayed in error window. If you find any, its recommended to delete these files and reboot the system.

Installing and Configuring apache flood on CentOS

2009-06-14T22:32:00.000-07:00

I have often found that installing flood on 64 bit machine with CentOS fails.

you can follow these simple steps to install flood on your system

Download flood from

svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/flood/trunk flood

or

Browse to http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/httpd/flood/ and download from a mirror

If you want to install on remote machine you can also

wget http://apache.mirror.facebook.net//httpd/flood/flood-0.4.tar.gz

untar the compressed file where it is downloaded on your system by issuing the following command

[root@myserver] tar zxf flood-0.4.tar.gz

dowload apr-1, and apr-1-util from http://apr.apache.org/download.cgi

wget http://apache.opensourceresources.org/apr/apr-1.3.5.tar.gz
wget http://apache.opensourceresources.org/apr/apr-util-1.3.7.tar.gz

untar both apr files as it was done for flood

[root@myserver] cd apr-1.3.5
[root@myserver] ./configure
[root@myserver] ./make
[root@myserver] ./make install

and now for apr-1-util

[root@myserver] cd ../apr-util-1.3.7
[root@myserver] ./configure
[root@myserver] ./make
[root@myserver] ./make install

after installing both apr and apr-util flood can be compiled and installed; flood is built on top of these utilities.

[root@myserver] cd ../flood-0.4
[root@myserver] ./configure --with-apr=/usr/local/src/apr-1.3.5/apr-1-config --with-apr-util=/usr/local/src/apr-util-1.3.7/apu-1-config
[root@myserver] ./make
[root@myserver] ./make install

Optionally you may have to get a shell script from http://linux.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/linux.redhat/2005-03/0373.html if at the time of configuring you get errors like x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu': machine `x86_64-unknown' not recognized

Happy Flooding!!!

tail: cannot open `+1' for reading

2009-06-05T11:02:00.000-07:00

$ export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209

This will fix the problem

Calling static class methods with uasort

2009-04-14T06:40:00.001-07:00

class Testuasort
{
static function mysort($a, $b)
{
if ($a[0] == $b[0])
{
if($a[1] == $b[1]) return 0;
return $a[1] > $b[1] ? -1 : 1;
}
return $a[0] < $b[0] ? -1 : 1;
}

static function sortOnfield($narr)
{
uasort($narr, array(self,'mysort'));
return $narr;
}
}

?>

Further reading at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=14104&edit=1

Configure failed for xml/expat , apr-util

2009-03-27T06:27:00.000-07:00

On cent-os, redhat, fedora:

yum install expat-devel
yum install apr-devel

On ubuntu, debian

apt-get install libexpat1-dev
apt-get install libapr1-dev

and then configure your application

2008-12-12T21:11:00.000-08:00

perl Makefile.PL
Can't locate ExtUtils/MakeMaker.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.6/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.6 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.7/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.6/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.7 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.6 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8 .) at Makefile.PL line 1.

BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at Makefile.PL line 1.

If you happen to encounter this error while installing a perl configured script, it may be possible that your machine doesn't have perl MakeMaker so you need to update perl and its libraries

Installation on Fedora

yum install perl-devel

on Debian/Ubuntu

apt-get install perl-devel

This would install the latest stable version of perl and its dependent libraries. After update run the command

perl Makefile.PL

I everything is all right you may see a message like this

Checking if your kit is complete...
Looks good
Writing Makefile for HTTPD::Bench::ApacheBench

ApacheBench is the package I was installing on my system.

Working with CVS

2008-11-18T21:15:00.000-08:00

Though there are lot of tutorials on the internet for one to find out how to work with CVS. I would like to put few handy commands that I have found it difficult to recall when needed. That's going to save some time at least.

How do I checkout a branch?
cvs [-d /<cvs directory>] checkout -r <branch name> <release name>

This would checkout your files in the folder

How do I checkout a single file from cvs?
cvs [-d /<cvs directory>] co <release name>/<path to file>

NB: Text within <> symbols have to be replaced with actual names as they exist on your CVS repository.

nawk - where to find it?

2008-05-19T03:46:00.000-07:00

If at the time of configuring your program on linux the configure script says "nawk not found" you don't need to panic, though there is every reason to be, as, if your program requires you must provide. For achieving that you should create a soft link to awk as nawk

ln -s /usr/awk /usr/nawk

configure make and install

Compiling ServerLimit in Apache 2.x

2008-04-30T00:44:00.000-07:00

I had some requirement from my client that required me to set the ServerLimit directive of apache to increase my server limit. So that Apache can serve more number of clients I increased the MaxClients to 500 and after a restart I started receiving warning messages after server start saying to lower my MaxClients limit as ServerLimit was set to 256. One change that has been incorporated in Apache 2.2.x is that ServerLimit cannot be set through configuration files any more for mpm-prefork.

Workaround for this is to compile Apache with increased ServerLimit. So, before you compile, open prefork.c that would be at /server/mpm/prefork/prefork.c
and find the text "DEFAULT_SERVER_LIMIT" then go to the line that says #define DEFAULT_SERVER_LIMIT
there you would find 256 against this directive, change it to the value that you need your ServerLimit to, I changed it to 1000.

Configure, make and make install, and you are all set

Interview questions for PHP and MySQL - Part 1

2007-09-30T22:46:00.000-07:00

PHP

Q1.Can we write windows like applications in PHP.
Ans : Yes using PHP-GTK on linux and WinBinder on windows.

Q2.What difference does it make when I declare variables with $ and $ in prefix.
Ans: $x = "Lion";
$$x = "Zebra";
echo $Lion;
would display "Zebra"
Use : creating runtime variables

Q3.What is the difference between strpos and stripos function
Ans: strpos is case sensitive search, and stripos is case insensitive search

Q4.What are the ways by which we can find out if a variable has been declared?
Ans: isset or empty language constructs

Q5.What is "global" and how to use it?
Ans: variables declared outside the functions can be used inside the function using global keyword

Q6.What is the difference between echo and print
Ans: echo can take more than one parameter for displaying.
print cannot take more than one
e.g
echo 'This', 'That' //is valid
print 'This', 'That' //is invalid
print returns 1 always.
echo cannot be used to return anything
$ret = print "Abcd" //valid
$ret = echo "Abcd" //invalid

Q7.What are predefined variables in php, give some examples.
Ans: PHP provides an additional set of predefined arrays containing variables from the web server (if applicable), the environment, and user input. These new arrays are rather special in that they are automatically global

[ Resource Link : http://in.php.net/manual/en/language.variables.predefined.php ]

e.g., $_SERVER, $_REQUEST, $_POST, $_GET, $_ENV, $_COOKIE, $_FILES, $_SESSION, $GLOBALS, $php_errormsg, $http_response_header

Q8.Give examples of predefined classes in PHP, and specify the use of anyone of them.
Ans: stdClass, Exception,_PHP_Incomplete_Class, php_user_filter, Directory

Exception : for exception handling
Directory: dir class

Q9.Declaring a class.
Ans: public/private/protected [static] class <classname> extends <baseclassname>{
    public $x;
  …
    public function method_a() {
  …
  }
}

Q10.How can we instantiate a class with default values.
Ans: Write a function with the same name as class and assign values to the vars.
E.g.:
class myclass {
  private $var1, $var2;
  function myclass() {
    $this->var1 = "Demo";
    $this->var2 = "Disabled";
  }
  function __get($x) {
    return $this->$x;
  }
}

$m = new myclass();
echo $m->var1 . " Vars " . $m->var2;

Q11.Abstraction, interfaces explain the main difference.
Ans: a) Abstract classes cannot be instantiated,
b) They start with keyword abstract before the class name,
c) One can force the methods to be declared in the inheriting class by creating
abstract functions
d) only abstract class can have abstract methods
eg.
  abstract class a {
    abstract function b();
    public function c() {
      echo "Can be used as it is";
    }
  }

  class m extends a {
    public function b() {
      echo "Defined function b";
    }
  }

$tClass = new m();
$tClass->b();
$tClass->c();

Q12.Interface classes only provide the skeleton of the class that the inheriting class must implement.

Eg.
  interface Person{
    public function myFunc();
  }

  class Employee implements Person {
    public function myFunc() {
      echo "Implemented";
    }
  }

$tClass = new Employee();
$tClass->myFunc();

Q13.What are magic methods?
Ans: Functionalities like serializing, converting objects to string, getting setting values without explicit get and set methods for the variables etc, are magic functionality. PHP defines methods with names starting with __(double underscore).
Eg. __get, __set, __construct, __destruct, __set, __isset, __unset, __sleep, __wakeup, __toString, __clone, __autoload, __set_state

[ Resource Link : http://in.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.magic.php ]

Q14.What does function `eval` do?
Ans: Evaluate a string as PHP code;
Eg. eval('echo "This would be printed"');

Q15.What is the method by which PHP converts datatype of a given variable.
Ans: settype()
$a = "10"; // $a is string
settype($a,"integer"); // $a is integer

Q.Can we change php.ini settings at the runtime, and how?
Ans : Yes, using ini_set();

Q16.What is the difference between sort(), assort() and ksort? Under what circumstances would you use each of these?
Ans: Sorts an array, sorts an array and maintains index association, Sorts an array by key
Simple sort (sorts on values)
Simple sort after sorting the array (lets assume size of array is 10) rearranges the index, if we want to access element at index[5], using a simple sort an element value would have changed, but in assort the value is still held by index 5 though its position in the array may be 10th.
Ksort – sorts the array by key and maintains the key to data correlations

Q17.What is the difference between foo() & @foo()?
Ans: if an error occurs calling foo() would show up the error on the screen, whereas, @foo() would suppress the error because ‘@’ is a error control operator.

Q18.What is the difference between mysql_fetch_row() and mysql_fetch_array() and mysql_fetch_object?
Ans: mysql_fetch_row() – fetches a row as an enumerated array
mysql_fetch_array() - Fetch a result row as an associative array, a numeric array, or both
mysql_fetch_object - Fetch a result row as an object

Q19.What is the difference between include & include_once? include & require?
Ans: include_once includes the script only once if it is already included in the execution of the script
Include includes the script everytime the include is encountered in the code
Require is identical to include except that it results in fatal error when file is not present in the include_path.

Q20.What type of inheritance PHP supports?
Ans: An object can inherit only from one base class. Multiple inheritance is not supported in PHP.

Q21.How can we call an object's method by using the variable functions?
Ans: If MyClass contains function myFunction()

…
$foo = new MyClass();
$var = "myFunction";
$c->$var();

[ Resource Link : http://in.php.net/manual/en/functions.variable-functions.php ]

Ajax, Cross site scripting (JavaScript).

Q22.What is the use of AJAX?
Ans: If a page contains form that needs to be updated constantly based on runtime values, a javascript code constantly sends user input to the system and displays the results from the server, without refreshing the whole page.

Q23.What is cross site scripting, and how to avoid it?
Ans: Injecting a javascript code in the response of a form that is capable of calling and executing scripts from other site.

Occurs when variables holding form values are not cleaned with html code escaping functions.

Clean the variables before storing or before display. Recommendation is to display the code clean and store the value as it is, unless its specified otherwise.

MYSQL.

Q1.What is a join, what types of join are supported in MySQL.
Ans: A ‘join’ joins two table in such a way that all or partial records are selected from both the table based on join criteria.

Joins supported in mysql are :

[INNER | CROSS] JOIN

STRAIGHT_JOIN

LEFT [OUTER] JOIN

NATURAL [LEFT [OUTER]] JOIN

RIGHT [OUTER] JOIN

NATURAL [RIGHT [OUTER]] JOIN

Q2.In MySQL, what table type is required for foreign keys to work?
Ans: innoDB

Q3.How does full text search work.
Ans: A table must be a myISAM table
Table must have char varchar and text columns
FULLTEXT index must be created at the time of creation of table

Q4.What is the use of files .frm, .MYD, .MYI
Ans: frm files store the table definition
MYD files store the data
MYI files store the index

Q5.What is maximum size of a database in MySQL?
Ans: 65+GB / table / [ limited by the OS]

Q6.How many columns can exist in a mySql table?
Ans: 4096 colums

Q7.What is the maximum size of a row in a mysql table?
Ans: 65,535 not including blobs (as these are stored separately)

Q8. What would you use if you have a choice Natural [left] join or inner join or left join with using clause?
Ans: The NATURAL [LEFT] JOIN of two tables is defined to be semantically
equivalent to an INNER JOIN or a LEFT JOIN with a USING clause that names all columns that exist in both tables

[ Resource Link : http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/join.html ]

How to restore data from a previous PostgreSQL installation

2007-06-14T22:11:00.000-07:00

Recently I was given a task to restore data from a previous PostgreSQL installation to my latest Postgresql installation. The server on which the database server was running crashed. Though I tried to find if any help was available on the net and surprisingly most of the sites talked about restoring data from backup created using pgdump or pgdumpall. After a lot of digging I learnt that if I give my data path while starting the database server using pg_ctl PostgreSQL can make the data accessible. I did the same and I found that the database was not getting mounted properly. Here are the steps one should keep in mind if they want to access their database from previous postgresql installation directory.

1. Check for the version of previous Postgresql installation.
/.../data/PG_VERSION (location of directory data under previous postgresql installation directory)

2. Check if it matches the current version i.e if the version of Postgresql from PG_VERSION file matches your current Postgresql installation
- >If the versions match, just clean start your postgresql using your old directory in the data path
pg_ctl start -D /data path to previous installation/

or alternatively you can use

postmaster -D /data path to previous installation/

- > if the versions don't match as it was in my case, [I had Postgresql 7.4 installed previously and now I wanted to get the data on to Postgresql 8.4] we have to do a bit more than just starting database server with old data path.

Steps to recover data from previous version of Postgresql

a) install Postgresql 7.4 (remember even if you cannot find version 7.4 you can install any 7.x version)
for this, I downloaded the source and compiled and installed it on my system
Ubuntu users don't have to go through all this they can directly use binary package download from

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/postgresql/7.4.5-3

This site also has downloadable source code so people who use Linux flavors for which binary is not available can rebuild the binary on their system locally.

RPM binary packages are also available from www.postgresql.org

http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/binary/v7.4.17/

Once installed, use the command in step-2, Postgresql should mount the database without any errors, login to postgresql database server and you should be able to see all your previous data.

Making the best use of Internet

2006-12-07T19:12:00.000-08:00

Internet has grown manifolds as a community. But delving deeper into this community, I could draw a conclusion that on the internet if you see the number of people visiting sites that are in the language they understand is higher, than the sites that are in other languages. Surprisingly, people have started cornering themselves again with the language barrier. But, now netizens don't need to worry, as there are online tools available that can do the translation of web pages to language of your choice from other languages on the fly. This indeed opens up few more areas where you can find information and use it too. I was searching for some resource on Debian Linux, and even after searching for two days I didn't find any information that would have helped me. Fortunately, search engines like Google, also add [Translate] link if the site is in some other language that can be translated. Finally, I ended up getting a proper explanation about the problem and its solution on a French site. Other sites offering similar service is Babelfish owned by altavista.com. In the initial stages translators were used more like humor generators where you feed in a sentence, reverse the result back into english and it use to be amusing, most of the time. Times have changed and now more languages are added, and, one can easily translate text/html pages from French, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, etc. There are still improvements going on and I am sure the translators would be able to translate texts without errors in the near future. A nice thing that has been added with this translators is that they also convert the links to go through the translators so that navigating the website is easy and seamless, as you don't have to do translation manually every time you click a link on the web page. Babelfish still does not have support for Russian, though they have it on their website, google scores on this. If someone is not obsessed with a particular site they can see the translations on all the websites available and see which site support a particular language better. Google Translation
Babelfish Translation

The sites that I commonly use. So, welcome to the yet unexplored area of Internet.

Setup Alias for your directories on Apache

2006-11-14T10:07:00.000-08:00

Its very easy to setup aliases on Apache running under *nix platforms. It took a whole day to figure out and setup aliases for directories on Apache under Windows.

1. open httpd.conf for editing in your favorite text editor. Please be sure, you edit the right file.
2. search for word "Alias" [without quotes]. After search you may find something like this
# Alias ... [ alias name ] [full path name]
3. Delete # from the line, if present, otherwise add your own Alias directive as below.

Alias /img "C:\Myimages\images"

where "/img" is the alias you want to have for directory "C:\Myimages\images"

4. Save the file
6. Restart apache [ refer http://httpd.apache.org/ for starting up your apache webserver, incase you don't know how to]

Thats it, folks !!

I wish there were UnDo commands in Life too

2006-10-19T03:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, was an amazing day. Since morning I was feeling great. I had things lined up, and I was enjoying doing every small task I had in mind. I had written in my previous post that my hard drive crashed. I would have got my data the next day I wrote about it. I was desperately waiting for the person give me the address of the technician. But, as the saying goes .. "Had life been so easy!". Anyways, though I didn't receive any information about the technician till evening, I had my counter plans already in place. All my "What if ?" things and "What if not ?" things were in place. It was like a commander, having his infantary in very high spirits, ready for a war. I had to finish my work at my office, and then only I could go back home and do some self-learnt know hows. I was so anxious to try out the new things, but as the saying goes .. "Had life been so easy..". Finally the time came when I was out of my office, and then I had to take transport courtsey: Govt. of Karnataka, back home. The ride was a bit harsh, but I was not even thinking about it. Again, the excitement of seeing my PC working was more than all that I was going thru. Reached home, and connected my hard drive to my friends PC as slave. I got some tools, from the internet, and wanted to test them out on my HDD, these tools can read partition information and can help correct them. Anyways, in my mind, I always was having the curiosity factor building up but I delayed the diagnosis for sometime. First I freshened myself up, and pepped up with some boosters that I think I would have required. I still had read the information, didn't see it working on a hard drive live. I needed all my experience and all my strengths in my side and with right proportions to do the next thing. That was going ahead and running the tools on my HDD. First, I installed the tools on my friends system, and then started the application. The application reported error that something was wrong with Access mode and it was wrong. The partition information had changed statistics of my HDD in a way that I had 200 GB FAT-16 Drive. For all the people new to FAT-16, its just a file system used earlier by stone age DOS. No way it can access anything more than 2 GB. First I corrected this problem by selecting Access mode as LBA from my BIOS Menu. After this I started my application again, and tried to correct the problem by selecting Automatically rebuild partition table . This didn't help, so I scanned the disk and manually selected the partition tables. It showed me the partition information, and I had a XXL smile on my face.. "My Precious, I said". I wrote the partition table information. Fixed the HDD on my computer back and started ... Viola, it booted in Windows, I checked and all my partitions were back as they were earlier. How does it feel when you get back your 80 GB+ data?

How to crash your hard drive?

2006-10-15T06:07:00.000-07:00

Sitting idle, without having much to do on this lazy Sunday morning, because of a crashed hard drive on my PC, I couldn’t find a better thing to do than to update my blog.
Every time I thought of my system, I felt miserable. It all just happened too fast, and by the time I realized it was just a bit too late. Now, when I look back and think about how it all happened, I am convinced; they were series of events that were waiting to be discovered by me. I perhaps may have done something to not let it happen, but I guess I was too excited with the outcome of the adventures I was having with my system. No idea ever flashed, for what was actually in store for me, and what I learnt was something that happened for the first time with me. In spite of being in the field of computers for over a decade, I never encountered this kind of problem. For once it did occur in my mind this was getting more exciting and can be a good feed for a desi techno masala action thriller!
I have a dual boot hard drive with Linux on one and Windows on the other partition. The Linux partition had its swap file on the same partition where OS was installed. Power cuts use to make my Linux OS repair its file system every time I boot on Linux, so I tried to create a swap partition on one of my other partitions, all in good faith. I made a DOS partition, on one of the four partitions I have, and formatted my newly created partition. I left some space for Linux swap. I thought I would do the rest of my work from Linux itself. I started my system and phew.., my GRUB loader failed!. I tried and tried, but couldn’t get the GRUB loader up, I left it as it is and hoped that it would understand and repair all by itself once I come back from my work. After getting back home, I started my system only to be disappointed, my prayers were unheard, and I was still having the same system showing me the dull black and white screen with messages that only geeks with masters in geekology would be able to comprehend. Though the whole day I tried to find a way out of this tricky situation on the internet, but perhaps the explanations were too alien for me to understand it in depth. Over the years in computers I have understood one thing, as you keep learning; the messages get more and more cryptic, something like “GRUB Loader failed Error 17”. Being into application development I am more used to getting meaningful error messages and I get the source code to debug. Here, I had more challenging situation, and tried seeking help from one of my friends, but he was too as clueless as I was. Finally I thought of using some commands on NT Recovery console, I have been reading it all on the internet while I was searching for repairing GRUB. And I thought of trying it, but then, what unfolded was absolutely funny. My system was unusable, NT reported error as if a dutiful mom was looking for her babies … it was not able to find NTLDR and I knew I was doomed. What I did was not easy, I wrote the boot record by using FIXBOOT and though difficult, I could do it with so much ease was because I didn’t know much about its actions on a multi-boot hard drive. I learnt one thing after all this adventure that, I should not use this command next time I am caught in this kind of situation. But perhaps, the adventure with my system was not yet over and script for the other part of my adventure was getting ready in my mind. Last time when I saw list of commands on recovery console of NT, I saw one more command called FIXMBR. I saw a ray of hope in this command as I read earlier on the net that GRUB has to do something with the MBR and this command was looking more promising as the time passed. My desire of seeing my system working was growing stronger every second I spent time in isolation. Even if it meant I cannot use Linux for sometime. I wanted to see my system ‘That Worked’ and, I was ready to take my chances. I ran the command and it gave me a warning message of loosing all the data on the hard drive, I went ahead and pressed key and I got very promising messages confirming MBR was written. I started my system and hoped for the best. After POST it tried loading the OS, but perhaps after issuing the earlier command my MBR got corrupted and my hard drive was doubly unusable. My system read “Invalid MBR”. I sensed a chill in my spine, and over the years I have learn't the art of getting out of these kinds of tight situations. By holding my head with my both hands and pressing while looking down does help me ease. I did that and it helped me a lot. I started thinking now what next? Any more tricks? I thought of giving up, and called my friend letting him know about this. I guess he was disturbed in middle of his sleep so I let him sleep. But I just couldn’t stop myself and wanted to know if there is any possibility of getting my valuables back. 80 GB of data, it’s a big thing to loose. I called another friend of mine in Hyderabad. I felt better when he said it is possible to recover the data. We had a very cordial discussion on this topic with Hindustani classical background music. My friend’s one and half year old daughter has started singing, and she made the ambiance as if it was of 15th – 16th century. Next day morning I took some more opinion about my problem and I learnt that I will have to give my hard drive to some hard drive specialist. I hope I will have it up and running soon, I still have to spend a day in exile before my data is recovered. How it feels when one looses a year of data and all the work?