Author Archives: Brandon Yap

Smelly glass tabletop

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We’ve had the dining room set for many years now and the glass tabletop has started to smell bad, kinda like an old fish tank. Over the last few months we’ve tried anti-bacterial wipes, surface cleaner, and vinegar only.

Nothing worked.

We eventually found a solution. I learned that despite conventional wisdom, glass is actually porous. Over the years it had absorbed all manner of scents and smells. We first sprayed a fine layer of vinegar on the tabletop, then liberally sprinkled bicarb of soda all over the surface until there were no exposed glass showing. This was then left for a number of hours (leave overnight if you have the time) for the bicarb and vinegar to do it’s thing.

After you cleanup, your tabletop will be left smelling wonderful.

Fixing push notifications for the Facebook app on iOS

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Every now and again, push notifications would stop working on the Facebook app on my iPhone.

Previously I had completely removed and re-installed the app and that fixed the problem, but i’ve discovered an easier and quicker way to fix them up.

  1. Go into Settings.
  2. Tap on Facebook.
  3. Tap on Push Notifications.
  4. Turn all the sliders off.
  5. Go back a screen.
  6. Tap on Push Notifications again.
  7. Turn the features you want notifications for back on.
  8. Go back a screen.

I did get a bit paranoid and exited the push notification settings after turning them off then went back in as i’m not sure if the settings are saved immediately or not. That fixed it for me. I hope it does the same for you too.

Let me know if this helps.

Mounting an IBM XiV LUN onto a RHEL v5 host without installing the HAK

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There are two methods of doing this. The first is installing the IBM Host Attachment Kit (HAK). This makes mounting any LUNS from the XiV dead easy, but isn’t what this article is about.

Installing the HAK will blow away your multipath.conf and any changes you might have made to it. What if you wanted to mount the LUN without installing the HAK? What if you wanted to mount LUNs from two different SANs?

This is where manually modifying multipath.conf comes in. I’m documenting the changes that the HAK made to multipath.conf so you don’t need to install it.

blacklist {
    device {
        vendor "IBM-ESXS"
    }
    device {
        vendor "LSILOGIC"
    }
    device {
        vendor "ATA"
    }
    device {
        vendor "VMware"
    }
    devnode "^(ram|raw|loop|fd|md|dm-|sr|scd|st)[0-9]*"
    devnode "^hd[a-z]"
    devnode "^cciss!c[0-9]d[0-9]*"
}
devices {
    device {
        path_checker tur
        product "2810XIV"
        vendor "IBM"
        rr_min_io 15
        path_grouping_policy multibus
        path_selector "round-robin 0"
        no_path_retry queue
        failback 15
    }
}
defaults {
    user_friendly_names yes
}

Pick and choose which bits you want to copy into your multipath.conf, the most important part being the devices stanza of the above config.

Since user_friendly_names is set to yes, this will give the device a name of /dev/mapper/mpathx. But if you don’t don’t like this you can name it whatever you want. To do this, find the wwid of the multipath device with “multipath -l”, then put this into your multipath.conf. Example below:

multipaths {
        multipath {
                wwid    3600507680193818250000000000001e9
                alias   mymount1
        }
        multipath {
                wwid    3600507680193818250000000000001ea
                alias   mymount2
        }
}

Your multipath device (LUN) will then be available as /dev/mapper/mymount1 and /dev/mapper/mymount2.