When trying to install the HRCS90 Revision 5 application on a new RHEL Linux x86-64 system I got the following error when running the setup.sh

[psoft@z4sp-ps2 Disk1]# ./setup.sh
Setting temporary directory /tmp/IA.27241
Executing setup.linux -DCOMP_NAME=sp-ps2 -DPS_UMASK=0022
Preparing to install…
Extracting the JRE from the installer archive…
Unpacking the JRE…
Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive…
Configuring the installer for this system’s environment…

Launching installer…

Invocation of this Java Application has caused an InvocationTargetException. This application will now exit. (LAX)

Stack Trace:
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /tmp/IA.27241/install.dir.27252/Linux/resource/jre/lib/amd64/xawt/libmawt.so: libXtst.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This one seemed odd to me because the PeopleTools 8.53 installs worked fine. I checked the MOS and didn’t find anything that looked right, then I did the obvious and checked to see if the libXtst libraries existed on the server, and there it wasn’t! Installed the RPM and all was good in the world!

yum install libXtst

Sometimes I find myself on a unix based system for the first time in awhile and I have to use the tar program to extract data from a tar or tar.gz compressed data set.

Here is a nifty set of helpful tips:

You can also extract files that match a specific pattern. This example shows how to extract files that start with psoft from the tar file psoft.tar regardless of its directory location:

$ tar -xf psoft.tar --wildcards --no-anchored 'psoft*'

To extract all xml files:

$ tar -xf psoft.tar --wildcards --no-anchored '*.xml'

Command Flags:

• -x: instructs tar to extract files.
• -f: specifies filename / tarball name.
• -v: Verbose (show progress while extracting files).
• -j : filter archive through bzip2, use to decompress .bz2 files.
• -z: filter archive through gzip, use to decompress .gz files.
• –wildcards: instructs tar to treat command line arguments as globbing patterns.
• –no-anchored: informs it that the patterns apply to member names after any / delimiter.

This post was sourced from article: Tar Extract a Single File(s) From a Large Tarball from CyberCiti

I was recently trying to test a system for a client that was trying to do some year end testing. In order to do this testing in the past they use to simply use the Oracle Database function “FIXED_DATE” to future date their database. When you use the FIXED_DATE feature it effects the SYSDATE variable and returns a date that is not the date of the operating system.

Unfortunately, with the more current releases of PeopleSoft, they have changed several of their system calls from SYSDATE to SYSTIMESTAMP. For some reason SYSTIMESTAMP is NOT effected by the FIXED_DATE override parameter, and from everything I have read there is no override parameter for changing the SYSTIMESTAMP. This leads to the problem of how to make future date testing work within PeopleSoft.

The only real solution is to future date the operating system. However, there are some real concerns that can come with this idea. I personally would highly recommend that you clone the server you are working on and use the cloned machine for this future date testing.

My testing system is stored on RackSpace servers, and when I made the cloned server and tried to change the OS date, it said it changed it, but when you looked again, it was still the current date/time. It turned out that the RackSpace system uses XEN on the RHEL OS to keep the server times in sync. I found the best way to change this was to add the sysctl parameter:

xen/independent_wallclock = 1

Once, I rebooted the server, I had no issue controlling the OS clock.

Linux uses an utility called uncompress to decompress *.Z files, however, it is not always installed by default.  It should appear in the /usr/bin folder as uncompress.  If it is not there, you can install the uncompress RPM, or you can use the gunzip program to uncompress the files by make a symbolic link.

ln -s gunzip uncompress

You might also want to make sure you have enough temporary space to uncompress the files.

When working on SSH sessions, you run into some environments that have weird prompts and colors associated with the prompt. Often I find I can’t even see the prompt where it is a dark blue on black. Maybe that is just a sign that I am getting older but it is really difficult to see.

So to change the prompt here are a list of options:

• \a : an ASCII bell character (07)
• \d : the date (Format: “Tue May 26”)
• \D{format} : the format is passed to strftime(3) and the result is inserted into the prompt string; an empty format results in a locale-specific time representation. The braces are required
• \e : an ASCII escape character (033)
• \h : the hostname up to the first ‘.’
• \H : the hostname
• \j : the number of jobs currently managed by the shell
• \l : the basename of the shell’s terminal device name
• \n : newline
• \r : carriage return
• \s : the name of the shell, the basename of $0 (the portion following the final slash)
• \t : the current time in 24-hour HH:MM:SS format
• \T : the current time in 12-hour HH:MM:SS format
• \@ : the current time in 12-hour am/pm format
• \A : the current time in 24-hour HH:MM format
• \u : the username of the current user
• \v : the version of bash (e.g., 2.00)
• \V : the release of bash, version + patch level (e.g., 2.00.0)
• \w : the current working directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde
• \W : the basename of the current working directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde
• \! : the history number of this command
• \# : the command number of this command
• \$ : if the effective UID is 0, a #, otherwise a $
• \nnn : the character corresponding to the octal number nnn
• \\ : a backslash
• \[ : begin a sequence of non-printing characters, which could be used to embed a terminal control sequence into the prompt
• \] : end a sequence of non-printing characters

In order to change the color you will need to add the escape sequence:  \e[x;ym where x = 0 or 1, zero is darker and one is lighter.

• y = 30 – Black, 31 – Red, 32 – Green, 33 – Brown, 34 – Blue, 35 – Purple, 36 – Cyan

So to change your prompt to be Red with user @ machine short name showing the directory in brackets and a mode at the end you would do the following, note that the \e[m at the end of the string effectively ends the color change otherwise the color change will impact everything that isn’t color controlled:

export PS1=’\e[1;31m[\u@\h \W] \$ \e[m’