Posts Tagged ‘Rename’

Fix Oracle virtualbox Virtual Machine inacessible error in Linux / Windows Host OS

Monday, November 2nd, 2020

Fix Oracle virtualbox Virtual Machine inacessible error in Linux / Windows Host OS

Say you have installed a Virtual Machine on a Host OS be it Windows 7 / 10 or some GNU / Linux / FreeBSD OS and suddenly after a PC shutdown / restart the Virtual machine shows as it couldn't be run by Ora Virtualbox anymore with a message of VM Machine "inaccessible", what is causing this and how to fix it?

Virtualbox-virtual-machine-in-inaccessible-state-screenshot
This error is usually caused by the Guest Operating System's forceful behavior or an OS system crash such as sudden hang due to kernel error or due to sudden electricity drop. Whatever the reason if improper sending of termination process signals to Oracle Vbox are not properly handled this is causing the VBox to not recreate its own files and kill (close) the application of Oracle Virtualbox program in gracious way.

On Windows Virtualization Host OS the common files that needs to be tampered by Virtualbox are found under Virtualbox VMs\Name-of-VM:

virtualbox-vm-inacessible-_error-screenshot.png

For example if you have a Ubuntu installed

Virtualbox-virtual-machine-in-inaccessible-state-screenshot.png
C:\Users\\VirtualBox VMs\Ubuntu

If you have CentOS7 installed instead it will be under

C:\Users\\VirtualBox VMs\CentOS7

Usually under this dir you will find files which are with .vbox extension.

The virtual box files with extension .vbox contain metadata the virtualbox hypervisor requires to resolve the guest virtual OS' configuration.
If the main .vbox file is corrupted (i.e. reporting that it is empty) then use the backup .vbox-prev file to recover the contents of the original file.

How to solve the Virtualbox inacessible weird error:

Usually under the Virtualbox VMs\VM_name you'll find a directory / filestructure like:
 

Logs/
Snapshot/
VM_Name.vbox
VM_Name.vbox-prev
VM_Name.vbox-tmp
 

 

1. Considering .vbox is empty Rename the empty .vbox files a temporary name (e.g. rename VM_Name.vbox to VM_Name-empty.vbox). If you're unsure whether it is empty you can check by opening the file in a text editor and make sure it is empty.

2. Then make a copy of the backup file VM_Name.vbox-prev, where the copy will have the same name as the original but with the word "copy" appended to it (i.e. VM_Name.vbox-prev is renamed to VM_Name_copy.vbox-prev) as well as copy VM_Name.vbox-tmp to VM_Name_copy.vbox-tmp.

! Note that it is important to retain the original backup .vbox-prev file it should not be altered or itself renamed.

3. Now go rename the copy of the newly created .vbox-prev file VM_Name.vbox-prev to the name of the empty .vbox file (VM_Name.vbox).

Now that this is done you may add the .vbox file (guest os) back into the VBOX hypervisor.

If for some reason this did not work and you have a proper working copy of the Virtual Machine under VM_Name.vbox-tmp another approach to try is:
 

1.  Go to your Virtualbox folder i.e. C:\Users\hipo\VirtualBox VMs\Ubuntu

2. Check for file extensions files Ubuntu.vbox-tmp or Ubuntu.vbox-prev needed are there.

3. Overwrite Ubuntu.vbox file with the -tmp one, Just rename file from Ubuntu.vbox-tmp to Ubuntu.vbox

4.  Exit from Virtual Machine and Power it on again.

Hopefully this should recovered the state and snapshot of the "inaccessible" guest VM and
you should now see error gone away and VM will work as before.

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in System Administration, Various, Virtual Machines | No Comments »

How to change Outlook Signature – modify and delete Microsoft Outlook email signatures

Monday, February 17th, 2014

I'm using Mozilla Thunderbird over the last 5 years in my life. Just now in my new job place in Hewlett Packard, in order to have well functional mail (with exchange server) – I started using Microsoft Outlook.
Logically a little while after I started my work I have to update my Outlook E-mail signature to reflect my contact details (job position title, email, stand-alone / mobile phone, office address etc.). As of moment of writting I'm using Microsoft Outlook 14.0.6123.5001 (32 bit) part of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010.

Its a kind of irony that I had to use Microsoft products after all these years trying my best to avoid using Microsoft technologies but heh, this is life … Though this article will be a bit trivial I decided to blog it because already I had to change email signature for a 3rd time over the last 3 months and every now and then after a month time I tend to forget how I did it last time.

Here is how I changed Email Signature in Outlook:

1. Click on "New-Email" (located below File menu)

2. Click on "Insert" (menu tab)

3. Click on "Signature"

microsoft-outlook-pop3-mail-client-change-signature-screenshot

4. Click on "New" button

As you see Outlook is written in very intelligent manner 🙂
It is possible to have more than one signature and change them every now and then (I guess that's made for Schizophrenic people who like changing their signature a couple of times a day accepting different personalities 🙂 🙂 🙂
For already existing signatures just edit the old one – click on Edit Signature

microsoft-outlook-exchange-how-to-change-email-signature
http://www.clarion.edu/273437/
 

  • Rename Signatures:

        Perform steps 1-4 in ('Create Signatures') except click "Rename button instead of 'New' and begin typing new name.

  • Delete Signatures:

        Perform steps 1-4 in ('Create Signatures') except click 'Delete" button instead of 'New'.

  • Modify Signatures:

        Highlight signature name you wish to modify under

  1. "Select Signature to Edit" then modify signature.

  2. Click "Save" button to save any signature changes made.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Everyday Life, Outlook, Various, Windows | No Comments »

Linux: Rename all files extension from upper to lower cases

Friday, February 14th, 2014

Lets say you're an admin involved in webhosting and due to a programmer's mistake, you end up with directory full with files with extension in upper cases but for actual version of website (all pictures are red only in lower cases), hence would like to transform these to lower cases.
To give an example, to illustrate what I mean, lets say you have in a directory files like;

filename.JPG, picture.PNG, new-picture.GIF

and you would like all files to be renamed to lower extension characters, i.e.:

filename.jpg, picture.png, new-picture.gif.
 

# find . -name '*.*' -exec sh -c 'a=$(echo {} | sed -r "s/([^.]*)\$/\L\1/"); [ "$a" != "{}" ] && mv "{}" "$a" ' \;

That's all enjoy 🙂

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Linux, System Administration, Various | No Comments »

Mysql: How to disable single database without dropping or renaming it

Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014

mysql rename forbid disable database howto logo, how to disable single database without dropping it
A colleague of mine working on MySQL database asked me How it is possible to disable a MySQL database. He is in situation where the client has 2 databases and application and is not sure which of the two databases the application uses. Therefore the client asked one of the database is disabled and wait for few hours and see if something will break / stop working and in that way determine which of the two database is used by application.

My first guess was to backup both databases and drop one of them, then if it is the wrong one to restore from the SQL dump backup, however this wasn't acceptable solution. So second I though of RENAME of database to another one and then reverting the name, however as it is written in MySQL documentation RENAME database function was removed from MySQL (found to be dangerous) since version 5.1.23 onwards. Anyhow there is a quick hack to rename mysql database using a for loop shell script one below:

mysql -e "CREATE DATABASE \`new_database\`;"
for table in `mysql -B -N -e "SHOW TABLES;" old_database`
do
  mysql -e "RENAME TABLE \`old_database\`.\`$table\` to \`new_database\`.\`$table\`"
  done
  mysql -e "DROP DATABASE \`old_database\`;"

Other possible solution was to change permissions of Application used username, however this was also complicated from mysql cli, hence I thought of installing and using PHPMyAdmin to make modify of db user permissions easier but on this server there wasn't Apache installed and MySQL is behind a firewall and only accessible via java tomcat host.

Finally after some pondering what can be done I came with solution to request to disable mysql database using chmod in /var/lib/mysql/data/, i.e.:

sql-server:~# chmod 0 /var/lib/mysql/databasename
Where databasename is the same as the database is named listable via mysql cli.

After doing it that way with no need to restart MySQL server database stopped to appear in show databases; and client confirmed that disabled database is no longer needed so we proceeded dropping it.

Hope this little article will help someone out there. Cheers :

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in MySQL, System Administration, Various, Web and CMS | 4 Comments »

How to change users quota to NO QUOTA on Qmail with Vpopmail Mail server install / Qmail mail over quota issue

Monday, February 20th, 2012

 

Qmail Vpopmail quota exceeded Dolphin Logo

Already on a couple of mail boxes located on one of the qmail powered mail servers I adminiter, there is an over QUOTA reached problem encountered.

Filling up the mailbox quota is not nice as mails starts get bounced back to the sender with a message QUOTA FULL or EXCEEDED MESSAGE, if this is a crucial mail waiting for some important data etc. the data is never received.
Below is a copy of the mail quota waarning notification message:

Delivered-To: email_use@my-mail-domain.net
Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:40:36 +0000
X-Comment: Rename/Copy this file to ~vpopmail/domains/.quotawarn.msg, and make appropriate changes
X-Comment: See README.quotas for more information
From: Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon@different.bg>
Reply-To: email@www.pc-freak.net
To: Valued Customer:;
Subject: Mail quota warning
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
Your mailbox on the server is now more than 90% full. So that you can continue
to receive mail you need to remove some messages from your mailbox.

As you can read from the copy of the mail message above, the message content sent to the mail owner whose quota is getting full is red from /var/vpopmail/domains/.quotawarn.msg

The mail reaching quota problem is very likely to appear in cases like low mailbox quota set, but sometimes also occurs due to bugs in vpopmail quota handling.

Various interesting configuration settings for mail quotas etc. are in /home/vpopmail/etc/vlimits.default file, (assuming vpopmail is installed in /home).

In my specific case, the default vpopmail mailbox quota size was set to only 40 Megabytes.
40MB is too low if compared to todays mailbox size standards which in Gmail and Yahoo  mail services are already a couple of gigabytes.
Hence to get around the quota troubles, I  removed the quota for the mail.
To remove the quota size in vpopmail set for address (email_user@my-mail-domain.net) used cmd:

qmail-server:~# vmoduser -q NOQUOTA email_user@my-mail-domain.net

To save myself from future quota issues, I decided to apply a permanent fix to all those over quota size VPOPMAIL mailbox problems by removing completely quota restriction for all mailboxes in my vpopmail existent mail domain.

To do so, I wrote a quick simple bash loop one-liner script:

qmail-server:~# cd /home/vpopmail/domains
qmail-server:~/vpopmail/domains# cd my-mail-domain.net
qmail-server:~/vpopmail/domains/my-mail-domain.net# for i in *; do \
vmoduser -q NOQUOTA $(echo $i|grep -v vpasswd)@my-mail-domain.net; \
done

This works only on vpopmail installations which are configured to store the mail messages directly on the filesystem. Therefore this approach will not work for people who during vpopmail install had configured it to store mailboxes in MySQL or in other kind of SQL db engine.

Anyways for Vpopmail installed to use SQL backend, the script can be changed to read directly a list with all the mailboxes obtained from databasae (SQL query) and then, loop over each of the mail addresses apply the vmoduser -q NOQUOTA mail@samplemaildomain.net.

I've written also a few lines shell script (remove_vpopmail_emails_domain_quota.sh), it accepts one argument which is a vpopmail domain to which the admin would like to reset all applied mailbox quotas. The script is useful, if you have to often remove all quotas for vpopmail domainsor have to do quota wipe out simultaneously for multiple email domain names  located on different servers.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Qmail, System Administration | No Comments »