One day, I started seeing an odd pop up every time I started google chrome on my linux box at work.  If I just click the ‘OK’ button, chrome would work just fine.  The pop up is quite annoying though.

After some research, I found that this is caused by NFS server locking your profile.  My home directory on my linux box is located on an NFS mounted partition (part of an NIS infrastructure).  Its quite known that for some reasons an NFS server can lock SQLLite files and never reqlinquish the lock.  That’s precisely what happened to my chrome profile.

To remove the lock, you would need to, kind of, relocate the file nodes.  You can do the following to achieve that:

• cd ~/.config/google-chrome
• mv Default Default.bak
• cp -r Default.bak Default
• restart your google chrome browser
• then you can remove the old Default.bak directory

Today, one of our MySQL database suddenly went unresponsive. The first thing I noticed was the following lines in the error.log:

InnoDB: Unable to lock /path/to/ibdata1, error: 11
InnoDB: Check that you do not already have another mysqld process
InnoDB: using the same InnoDB data or log files.

Upon further investigation, I found a not perfectly matched issue but does look similar: http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?22,22344,24497#msg-24497.  I took a chance and did the following:

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At work, I had just received a new Dell desktop computer pre-installed with Windows 7.  First thing I did was to ‘join’ the computer into our internal Active Directory domain.  That was all good and I was able login to my desktop using my domain user id.  Then I started installing software and ‘personalizing’ my windows 7.  At some point, for some stupid reasons, I somehow removed my user profile folder (C:\Users\{myuserid}) … oops    

From that point on, I wasn’t able to persistently store any personalization.  Everytime I logged off and re-logged in, a new ‘temporary’ profile is created.  On every logged in, windows would present me with a ‘warning’ message that in essence said it was not able to find my ‘profile’.  I did a few things to try to fix this issue, including:    

1. manually adding C:\Users\myuserid folder
2. removing/re-adding my domain user to the desktop
3. detaching/re-joining the desktop to the domain

None helped.    

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Problem:

I have a directory structure from one server that I need to mirror onto another server.  The directory structure/tree is deep and contains hundreds of subdirectories.  I do not want to spend hours manually creating the directory structure on the other server.  I also do not want to have to back up and restore the content in the subdirectories.

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