How to mount a windows fileshare

Assuming the folder 'library' is being shared on the ntserv1 machine, here's how to do it from the command line:

mount -t cifs //ntserv1/library -o username=pcr,password=Purisma1 /library

Be sure to create the /library directory on your unix box and set the permissions to allow everyone to access it.

The /etc/fstab entry will look like this:

//ntserv1/Library /library cifs password=Purisma1,username=pcr 0 0

Help, there's garbage in my Outlook signature (or what the hell is this  in my sig)

Outlook will add garbage characters to your sig. It is the UTF-8 byte order marker.. for some reason Microsoft wants to add this for all signatures.

Anyway, to fix it, you need to manually modify your .sig files. They are located under C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures on Windows XP. On Vista they can be found under C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures.

Once there, you will see several files:

signature.htm
signature.rtf
signature.txt

I just needed to modify the .rtf and .txt files by deleting the "" in the first line to rectify the issue. I used notepad for the .txt file and Word for the .rtf file.

oracle client libraries on 64bit linux (resolving libclntsh.so.10.1 error loading shared libraries)

I recently had a problem when after an oracle client install looked like it went ok, I tried to execute a particular utility (csscan) and it gave me an error of "libclntsh.so.10.1 error loading shared libraries".

I checked my LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and it was set to the following:

/home/oracle/product/10.2.0/lib:/lib/:/usr/lib

After banging my head, I realized I was installing a 64 bit Oracle client, but trying to load 32 bit shared libraries from the OS (/lib and /usr/lib are 32 bit, but the Oracle 'lib' directory is 64 bit. Oracle has a 'lib32' directory for 32 bit libraries)

After changing my LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the following:

/home/oracle/product/10.2.0/lib:/lib64/:/usr/lib64

My problems were solved... so even if you think your LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set right, it probably isn't if you get that error.

Symbolic Links with 'ln'

To remember how it works, I say something in my head - I'll be making a link to x, and calling it y.

ln -s x y

So if you want to make a link to a directory called /PSO/achan/data-dumps, but you want to reference it from within your current project directory's data-dumps directory, you'd do something like:

ln -s /PSO/achan/data-dumps data-dumps