How to get "normal" scrollbars in Ubuntu Unity

I hate the little scrollbar in Ubuntu because on a laptop, it's harder to get precise control of the cursor to hit the few-pixel-width area (the orange bit in the first image below).

To get "normal" scrollbars, type this command:

gsettings set com.canonical.desktop.interface scrollbar-mode normal

Should you want to get the Ubuntu-style scrollbar back, reset the parameter:

gsettings reset com.canonical.desktop.interface scrollbar-mode 

Nice online resource plus ebook for MPI

Wes Kendall from University of Tennessee, Knoxville has produced a website showing how to code in MPI, including installing an Amazon EC2 cluster. For portability, the site content is also available as a Kindle ebook for only US$5.

Scripting Bright Cluster Manager

At my new position as Sr. SysAdmin at Drexel's University Research Computing Facility (URCF), we use Bright Cluster Manager. I am new to Bright, and I am finding it very nice, indeed. One of its best features is programmatic access via a Python API. In about half an hour, I figured out enough to modify the node categories of all the nodes in the cluster.

Node categories group nodes which have similar configurations and roles. Example configuration may be a list of remote filesystem mounts, and an example role may be Grid Engine compute node with 64 job slots. The cluster at URCF has 64-core AMD nodes and 16-core Intel nodes, so I created a category for each of these. Then, I needed to change the node categories from the default to the architecture-specific categories. The script below did  it for the Intel nodes.

Google Blogger/Blogspot is a second-class citizen

I just browsed through old posts and realized that all the embedded images are now gone. This happened, I am guessing, due to the integration of Google+ with Blogger. Some of my old posts are now fairly useless without the images. Grrr.

Design Change

I just discovered that Blogger's dynamic layout broke Readability. So, it's back to a basic layout.

Introduction to Lustre from Whamcloud's Andreas Dilger

Exchange email support for Evolution on Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail

First, a little personal update: I have just left Wake Forest University, and joined Drexel University as a senior systems administrator in charge of the high performance computing University Research Computing Facility.

There are some dependencies which have not been properly encoded into the Exchange MAPI plugin for Evolution in Ubuntu 13.04. To get MAPI support, you must install: evolution-mapi and python-samba.

I was not able to get Exchange MAPI to work with Drexel's Exchange server: the issue was during the authentication step. However, using Exchange Web Services works. This uses Exchange's web service, which presents all the data in XML. To use this, the evolution-ews package has to be installed. Then, for the Host URL, use the usual web access address, appended with /EWS/Exchange.asmx So, if the webmail address is https://exchangeweb.myorganization.com/ the Host URL for Evolution will be https://exchangeweb.myorganization.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx

UPDATE: There is a bug in the exchange-ews package: there is an issue with sending mail. To fix, edit the the file in  ~/.config/evolution/mail/sources/  that contains a line that starts "Email=", and change it to Email=myemail@myorganization.com