Unmemorable Memories

Going into surgery, many people asked me how I felt. Was I afraid? Was I apprehensive? Did I have any anxiety? Did I ever think “what is something goes wrong?” or “what’s recovery going to be like? will it be difficult?”

I can truly say that God has given me peace. The apprehension, anxiety and fear never entered my mind. I never thought anything would go wrong. I never thought that recovery would be difficult. In fact, I expected myself to be up and about a few hours after the surgery. In the last few months, I’ve been noticing God leading me in various ways, slowly making changes in my life, giving me opportunities to share Him with those I come in contact with. And God continued to become more and more real in my life. I began to see that his work in my is not yet complete. He is still converting me, changing me, improving me, and using me. With that thought, how can I think that anything would go wrong on my surgery? God is not finished! He needs to finish his work in and with me. This is the thought that brought me the utmost peace.

And this peace is not without basis. For truly after the surgery, I was walking in a few hours. Pain? It was bearable. Within one day I began o resume all my normal activities (except heavy lifting — as strongly recommended by my surgeon).

Our God is truly our Greatest Physician. Not only does he care about the physical health, he also cares about our mental state.

God be praised.

Have you ever had an LDOM that failed to boot due to some erroneous configuration files in the root file system? Ever wish you could modify the root filesystem of that LDOM without having to boot the LDOM?

Well, you could take the virtual disk and re-assign it to another LDOM, and restarting the LDOM you just re-assigned it to, then access it from there.

For example:

ldm rm-vdisk bootdisk broken_ldom
ldm add-vdisk broken_bootdisk broken_ldom_bootdisk@primary-vds0 working_ldom
ldm stop working_ldom
ldm start working_ldom


Once working_ldom boots, you can run “devfsadm” to create the device links for the new disk. At which point you can mount it and fix whatever you want to fix.

But what if you didn’t have an LDOM that you could restart at this point? What if you didn’t have the resources to create a new temporary LDOM for this purpose?

There is another way but it has limitations. You will only be able to access the first partition on that virtual disk.

If the virtual disk is a zfs volume you can mount it directly as follows:
mount -o rw /dev/zvol/dsk/zpoolname/volname /mountpoint

If the virtual disk is a file, then you can use lofiadm to create a device for it:
lofiadm -a /path/to/vdisk/file
mount -o rw /dev/lofi/1 /mountpoint

I’ve only tested this on volumes that have UFS file systems on it. It may work with other file systems (even ZFS), I just haven’t tried it.

Now if anyone can figure out how to create device files for the other partitions within the volume (by mapping that device file to an offset within the file), then managing every slice in a virtual disk file or volume would be possible and greatly simplified.

Two days until we move. I have mixed emotions. On one hand I am excited at the prospects of moving to a new home. One that has been customized to a certain extent to our liking. One that is larger so that our two growing children will have more space to play and learn. One that is close to parks, a library, a community center, an Adventist school, shopping and many other amenities.

On the other hand, this old house is where many memories were made. This was our first home. Chris and I bought it together, moved into it together, planned our future here together. Both our children were born here. Caitlin has made many memories in this house. A part of me is sad to leave this home that has grown to be a part of us.

Being the son of a minister, I used to move from house to house a lot when I was a kid. I guess I never really got used to it. We may bring all our things, but it is inevitable that those intangible memories, although we bring them with us, makes us feel like we’ve left something behind.

It won’t be different this time around.

On March 15, 2008 at 4:58 P.M. my daughter Catherine Eeva was born. She was 5 lbs, 4.5 oz at birth. We are very grateful for this wonderful gift from God. Catherine is truly a gift from God, one we specifically asked for. Her arrival has been a “Hallelujah moment” for me.

I thank God for her, and I can only hope to do my best in training her for a life of dedicated service to the One who has entrusted her to me.

I thought this was pretty cool.