PGI makelocalrc fails - but doesnt really

If you've just installed the portland (PGI) compilers, you may get a message when you try to compile telling you to run 'makelocalrc'- but then when you try (once you've worked out the syntax)- you may get message like this

cp: cannot stat `/opt/pgi/linux86/10.6/lib/libpgbind_real.a': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `/opt/pgi/linux86/10.6/lib/libpgbind_real.so': No such file or directory
localrc has not changed

I spent a while searching about this before finding a site (in Japanese- thank you babelfish) that said- don't worry, it's been written really. And it had. WHY LIE PGI!

Firefox -Could not find compatible GRE between version 1.9.2.7 and 1.9.2.7

Trying to start firefox on a new system (Rocks 5.3 running Scientific Linux SL 5.5 <=> Red Hat RHEL 5.5), I got the not terribly helpful message "Could not find compatible GRE between version 1.9.2.7 and 1.9.2.7". I found the answer by a roundabout route, but in hindsight I should have attacked this with
rpm -qa | grep "1.9.2.7"
which reveals the only package at this revision level to be xulrunner. Doing yum list all xulrunner showed that only the i386 version of xulrunner is installed. This is a 64bit system, with both i386 & x86_64 firefox versions. Lo & behold, yum install xulrunner installed the 64 bit version as well and the problem went away.  I guess yum erase firefox.x86_64 would have worked too.
No prizes for the error message though...

Kickstart cant repartion disks with software raid (md0 etc) arrays

If you're using kickstart to repartion disks with software raid arrays on them, you may get errors of the type 'no boot partion defined - may be due to lack of space'. I found this on a Rocks v5.3 Cluster running Scientific Linux 5.5 = Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5. Although kickstart has a 'clearpart' option that is supposed to clear existing partitions, it doesn't seem to do the job properly.

Solution- brutal but effective, make sure you don't want to keep anything off the disk: In the kickstart pre-install script (in rocks, put it in /export/rocks/install/site-profiles/5.3/nodes/replace-partition.xml  in the <pre> section) do

dd if-/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1k count=64
dd if-/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1k count=64

as required to zero the partition tables of all the disks. It's not really necessary to zero anywhere near this much of the disk, but it take no time and I like to be thorough!

I saw mention of zeroing the raid superblocks with mdadm --zero-superblock <partition> but that  didn't seem to do it for me.

Firefox with X tunneling opens on the local machine- duh!

So you're logged onto a local machine with X-windows- maybe it's linux, maybe it's Windows with an X-server application (Xming is good and free), and you've got an ssh connection to another remote system, with X-tunnelling switched on. At the command prompt for the remote system you type 'firefox &' (or just 'firefox' for that matter). It opens firefox on the remote system, displayed in an X-window on the local system- right? Well- maybe. If you have firefox already running on your local system, you may just get a new window from your local  firefox. Huh?

The answer is, it does open an X-window on the local machine- then it looks to see if there's a Firefox window on that display, and if it manages to find one, it connects to that instance and opens a new window. Which is brain-dead- if I wanted a new local window, I'd open one. I wanted a remote firefox window (maybe the remote system has access to machines that my local one doesn't. Say it's a HPC system frontend and I want to access IPMI cards on the nodes).

And the $64k question- how do you stop it doing this witless thing?

firefox -no-remote

Thanks to JMax, who posted this in Mozilla support but I could only find it through the google cache- it appears to have been deleted (very suspicious), and also to this Ubuntu thread http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-477493.html