Unable To Connect Your Phone In VirtualBox Through USB Cable??

Recently I came to know about the Premium Suite For Samsung Galaxy Note. And being a proud owner of this great device it was quite obvious that I wanted to take the pleasure of this. So, I thought of upgrading my phone through Samsung Kies. But I have been working of Linux since last couple of years, so got kinda stuck as Kies doesn't come for Linux. So, I installed Oracle VirtualBox on my Ubuntu Box and installed Windows 8 in it. After that I quickly installed Kies in it. But, to my surprise I was not able to connect my phone. After some diagnosis I found the error message shown below :


Failed to access the USB subsystem. VirtualBox is not currently allowed to access USB devices. You can change this by adding your user to the 'vboxusers' group. Please see the user manual for a more detailed explanation.

And the detail message was :


NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x00004005)
Component: 
Host
Interface: 
IHost {dab4a2b8-c735-4f08-94fc-9bec84182e2f}
Callee: 
IMachine {5eaa9319-62fc-4b0a-843c-0cb1940f8a91}

If you are also facing something similar, don't worry. There is simple one line workaround for this problem. But before that let me put one thing. This is not a problem with VirtualBox. You just have to add the current user to the vboxusers group. Issue the following command to do this :
sudo usermod -aG vboxusers <your username>

*Replace <your username> with your user.

Do not forget  to log off and back in to finalize the change in permissions. After logging in restart your VM, open Kies, plug-in your phone and you are good to go.

HOW TO BENCHMARK HBASE USING YCSB

YCSB (Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark) is a popular tool for evaluating the performance of different key-value and cloud serving stores. You can use it to test the read/write performance of your Hbase cluster and trust me it's very effective. In this post i'll show you how to build and use YCSB for your particular version of Hbase. So, this is just about setting up and using YCSB and not about YCSB itself. For detailed info on YCSB you can go to the below specified links :

1- Github-YCSB page : https://github.com/brianfrankcooper/YCSB
2- The paper from ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, "Benchmarking Cloud Serving Systems with YCSB" : http://research.yahoo.com/files/ycsb.pdf

So, let us get started...

Step1- Clone the YCSB git repository :

apache@hadoop:~$ git clone http://github.com/brianfrankcooper/YCSB.git

This will create a directory caleed YCSB inside your current directory. (It might take some time depending on your internet connection speed. So, be patient)

Step2- Go inside this newly created YCSB directory and move inside the hbase directory. You will find an xml file here named as pom.xml. Open this pom.xml file and edit it so that it looks like this :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <parent>
    <groupId>com.yahoo.ycsb</groupId>
    <artifactId>root</artifactId>
    <version>0.1.4</version>
  </parent>
  <artifactId>hbase-binding</artifactId>
  <name>HBase DB Binding</name>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.apache.hbase</groupId>
      <artifactId>hbase</artifactId>
      <!--<version>${hbase.version}</version>-->
      <version>0.94.4</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.apache.hadoop</groupId>
      <artifactId>hadoop-core</artifactId>
      <!--<version>1.0.0</version>-->
      <version>1.0.4</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>com.yahoo.ycsb</groupId>
      <artifactId>core</artifactId>
      <version>${project.version}</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>${maven.assembly.version}</version>
        <configuration>
          <descriptorRefs>
            <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef>
          </descriptorRefs>
          <appendAssemblyId>false</appendAssemblyId>
        </configuration>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <phase>package</phase>
            <goals>
              <goal>single</goal>
            </goals>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
</project>

      Pay attention to the lines in red. These are the changes that you have to make in order to build YCSB without any problem for your specific version of Hbase.

NOTE : As of this writing I am usign hadoop-1.04 and hbase-0.94.4, so I have mentioned these versions in the above shown file. You have to specify the versions which you are going to use.

Step3- Now, go back to your terminal and move inside the YCSB directory :
apache@hadoop:~$ cd YCSB

Step4- It's time to do the build now :
apache@hadoop: /YCSB/ mvn clean package
This will start the build process. You can see all the information as the build process continues. If everything goes fine then you will see something like this on your terminal :


NOTE: If multiple descriptors or descriptor-formats are provided for this project, the value of this file will be non-deterministic!
[WARNING] Replacing pre-existing project main-artifact file: /hadoop/projects/YCSB/voldemort/target/archive-tmp/voldemort-binding-0.1.4.jar
with assembly file: /hadoop/projects/YCSB/voldemort/target/voldemort-binding-0.1.4.jar
[INFO]                                                                      
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building YCSB Release Distribution Builder 0.1.4
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO]
[INFO] --- maven-clean-plugin:2.3:clean (default-clean) @ ycsb ---
[INFO]
[INFO] --- maven-checkstyle-plugin:2.6:checkstyle (validate) @ ycsb ---
[INFO]
[INFO] --- maven-assembly-plugin:2.2.1:single (default) @ ycsb ---
[INFO] Reading assembly descriptor: src/main/assembly/distribution.xml
[INFO] Processing sources for module project: com.yahoo.ycsb:core:jar:0.1.4
[INFO] Processing sources for module project: com.yahoo.ycsb:cassandra-binding:jar:0.1.4
[INFO] Processing sources for module project: com.yahoo.ycsb:hbase-binding:jar:0.1.4
[INFO] Processing sources for module project: com.yahoo.ycsb:hypertable-binding:jar:0.1.4
[INFO] Processing sources for module project: com.yahoo.ycsb:dynamodb-binding:jar:0.1.4
[INFO] Processing sources for module project: com.yahoo.ycsb:elasticsearch-binding:jar:0.1.4
[INFO] Processing sources for module project: com.yahoo.ycsb:infinispan-binding:jar:0.1.4
[INFO] Processing sources for module project: com.yahoo.ycsb:jdbc-binding:jar:0.1.4
[INFO] Processing sources for module project: com.yahoo.ycsb:mapkeeper-binding:jar:0.1.4
[INFO] Processing sources for module project: com.yahoo.ycsb:mongodb-binding:jar:0.1.4
[INFO] Processing sources for module project: com.yahoo.ycsb:orientdb-binding:jar:0.1.4
[INFO] Processing sources for module project: com.yahoo.ycsb:redis-binding:jar:0.1.4
[INFO] Processing sources for module project: com.yahoo.ycsb:voldemort-binding:jar:0.1.4
[INFO] Processing sources for module project: com.yahoo.ycsb:ycsb:pom:0.1.4
[INFO] Building tar : /hadoop/projects/YCSB/distribution/target/ycsb-0.1.4.tar.gz
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Reactor Summary:
[INFO]
[INFO] YCSB Root ......................................... SUCCESS [1.940s]
[INFO] Core YCSB ......................................... SUCCESS [23.149s]
[INFO] Cassandra DB Binding .............................. SUCCESS [7.421s]
[INFO] HBase DB Binding .................................. SUCCESS [15.638s]
[INFO] Hypertable DB Binding ............................. SUCCESS [2.805s]
[INFO] DynamoDB DB Binding ............................... SUCCESS [3.451s]
[INFO] ElasticSearch Binding ............................. SUCCESS [8.123s]
[INFO] Infinispan DB Binding ............................. SUCCESS [2:27.468s]
[INFO] JDBC DB Binding ................................... SUCCESS [18.235s]
[INFO] Mapkeeper DB Binding .............................. SUCCESS [10.011s]
[INFO] Mongo DB Binding .................................. SUCCESS [4.874s]
[INFO] OrientDB Binding .................................. SUCCESS [19.702s]
[INFO] Redis DB Binding .................................. SUCCESS [3.960s]
[INFO] Voldemort DB Binding .............................. SUCCESS [14.181s]
[INFO] YCSB Release Distribution Builder ................. SUCCESS [7.076s]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 4:48.305s
[INFO] Finished at: Mon Feb 04 01:13:00 IST 2013
[INFO] Final Memory: 107M/737M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

This shows that the build has been completed successfully and you are all set to go. 

Step5- Step4 will create a directory named target inside your /YCSB/distribution/ directory. You will find the YCSB tar file here, ycsb-0.1.4.tar.gz in my case. Copy this file to some location of your choice and extract it. This will give you the ycsb-1.0.4 directory which contains all the important and necessary stuff.

Step6- Move inside the ycsb-1.0.4 directory where you will find a directory called /hbase-binding. Go inside the /hbase-binding and open the /lib directory situated there. Copy the following jars from your /HBASE_HOME/lib into this /lib directory :

     1-slf4j-api-*.jar

     2-slf4j-log4j12-*.jar

     3-zookeeper-*.jar

Step7- You will find another directory named /conf inside /hbase-binding. You will find an xml file here named as hbase-site.xml file. Replace this hbase-site.xml file with the habse-site.xml present in your /HBASE_HOME/conf directory.

Step8- You are all set for testing your Hbase now. Start the Hadoop and Hbase processes and go inside ycsb-1.0.4. Now, issue the following command to load test your Hbase deployment :

apache@hadoop:/ycsb-0.1.4$ bin/ycsb load hbase -P workloads/workloada -p columnfamily=f1 -p recordcount=1000000 -p threadcount=4 -s | tee -a workloada.dat

This will start the load test and after sometime it will give you the result summary. Do not get overwhelmed by the great amount of information displayed on your terminal after this operation. For our convenience we have piped this ycsb command with the Linux tee command and written the entire output information to the terminal and the workloada.dat. You will find this file inside your ycsb-0.1.4

directory which contains the same content as your terminal has. You can extract useful insights from this file(or from your terminal) like :

The overall runtime in milliseconds

Throughput i.e. operations per second

Number of operations

AverageLatency etc etc

Here are some of the lines from my terminal :

[OVERALL], RunTime(ms), 73258.0

[OVERALL], Throughput(ops/sec), 13650.386305932458

[UPDATE], Operations, 4

[UPDATE], AverageLatency(us), 530564.25

[UPDATE], MinLatency(us), 65895

[UPDATE], MaxLatency(us), 1642179

I hope you found this post helpful. Stay connected for more :)

How to install Java 6 on Ubuntu

In one of the previous post of mine I have shown you how to install Sun(Oracle) Java on Ubuntu through its repository. This will, by default, install Java-7 on your machine as Ubuntu 12.04(and onwards) have Java-7 in their repository. But, sometimes you may come across a situation wherein you need some specific version of Java. For example, it is advisable to use Java-6 while trying to configure or use Apache Hadoop. In such a scenario you need to download the appropriate version of Java and install it manually. It is again a straightforward process. Just follow the steps below :

Note : Java-6 has been taken here, as an example, on a machine running Ubuntu 12.10

Step 1 : Download the required version of Java from the official download page. It will download  jdk-6u38-linux-x64.bin inside your Downloads directory.

Step 2 : Go to the directory where jdk was downloaded(Download here) and make it an executable file using this command :
apache@hadoop:~/Downloads$ sudo chmod +x jdk-6u38-linux-x64.bin

Step 3 : Run this executable .bin file using :
apache@hadoop:~/Downloads$ ./jdk-6u38-linux-x64.bin

Step 4 : Now move the file to the /usr/lib/jvm directory with the help of mv command :
apache@hadoop:~/Downloads$ sudo mv jdk1.6.0_38/ /usr/lib/jvm/

Step 5 : This is the step where you actually do the installation. Use the following commands to do that :
apache@hadoop:~/Downloads$ sudo update-alternatives  --install /usr/bin/javac javac /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.6.0_38/bin/javac 1
apache@hadoop:~/Downloads$ sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.6.0_38/bin/java 1
apache@hadoop:~/Downloads$ sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/javaws javaws /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.6.0_38/bin/javaws 1

Once you are done with these steps you are good to go. One step is actually still required though. The above procedure will just install Java-6 on your machine. In case you have multiple versions of Java installed on your machine, you need to set which version you want to use as your default Java. To do so issue the command shown below :
apache@hadoop:~/Downloads$ sudo update-alternatives --config java

This will show you all the Java versions installed on your machine. Choose the number corresponding to the version of your choice and you are all set.