To be or not to be ---

… that’s the question. I’ve been thinking lots and lots about my involvement with our " beloved" distribution. I talked to some of the users (that is Gordon), some fellow developers (hello Christina, Łukasz, solar, Jorge, Anders) about whether or not I’m actually still wanted and/or needed. Turns out, the collective opinion is, that I am fun to have around ( 🤷 don’t ask me why, I don’t find myself particularly funny/amusing) and that’d I’d be the person to have around. ...

March 10, 2008 · 1 min · 128 words · christian

Integrating Windows XPe into Active Directory

As the guys over at FreeWyseMonkeys demonstrated with JoinDomain.zip, it ain’t hard to integrate a Windows XP Embedded system into Active Directory. You basically need this: A system powered by Windows XP Embedded netdom.exe (from any Windows XP - SP2 in your MUI language) some know-how, on how to use netdom to integrate it into your AD Everything else is already present on the Windows XP Embedded systems I’ve seen. Then let’s get it on ! ...

March 7, 2008 · 1 min · 211 words · christian

Backup solutions

Well some people apparently completely don’t understand the use of a backup client like dsmc, additionally they don’t seem to have the slightest clue on how to draw up a “clever” backup solution. Lemme describe the situation for you. We do have two Solaris systems at work, housing our mailing system(s). Now apparently, people are unable to install the Tivoli Storage Manager Client on Solaris (or get it working properly - which people are blaming on the software not working). ...

March 7, 2008 · 2 min · 224 words · christian

OCFS2 follow-up

OK, it turned out that said colleague wasn’t responsible at all. Turns out, the real trigger was me creating a new volume on our SAN, on the same array that houses the OCFS2 volume. Apparently, during creation of an additional SAN volume, all other SAN volumes in this array are either read-only or delayed during that time, as you can see from the following log: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 kernel: (13,3):o2hb_write_timeout:242 ERROR: Heartbeat write timeout to device sdd1 after 12000 milliseconds kernel: Heartbeat thread (13) printing last 24 blocking operations (cur = 4): kernel: Heartbeat thread stuck at waiting for read completion, stuffing current time into that blocker (index 4) kernel: Index 5: took 0 ms to do submit_bio for read kernel: Index 6: took 0 ms to do waiting for read completion kernel: Index 7: took 0 ms to do bio alloc write kernel: Index 8: took 0 ms to do bio add page write kernel: Index 9: took 0 ms to do submit_bio for write kernel: Index 10: took 0 ms to do checking slots kernel: Index 11: took 0 ms to do waiting for write completion kernel: Index 12: took 2002 ms to do msleep kernel: Index 13: took 0 ms to do allocating bios for read kernel: Index 14: took 0 ms to do bio alloc read kernel: Index 15: took 0 ms to do bio add page read kernel: Index 16: took 0 ms to do submit_bio for read kernel: Index 17: took 0 ms to do waiting for read completion kernel: Index 18: took 0 ms to do bio alloc write kernel: Index 19: took 0 ms to do bio add page write kernel: Index 20: took 0 ms to do submit_bio for write kernel: Index 21: took 0 ms to do checking slots kernel: Index 22: took 0 ms to do waiting for write completion kernel: Index 23: took 2004 ms to do msleep kernel: Index 0: took 0 ms to do allocating bios for read kernel: Index 1: took 0 ms to do bio alloc read kernel: Index 2: took 0 ms to do bio add page read kernel: Index 3: took 0 ms to do submit_bio for read kernel: Index 4: took 9995 ms to do waiting for read completion kernel: (13,3):o2hb_stop_all_regions:1682 ERROR: stopping heartbeat on all active regions. kernel: Kernel panic - not syncing: *** ocfs2 is very sorry to be fencing this system by panicing ***

March 7, 2008 · 3 min · 432 words · christian

OCFS2 fun

Turns out, that said colleague has been playing with NFS on one off the web nodes, thus apparently rendering the remaining nodes offline (or semi-offline). Now after all web nodes hung themselves, we had to hard reset them, now everything is tingly again .. yay for a great first day …

March 6, 2008 · 1 min · 51 words · christian

EPIA fun

Well, as for replacing my current fileserver (which I seriously need to consider replacing), I’ll just pick up these things: 3WARE 9550SXU-8LP (that’s 399,00€) plus riser card VIA EPIA EK 8000EG (that’s 201,69€) Kingston ValueRAM DIMM 1 GB DDR-400 (that’s 57,00€) 4x Seagate ST31000340NS (that’s 279,00€ each - making a subtotal of 1.116,00€) So after browsing some more for a replacement for my current fileserver, I’d like to share the latest stages with you people. Thanks to Mike (who mentioned that binutils-2.18* already does the LDFLAGS="-Wl,-z,relro" part) I replaced it with "-Wl,-O1". Same old place, there’s fresh stages … (and thanks again to Mike, with working util-linux-2.13-r2). ...

March 4, 2008 · 1 min · 143 words · christian

Getting the 2X service up and running

As I mentioned before, we decided against the Citrix Presentation Server solution in favour of the 2X LoadBalancer and ApplicationServer combination. You’re gonna say, but Citrix does the same and it’s only one " application frame". 2X is exactly the same.

February 21, 2008 · 2 min · 421 words · christian

Zend Optimizer again

Well, I happen to be back at my favorite application. Today I stumbled upon a " nice" thing. If you turn on the Zend Optimizer (doesn’t matter whether it is 2.6.2 or 3.3.0), one of the TYPO3 back ends ain’t showing any content in the preview pane. Once you turn the Zend Optimizer stuff off, it works without a problem. O RLY ? And as Zend stated on their " Support Forum", they don’t really support the Zend Optimizer stuff in the first place. Which is nice, what for do you need the Zend Guard shit in the first place ?? ...

February 19, 2008 · 1 min · 175 words · christian

Been a while

Well, it’s been quite a while since most of the people last heard a word from me. The last few months I’ve been extremely busy with work-related tasks (and as a side-effect of that, didn’t want to spend much time in front of the computer after 9 hours of work). I also started spending more and more time in the gym, like nearly two hours every Tuesday and Thursday. I finally fixed our replication issues, we do now have a working! MySQL Multi-Master ( 1. Node, 2. Node -- bear in mind, this boxes are only serving MySQL and nothing else, so don’t use these configurations on mixed setups) Replication Setup as database back end for our TYPO3-vHosts. all the web nodes are now serving the content from a clustered, shared SAN volume (is that a good thing ? 😛 - don’t know yet …) our VI environment is getting more and more acceptance (even if you hear some complaints now and then, like “awww, damn that crap my 4GiB RAM, 2x3.0GHz Windows 2008 is running soooo choppy” - simple answer, don’t use Windows Server 2008 and/or Windows Vista!) I finished prepping our VM templates (at least the Windows ones) we’re still putting together the plans on whether or not invest into a VDI solution. The next few weeks are gonna be as frantic as the weeks before, I still have to migrate a lot of TYPO3 installations to our new cluster (which sadly needs time, as we need to wait for DNS changes to propagate). Honestly, I might be ending up extending the SAN volume for the MySQL data storage, as even with only three somewhat busy sites, the binary log of the last 5 days is about 2GiB in size. And we still have ~ 20 other busy sites on a separate box. ...

February 17, 2008 · 2 min · 397 words · christian

Scaring people

I just found a rather oldish picture of myself. The date says it’s from last year ( Fri Feb 9 22:33:06 2007 to be exact) … Me with beard! (Or: WHO THE HELL IS THIS ?) One year later, I can’t imagine having such a beard ever again …

February 17, 2008 · 1 min · 49 words · christian