Life

So, as the previous try on getting the teamix people to fix the bloody LoadBalancer (as in sending at least an identification string for the SSH check) didn’t work so well (they told me, I should configure MASQ uerading/ ROUTE ing on the PacketPro(which is kinda icky), I went on today and looked at what SLES10 installs as default logger. Surprisingly they install a rather new syslog-ng (well, syslog-ng-1.6.8 is what they ship) so it was rather easy to workaround the situation. ...

OK, as I wrote earlier today I went onto a research mission for today, looking at the alternatives for the 2x stuff. Looks like Citrix Presentation Server is just the software I’m looking for. Watched the demo’s on their website, which are quite impressing, but sadly don’t tell me everything I’d like to know. Maybe I’ll ask some people in Greifswald and in the vicinity, how stuff works with Citrix. Maybe I should even get in contact with Citrix itself and ask for a test version, or some other sort of demonstration.

I’m coming back today from a six day vacation in the warm south (that is Stuttgart), back at work and find three sheets of paper on my desk. Two tell me something I haven’t done yet, the other one tells me something I haven’t seen yet. One of my colleagues had to restart one of our web nodes and now the thing can’t mount the logging volume (and thus, logrotate / awstats failed to do it’s job). OCFS2 ain’t spitting any error messages, when trying to mount the volume you see it joining the domain the volume belongs to on the other nodes, so from a first glance at things .. nothing is wrong ? ...

We’re currently having a weird issue (which we had before); the Windows XP Embedded powering our Wyse V90’s isn’t applying any GPO settings if you log on with a user that has a configured profile. Googling (is that a valid word yet ?!) for it, only resulted in one useful link, which is apparently a guy with the exact same problem … 🤷 I’m completely out of ideas by now, as I don’t even have a place to start (as in where the reason might be located). ...

Okay, so we received a brand new x3650 the other day entitled to replace one (or better two) of our NAS frontend servers. We installed Windows on it the other day (had to create a custom Windows Server 2003 CD first, since the default one doesn’t recognize the integrated ServeRAID), and we prepped the box during the week with the usual things. On Monday I started installing the " IBM StorageManager RDAC" MultiPath driver (since the box got two single port PCIe FC-HBA’s) and figured I’d be nice if we had this. I asked a IBM Systems Engineer of one of our partners, which told me generally there wouldn’t be a problem with Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS) and the IBM MPIO driver. Only requirement would be that I’d install the new storport.sys driver (version 5.2.3790.4021) first (as in Microsoft KB932755). ...

Well, as I said in my previous post, I do have some weird things happening. Apparently adding the domain user to the local group “Administrators” makes everything just works fine, yet he can’t do administrator like stuff (like turning off the write protection, changing local user accounts, …). Also, if you’re looking for a smart way of how to add a certain global group (as in Active Directory group) to a local group, try this: ...

I’m just got back from four days in Rostock over at S&N, where I was attending a VMware design course and here’s a list of questions I did ask the trainer: What’s the disadvantage of having a 1016 ported vSwitch ? Any clues on how to exchange the default certificate of the Virtual Center ? Are there any tools to stress test the virtual system ? Are there any performance impacts of having more than 10 users in Virtual Center ? Any clues and/or guides on how to do time synchronization in VMware guests, especially Linux guests ? What’s the preferred NIC type for Linux guests ? Any clues to using Raw Device Mappings with VMotion ? Is there a way of defining CPU masks on a global level ? Answers: ...

Well, it turns out that building stuff on ppc64 is a real pain in the ass, at least on anything SUSE related. I do have to tweak every damn spec to include this: 1 2 3 %ifarch ppc64 export LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -m64" %endif Otherwise, ld is gonna fail when linking, as it’s gonna try linking the generated 64bit code ( -m64 is passed on via RPM_OPT_FLAGS to CFLAGS) as 32bit code, which ain’t gonna work at all … ...

Today I did something horrible. I yet again noticed that I bought the wrong CPU’s (basically I bought Xeon DP’s with four cores). Those have apparently a feature called SSSE3, which makes vMotion with our old Xeon DP’s (dual cores) fail before even trying. But as we had a cooling outage today (basically ‘cause it broke), I needed to turn off some ESX servers. Thus leaving me with the new ones and one of the old ones. * yuck* ...

As virtualization seems to be a trendy thing to do, I went ahead and virtualized our nagios (while reinstalling the whole thing …). Now as I went into work today and started my email client, I received 4 nagios warnings about a LOAD service reaching critical state. Looked at the nagios box itself, opened up the VM console, looked into the syslog. Nothing. Yet over 3/4 of the services were flapping, some ping checks were critical (for whatever reason). So I opened the nagios webinterface again, and noticed it dropping the connection over and over again (had to reauthentificate me again and again). ...