Life

Well, after I had so much trouble with the USB converter (which isn’t really suited for Linux), I went ahead and bought a DawiControl DC-154 (which is using a SIL3114) controller to migrate my stuff. After fucking up the new RAID array with the 1TB disks on the old controller (luckily I had the old hard disks still lying around, which still contained the RAID array), I plugged the 1TB disks onto the new controller and started building the array. So after 760 minutes (that’s nearly 13 hours) of synchronizing the newly created array, I was finally able to create the file system – that should be without trouble, right ? ...

Disclaimer: I don’t take any responsibility for faults within the software, I just provide the RPM’s! Feel free to ask me about stuff concerning these RPM’s, but I ain’t accountable if your stuff goes kaboom … Well, I just looked at opsview again (haha, thanks Alex 😛). Only trouble is, the people over at opsview don’t distribute RPM’s for that … After registering for their site, to download the SRPM’s (or to download anything), I got the RPM’s and started looking at them. ...

For those of you, still using my binary packages. It’s just a waste of disk space for me (6.8G to be exact), so I decided to remove them. I’m gonna give people one week to grab yourself a copy. I’m gonna keep the bashrc and all the other stuff I wrote back when I was still interested in binary packages, but the binary packages are gonna vanish! ...

Well, today I once again had the case where a virtual machine (in my case a Virtual Machine Template) was kinda stuck. You couldn’t remove the template (as in the entries for “Remove from inventory” was grayed out) and you couldn’t re-add the Virtual Machine’s VMX from the datastore browser either. VI Client - Disconnected templates Though, a simple putting the host into maintenance mode and rebooting helped that problem. Maybe there is a simpler solution for this, I just don’t know about it. ...

Well, I just had another look at our client scheduler services on our Microsoft Cluster. A while back we noticed that those scheduler services were going nuts after some time. Well, as it turns out, I can tell why. Microsoft Cluster Services have a feature called registration replication, which replicates a given key, if changed when the resource is online, to all connected cluster nodes. Now, we added the obvious registry key to the settings of our cluster resources for the scheduler services ( SOFTWAREIBMADSMCurrentVersionBackupClientNodes) and the scheduler service would use the same registry key to store it’s passwords. But it seems we were far off with that assumption. ...

Well, Arne recently (not really recently though .. 😛 ) complained about my blog being waaay to technical, so I ended up writing this lil’ anecdote. I’m finally on my long awaited, the remaining year lasting vacation. Last week was interrupted by a short job interview in Nuremberg, and also by the flu (not " again", I still got it in me, haven’t been able to shake it now for about three months). ...

Well, kernel updates on our Linux servers running IBM’s RDAC driver (developed by LSI) is a real pest .. especially if you have to reboot the box two times in order to install the drivers/initrd correctly. So I sat down and looked at the Makefile. Turns out, it just needs four tweaks in order to be working with a different kernel version (which you have to pass using environment variables to make). ...

Well, after yesterday’s lesson about getting the IBM RDAC to install for a not-yet-running kernel, I decided to take it a step further. Novell does have some documentation about KMP’s, which is actually rather good, especially the guide written by Andreas Grünbacher. After a short tinkering, I got it actually working. I was kinda surprised, at how easily it actually is. One problem I still have to deal with, is modifying the %post, to generate the mpp-initrd image. For now, the KMP only contains the default %post, which updates the modules.* stuff. ...

After some more tinkering, a lot more looking at the macros in /usr/lib/rpm/rpm-suse-kernel-module-subpackage and /usr/lib/rpm/suse_macros, I think I finally have a usable RPM’ified version of IBM’s Multipathing driver ready for use. There is still one major annoyance left: each time you install a new ibm-rdac-ds4000-kmp RPM, you also need to reinstall the corresponding ibm-rdac-ds4000-initrd package, as the macros in /usr/lib/rpm don’t allow for custom %post or %postun. As mentioned before, I’m gonna send them to LSI/IBM for review, and maybe, MAYBE they are actually gonna make use of that. ...

Well, today we had a rather weird problem with our TS3500. TSM running on AIX basically went bonko and spit out weird media sense errors, all stating that there is a hardware or media error of unknown nature: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ANR8943E Hardware or media error on library LIB3584 (OP=00006C03, CC=-1, KEY=04, ASC=44, ASCQ=00, SENSE=70.00.04.00.00.00.00.46.00.00.00.00.44.00.00.00.00- .00.40.82.00.00.00.40.00.00.02.00.48.01.A1.00.00.00.00.0- 0.06.1B.00.01.09.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.- 00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00- .00.00.00.00.00., Description=An undetermined error has occurred). Refer to Appendix C in the 'Messages' manual for recommended action. ANR8381E LTO volume HG4480L4 could not be mounted in drive DR9 (/dev/rmt8). After restarting the TSM server (as in the service, not the whole box) five times, which didn’t resolve squat we decided to take a look at the TS3500 itself. We opened up the Management interface and tried moving a tape into a drive. That didn’t work. Hrmmmmm. ...