Life

As I previously said, I was writing my own OCF resource agent for IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager Server. And I just finished it yesterday evening (it took me about two hours to write this post). Only took me about four work days (that is roughly four hours each, which weren’t recorded in that subversion repository) plus most of this week at home (which is 10 hours a day) and about one hundred subversion revisions. The good part about it is, that it actually just works :-D (I was amazed on how good actually). Now you’re gonna say, “but Christian, why didn’t you use the included Init-Script and just fix it up, so it is actually compilant to the LSB Standard ?” The answer is rather simple: Yeah I could have done that, but you also know that wouldn’t have been fun. Life is all about learning, and learn something I did (even if I hit the head against the wall from time to time ;-) during those few days) … There’s still one or two things I might want to add/change in the future (that is maybe next week), like adding support for monitor depth by querying the dsmserv instance via dsmadmc (if you read through the resource agent, I already use it for the shutdown/pre-shutdown stuff) I still have to properly test it (like Alan Robertson mentioned in his one hour thirty talk on Linux-HA 2.0 and on his slides, Page 100-102) in a pre-production environment I’m probably configure the IBM RSA to act as a stonith device ( s hoot t he o ther n ode i n t he h ead) - just for the case one of them ever gets stuck in a case, where the box is still up, but doesn’t react to any requests anymore

I recently bought an Acer Aspire Revo and had one of my trainees put XMBC on a SDHC card today. So after a bit of toying earlier, I started looking at the thing (from the command line that is). One thing, if you enable the PPA (ppa.launchpad.net) sources, apt/aptitude is gonna babble something about an unverified key. 1 2 3 4 5 Fetched 119kB in 2s (41.4kB/s) Reading package lists... Done W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 6D975C4791E7EE5E W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 2BBD133164234534 W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY A956EB81318C7509 I ended up looking the error up (since I only have an Ubuntu desktop). There’s a simple solution for this: ...

As I wrote a month ago, one of my trainees put up with my stubbornness to put XBMC on said Acer Aspire Revo. Now, initially he put the Live Edition onto it, which didn’t really fly with me. I’m usually the CLI guy, so I needed to install it myself (again). Since I wanted to use the VDPAU features the later GeForce cards offer (and the Revo has such a graphics cad), I had to install the current development builds (you know – I love bleeding edge!) ...

Well, since about a week or so I keep having troubles with my vHost and lighttpd. The point being, after some time (up till now it’s been something between days and minutes) lighttpd completely freezes and doesn’t serve no content anymore. I don’t know if this is related to PHP (might be, I did perform an update to dev-lang/php-5.2.9-r2 on Thu May 28 12:18:57 2009), but I have to figure this out since the restart cron-job is getting annoying. ...

Well, after last weeks lighttpd troubles with PHP (or was it without ?), they finally seem resolved. First thing I did, was upgrade to the new php-version (5.2.10). After that, I ran revdep-rebuild, which apparently found issues with lighttpd being linked to a wrong pcre-version. After remerging lighttpd the issues seem to be gone! Well, guess I was to quick in saying the problem was resolved .. it’s still there, just not happening as fast as it would in the past ….

At first, it seemed that my lighttpd issues were resolved by updating PHP/remerging lighttpd. But apparently not. After putting in a crontab entry, that restarts lighttpd every 15 minutes (which completely sucks), the issue was minimized in it’s impact but not really solved. 1 */15 * * * * root /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart &>/dev/null Thanks to Michél (I guess, again) – who helped me looking at the strace logs, and of course Christian (aka hoffie – one of my old Gentoo buddies), the issue seems finally resolved. It turns out it was neither a PHP nor lighttpd issue. It was a simple matter of (stale) symlinks in /etc/ssl/certs if you can imagine that. Apparently a stale symlink forced PHP into a loop or something, from which it couldn’t recover on it’s own. ...

As many people on the VM-Planet already blogged about this, I ain’t gonna write just about it. Let’s turn the clock back a few months, to January 2008. As the institution I work for, is part of the DFN we took the opportunity to be a part of the " I want you to run our RA"-gang. In January 2008 we thought about changing the vCenter certificate. Now, apparently there’s a slight difference between the DFN-PCA and what VMware considers common practice. ...

I’m building a 6-node cluster, using Xen at the moment. For the last few days, I tried my setup in a virtual machine, simply because VM’s boot much faster than the real hardware. However, certain things you can only replicate on the real hardware (for example, the InfiniBand interfaces, as well as certain nfs-stuff). So I spent most of the day to replicate my configurations onto the hardware. After getting all done, the moment of the first boot … kaput! Doesn’t boot, just keeps hanging before booting the real kernel. Now what ? I removed the Xen vga parameters and rebooted (waited ~2 minutes in the process) until I finally saw the root cause for my trouble: ...

Here’s yet another post about my compute cluster. It’s (obviously) running NFS and that works quite well. Up till now, I would always have trouble with portmap hanging on shutdown/reboot. After spending some time thinking about the problem, looking at the init script and googling, I stumbled upon this Ubuntu bug on portmap. As noted in the bug, a pmap_dump would hang indefinitely. After taking another look at our nfs-root configuration (in regard to the first comment on the bug), it turns out it’s exactly that. We didn’t setup lo which seems vital for some things. ...

Today, after a short break (you can call it break, I think), I sat down and looked at the IBM RSA II adapter’s remote management GUI and it’s trouble with JRE versions. Ever since the last Java updates, I was unable to access the RSA console because Java would throw an error like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Initializing RemoteDisk v2.2 MCS v.3.6 initialized Established connection to rsa.home.barfoo.org:1045 Connected via socket: Socket[addr=rsa.home.barfoo.org/10.0.0.150,port=2000,localport=4292] Closing socket java.lang.NullPointerException at mcsClient.Row.isValid(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Component.invalidateIfValid(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Component.setLocale(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JComponent.(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JPanel.(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JPanel.(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JPanel.(Unknown Source) at mcsClient.Row.(Unknown Source) at mcsClient.Options.(Unknown Source) at mcsClient.McsToolBar.(Unknown Source) at mcsClient.McsClient.begin(Unknown Source) at mcsClient.McsClient.init(Unknown Source) at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2Manager$AppletExecutionRunnable.run(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) Ausnahme: java.lang.NullPointerException In the end, I downloaded every version since JRE 1.5.0.11 (that is 20 different versions ❗), as wittnessed by Michael Ellerbeck that the last working version for him was JRE 1.5.0.11, and gave each one a try (since I want to report the issue to IBM, so that they gonna release a fix sometime soon). ...