Work

Well, as I mentioned in my earlier post, I had some trouble during the week. I was having issues with SLES10 installations not finishing during the bootloader installation phase. After trying out different flavors (as in 10SP2 x64/x86, …), and not having any luck with this, I went searching on Google as a last effort try. Guess what, yet again Google helped me out! It was pretty simple. Putting /dev/cciss/c0d0 into /boot/grub/device.map as (hd0) made the grub-installer finish. Now, figuring out how to transfer those information during the installation proved difficult. I was just about to give up, while reading through the AutoYAST documentation, when it struck me. There is even an extra chapter for this stuff, so simply putting the following into my profile solved my issues: ...

As the title says, I’ve been playing with vCB (inside a VM) and the TSM integration with newer (>6.0) clients for work. Result of all this work should be a feasibility study. We’re currently thinking about replacing our VMware server(s) with ESXi. But as most of you know, if you install ESXi, you simply can’t install anything (well, you can .. on ~100KB of disk space, which is compared to a TSM client weighing roughly 120MB nothing!). As we would like the possibility to backup VMs on image-level, I went looking at solutions. ...

I had myself a lot of fun today. I ended up patching a Windows Server 2003 x64 SP1, where the Task Manager wouldn’t start anymore. It simply failed (or in case of right clicking on the task bar wouldn’t even appear), so I went downstairs and pulled a hard disk out of the RAID1 array, just to be sure. Really weird Windows error I went ahead, installed SP2 (as you can see on the above picture) while having the jitters. Also installed the VirusScan I was scheduled to install, and the system came back online. Phewww. ...

Well, it’s another day another fight. As we started migrating our VM’s from the old VMware ESX farms to the new environment, and upgraded the hardware suddenly the network devices were hot-plug-able, thus they did turn up in the “Safely Remove” dialog. I myself don’t have any trouble with that. The trouble I do have is the people working with those VM’s and their possibly hazardous “uuuh, what’s this ? I don’t need this! <click-click, network-device unplugged>” ...

After some more crunching on my VBscript, I think I finally have a working script that runs through a csv-list I point it to and walk onto each system (by ip-address only sadly) and query the os and the Service Pack that is installed. The CSV may look like this: 1 2 3 Hostname;IP;Model;Description;OS;Service-Pack;BL;Priority epimetheus;10.0.0.2;VMware guest;File-Server hades;10.0.0.1;VMware guest;Core-Router After saving that one, and running a cscript //NoLogo win_sp_level.vbs you should find a completed list like this: ...

We received a preinstalled customer server the other day, for which we had declared “as-is” support only, since it is running Lucid Lynx. Now today, I started getting the TSM client to work. Was kinda weird, since at first dsmc was reporting something like this: # ./dsmc: no such file or directory After fiddling with it a bit more, here are the control files, as well as the prerm and postinst-scripts for TIVSM-API, TIVSM-API64 and TIVSM-BA: ...

I’ve been tinkering with VMware’s Data Recovery for the last two weeks (as in configured it some time before Christmas) and had it running all that time. I have to say the integration into the vCenter Client GUI is amazing, I’d love to see that for VCB also. The Changed Block Tracking is a neat way to minimize the amount backup data as well as your backup window (which is nearly zero anyhow due to vDR using snapshots). ...

I’ve been learning for my VCP-410 exam the last week or so, and what can I say ? It helped … 463 points of a total of 500 points ain’t that bad at all (considering I spend twenty minutes doing it). Sure, I could have spent more time, and do better than 92,6%, but then again: why should I ? The achieved points (nor the percentage) don’t appear on the certificate (or at least it didn’t on the old one), so why bother. Anyway, that was my christmas present to myself, it that light; happy christmas ya’ll.

Some of you may know, that VMware released vSphere 4.0 Update 1 yesterday. I took this as a reason, to finally wrap my head around booting the VMware ESXi installer from my PXE/TFTP box. Since VMware was kind enough to provide (a somewhat worthless) document, that explains how to extract the necessary files on Windows. But that quite doesn’t work with Linux – and VMware just states that you should be using mount and it’s option offset. ...

Since I’m running check_zypper via nrpe (which in turn runs as nobody), I need to set up sudo. In order for the plugin to work, we need to add the following line to /etc/sudoers (by means of visudo): 1 nobody ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/zypper sl, /usr/bin/zypper --non-interactive --no-gpg-checks --terse list-updates (Keep in mind this needs to be a single line …)