Restarting the NSclient++ service without the management applet

For people, who are as click and point-lazy as me, here is how you restart the service without using the service management applet. 1 2 net stop "NSClientpp (Nagios) 0.3.5.2 2008-09-24 w32" net start "NSClientpp (Nagios) 0.3.5.2 2008-09-24 w32"

February 11, 2009 · 1 min · 39 words · christian

MySQL: Setting up an InnoDB raw device

Well, since I had to brood about this (again I might add), I’m gonna write it down this time … Setting up the InnoDB raw device isn’t that hard, just make sure the device has proper permissions (either add mysql to the disk group or create a udev rule). 1 KERNEL="sdb2", OWNER="mysql", GROUP="mysql" Now after that (and a reboot/udevcontrol reload_rules later), you should be able to initialize the InnoDB device. Yes, the InnoDB device needs initializing. ...

February 11, 2009 · 2 min · 380 words · christian

Monitoring the IBM BladeCenter chassis with Nagios

Today I ended up working out the details on what we want to monitor regarding our BladeCenter. The most interesting details (for us that is) are these: Fan speeds for Chassis Cooling/Power Module Cooling Bay(s) Temperature Power Domain utilization It wasn’t * that* hard to implement. Only trouble(s) I ran into, were ( 1) IBM did a real shitty job with the MIB’s. If you look closely into the mmblade.mib, you’re gonna notice, that not a single OID is specified for the events. ( 2) As the MIB’s weren’t documented anywhere, I had to look them up via snmpwalk (which I had never used before). So as a reminder (to myself), here’s how it is done: 1 snmpwalk -v1 -c public -O n 10.0.0.35 .1.3.6.1.4.1.2.3.51.2.2 This will get you a list, with a lot of output (5154 lines to be exact). Lucky me, the web interface of the management module/ssh interface is rather verbose, so all you need to do is compare those values with what you are looking for. So for myself (and anyone interested) read ahead for the list of checks we are currently running on the management module.

February 10, 2009 · 4 min · 772 words · christian

Installing SLES10 via network with no DHCP available

In our current fight against the BladeCenter switches, we’re currently facing the problem that the blades ain’t able to send/receive DHCP-traffic. So in order to move forward, we had to use static IP addresses. And since SLES10 ain’t straight forward on that, I had to look it up. Now, here’s for me (and everyone else tired of searching) how to do it: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 install=http://ftp.barfoo.org/install/SLES10-x64/CD1 netdevice=eth0 hostip=10.0.1.240 netmask=255.255.255.0 gateway=10.0.1.1 nameserver=10.0.1.2 domain=home.barfoo.org insmod=bnx2 splash=verbose

January 30, 2009 · 1 min · 80 words · christian

Setting up the BladeCenter H

Well, we finally had our maintenance window today, in which we planned the hardware exchange for our current Dell Blade Chassis (don’t ask!). The exchange went fine, but as we started exploring the components (like the IBM BladeCenter SAN switches – which are in fact Cisco MDS 9100) we hit a few road blocks. First, the default user name/password combo for the Cisco MDS 9100 for the BladeCenter is USERID/PASSW0RD (just as the rest of the password combinations). ...

January 30, 2009 · 2 min · 256 words · christian

Updating path information for TSM

As I did some switching today (between the new lin_tape version by IBM and our own lin_tape version), I ended up writing those lines a dozen times. Here is (just for me, if you don’t care .. skip ahead) on how to generate a list of commands: 1 2 3 4 5 6 for i in $( seq -w 1 32 ); do token="${i/0/}" path_prefix="/dev/lt/IBMtape12245775" echo "DELETE PATH TSM1 VTL1_DR$i SRCTYPE=SERVER DESTTYPE=DRIVE LIBRARY=VTL1" echo "DEFINE PATH TSM1 VTL1_DR$i SRCTYPE=SERVER DESTTYPE=DRIVE LIBRARY=VTL1 DEVICE=$path_prefix$((token+11))A1" done which should get you a list like this: ...

January 28, 2009 · 1 min · 112 words · christian

Sidenote: Amount of Slots per Virtual Tape Library

Well, I just stumbled about this again (and I don’t know right now whether or not this is documented inside a RedBook or not) today, so I thought maybe I’m gonna write it down. Slot-Amount Property of a Virtual Tape Library Please keep in mind, when creating the virtual library to think hard about the amount of slots you might need. It ain’t that bad, you just can’t decrease the amount anymore. So if you think about creating 50 different virtual tape libraries with 500 slots each on your TS7530, think again. The current software level only supports 25.000 slots on a global level.

January 27, 2009 · 1 min · 104 words · christian

Working with IBM's Virtualization Engine Console

Recently, we got the recommendation from our system partner to use static allocated tape cartridges instead of dynamic allocated ones. Apparently using dynamic allocating cartridges comes with a performance penalty if more than a few nodes are backing up a large amount of data at once. And yet again, I noticed that the IBM Virtualization Engine Console (aka Falconstor Software) is really error prone. In order to change the allocation type, we had to shred the old cartridges first (500 x ~100M up till now), chance the allocation type at the virtual tape library level, and then recreate the 500 cartridges with a fixed size (500x 102400MB). Now, as I was kinda optimistic, I decided to create all 500 cartridges at once. ...

January 27, 2009 · 2 min · 235 words · christian

Opsview installation reviewed

Well, I recently (well, yesterday) built the opsview RPM’s for SLES10, and started fiddeling about with it today. Alex " recommended" I should rather look at Opsview instead of Centreon, but boy was there a surprise waiting for me … Opsview has the advantage that it at least lets you use the package manager. But, it also needs a lot of handy work (just like Centreon, which I really dislike since it’s real error prone). ...

January 24, 2009 · 1 min · 130 words · christian

Automatic updates on SUSE Linux Enterprise 10

I had the problem, that the automatic update function of YaST doesn’t work like I want it to. I just wanted it to install only those updates, that ain’t interactive, don’t need a service restart and don’t need a reboot. YaST does only feature an online update that skips “interactive” updates (I’ve never even encountered an interactive update up till now). So I went ahead and wrote a (hackish) script, that achieves what I need. ...

January 23, 2009 · 2 min · 341 words · christian