Work

Well, as I wrote recently, we received a new BladeCenter a few weeks back. Now, as we slowly take it into service I was interested in watching the utilization of the back planes as well as the CPU utilization of the Cisco Catalyst 3012 network switches. The first mistake I made, was to trust Cisco with their guide about how to get the utilization from the device using SNMP. They stated some OID’s, which I tried with snmpwalk and got a result from. 1 2 snmpwalk -v1 -c public -O n 10.0.0.35 .1.3.6.1.4.1.9.5.1.1.8 .1.3.6.1.4.1.9.5.1.1.8.0 = INTEGER: 0 Now, as I tried retrieving the SNMP data by means of the check_snmp plugin, I got some flaky results: 1 2 3 4 /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_snmp -H 10.0.0.35 -C public .1.3.6.1.4.1.9.5.1.1.8 SNMP problem - No data received from host CMD: /usr/bin/snmpget -t 1 -r 5 -m '' -v 1 [authpriv] 10.0.0.35:161 Those of you, who read the excerpts carefully will notice the difference between snmpwalk and the OID I passed on to check_snmp. The point being, the OID’s Cisco gave in their Design tech notes are either old, or just not accurate at all. After passing on the .0 to each value given by Cisco, the check_snmp is all honky dory and integrated into Nagios. As usual, the Nagios definitions are further down, for those interested.

Hrm, today I tried to install some extra programs I need for devel-stuff (quilt, git, subversion) on an ancient (not sooo ancient) SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.2. Did I already mention I hate rpm-based distros ? Ah and I missed to tell you, that I really love USE-flags … Ok, so it took me half the afternoon, to rebuild half of all installed packages (heh, kde* depends upon expat*; but who need X or even KDE on a server-machine?) and figured that everything was for nothing. ...

Since one of the requirements for my current project is having NIC redundancy, I didn’t get around looking at the available " adapter teaming" (or adapter bonding) solutions available for Linux/SLES. First I tried to dig into the Broadcom solution (since the Blade I first implemented the stuff uses a Broadcom NetXtreme II card) , but found out pretty soon that the basp configuration tool, which is only available on the Broadcom driver CD’s shipped with the Blade itself, pretty much doesn’t work. ...

In preparation to get our website (and all those other websites - like www.fh-neubrandenburg.de or www.hmt-rostock.de) clustered, someone bought the cluster version of the PacketPro 450. These things are nice, especially considering you don’t need to fiddle around with LVS yourself (which is a real pain in the ass). The only problem I have currently with them is that they scan the database and web nodes every 30 seconds, and since we have an active node and a hot-standby both do this and producing this: ...

Well, since our current solution for mapping printers is an ugly batch file, which needs to be put into Startup, I today poked at doing it in VBscript (I know, but it’s less ugly than the batch script, trust me). As some of you know, printers are only applicable to users (as in you can’t put a startup script onto an OU, which is going to map the printers). So as we store users and the computes in different OU’s in our Active Directory (we do have about 15.000 students), I can’t apply the printer.vbs to the users OU directly either, unless I implement some intelligence into the script itself. ...

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). ...