Work

Well, after a loooong time of trying to get the modules and all the other stuff (read: init-script for the guest daemon and modules) working, I think I’m about there. I finally fixed a long-standing issue, with the postinst/prerm scripts, and the tools should be about ready. Gonna try and send it Daniel Baumann’s way (that is the Debian Maintainer), for proper inclusion into Lenny. I (successfully) tried splitting the Xorg parts from the " normal" open-vm-tools, as I usually don’t want Xorg installed on any of my virtual machines. Thus leaving me with open-vm-tools, open-vm-modules and open-vm-toolbox (and open-vm-source) as a list of packages one could install.

As Mike wrote about his experiences with hardware vendors, I’m gonna devote this here post to my favorite software company in the world. We recently bought two copies of a software called " 2X Application Server Enterprise Edition". As one would think from reading the spe cs of the software, it’s near a Citrix solution (which it is, at least for a small part); but in return it’s faaaar away concerning the price. Just so you get an idea, about what I’m meaning with " faaar": 1 2 3 4 5 6 Windows Server 2003: Standard Edition: 2 * 91,00 CAL: 50 * 6,00 Terminal Server CAL: 50 * 17,00 ___________ 1.332,00 The above are fixed costs, you need them anyway as both Citrix as well as the 2X solution is only working * on top* of Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services. Now, here’s the real comparison between 2X Application Server & Loadbalancer and Citrix XenApp Platinum Edition: 1 2 2X 2 * 1510,00 = 3.020,00 Citrix 50 * 393,00 = 19.650,00 While 2X is licensed per terminal server, XenApp is licensed per user. As you can see from the above prices, the 2X solution is roughly 1/6 of the Citrix XenApp solution.

Well, we do appear to be having some strange load problems with our main TYPO3 box hosting several home pages of the local universities, as you can see below. LOAD on t3node1 between 05:00-19:00 on 2008/04/07 We repeatedly tried to figure out which of them was the one responsible, but neither I nor the other Unix sysadmin knew a better way to figure out the load each TYPO3 installation was causing (since there ain’t no phptop or something similar). But since today the new semester started, we figured it might be good to finally figure which one it was. And a few minutes (as in one or two) wouldn’t be much of a problem compared to the advantage we’re getting out of it. ...

Well, as we do have quite a few custom built RPM’s, I was searching for a new solution to manage the repo(s). Currently I do have a single repository per distribution. One thing one needs to know about createrepo (from createrepo), it doesn’t support this type of thing in the first place. So I had to come up with another way of doing it. First, I created a proper layout (much like the Debian Official Repository layout): ...

As the guys over at FreeWyseMonkeys demonstrated with JoinDomain.zip, it ain’t hard to integrate a Windows XP Embedded system into Active Directory. You basically need this: A system powered by Windows XP Embedded netdom.exe (from any Windows XP - SP2 in your MUI language) some know-how, on how to use netdom to integrate it into your AD Everything else is already present on the Windows XP Embedded systems I’ve seen. Then let’s get it on ! ...

Well some people apparently completely don’t understand the use of a backup client like dsmc, additionally they don’t seem to have the slightest clue on how to draw up a “clever” backup solution. Lemme describe the situation for you. We do have two Solaris systems at work, housing our mailing system(s). Now apparently, people are unable to install the Tivoli Storage Manager Client on Solaris (or get it working properly - which people are blaming on the software not working). ...

OK, it turned out that said colleague wasn’t responsible at all. Turns out, the real trigger was me creating a new volume on our SAN, on the same array that houses the OCFS2 volume. Apparently, during creation of an additional SAN volume, all other SAN volumes in this array are either read-only or delayed during that time, as you can see from the following log: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 kernel: (13,3):o2hb_write_timeout:242 ERROR: Heartbeat write timeout to device sdd1 after 12000 milliseconds kernel: Heartbeat thread (13) printing last 24 blocking operations (cur = 4): kernel: Heartbeat thread stuck at waiting for read completion, stuffing current time into that blocker (index 4) kernel: Index 5: took 0 ms to do submit_bio for read kernel: Index 6: took 0 ms to do waiting for read completion kernel: Index 7: took 0 ms to do bio alloc write kernel: Index 8: took 0 ms to do bio add page write kernel: Index 9: took 0 ms to do submit_bio for write kernel: Index 10: took 0 ms to do checking slots kernel: Index 11: took 0 ms to do waiting for write completion kernel: Index 12: took 2002 ms to do msleep kernel: Index 13: took 0 ms to do allocating bios for read kernel: Index 14: took 0 ms to do bio alloc read kernel: Index 15: took 0 ms to do bio add page read kernel: Index 16: took 0 ms to do submit_bio for read kernel: Index 17: took 0 ms to do waiting for read completion kernel: Index 18: took 0 ms to do bio alloc write kernel: Index 19: took 0 ms to do bio add page write kernel: Index 20: took 0 ms to do submit_bio for write kernel: Index 21: took 0 ms to do checking slots kernel: Index 22: took 0 ms to do waiting for write completion kernel: Index 23: took 2004 ms to do msleep kernel: Index 0: took 0 ms to do allocating bios for read kernel: Index 1: took 0 ms to do bio alloc read kernel: Index 2: took 0 ms to do bio add page read kernel: Index 3: took 0 ms to do submit_bio for read kernel: Index 4: took 9995 ms to do waiting for read completion kernel: (13,3):o2hb_stop_all_regions:1682 ERROR: stopping heartbeat on all active regions. kernel: Kernel panic - not syncing: *** ocfs2 is very sorry to be fencing this system by panicing ***

Turns out, that said colleague has been playing with NFS on one off the web nodes, thus apparently rendering the remaining nodes offline (or semi-offline). Now after all web nodes hung themselves, we had to hard reset them, now everything is tingly again .. yay for a great first day …

As I mentioned before, we decided against the Citrix Presentation Server solution in favour of the 2X LoadBalancer and ApplicationServer combination. You’re gonna say, but Citrix does the same and it’s only one " application frame". 2X is exactly the same.

Well, I happen to be back at my favorite application. Today I stumbled upon a " nice" thing. If you turn on the Zend Optimizer (doesn’t matter whether it is 2.6.2 or 3.3.0), one of the TYPO3 back ends ain’t showing any content in the preview pane. Once you turn the Zend Optimizer stuff off, it works without a problem. O RLY ? And as Zend stated on their " Support Forum", they don’t really support the Zend Optimizer stuff in the first place. Which is nice, what for do you need the Zend Guard shit in the first place ?? ...