Work

Well, it’s been quite a while since most of the people last heard a word from me. The last few months I’ve been extremely busy with work-related tasks (and as a side-effect of that, didn’t want to spend much time in front of the computer after 9 hours of work). I also started spending more and more time in the gym, like nearly two hours every Tuesday and Thursday. I finally fixed our replication issues, we do now have a working! MySQL Multi-Master ( 1. Node, 2. Node -- bear in mind, this boxes are only serving MySQL and nothing else, so don’t use these configurations on mixed setups) Replication Setup as database back end for our TYPO3-vHosts. all the web nodes are now serving the content from a clustered, shared SAN volume (is that a good thing ? 😛 - don’t know yet …) our VI environment is getting more and more acceptance (even if you hear some complaints now and then, like “awww, damn that crap my 4GiB RAM, 2x3.0GHz Windows 2008 is running soooo choppy” - simple answer, don’t use Windows Server 2008 and/or Windows Vista!) I finished prepping our VM templates (at least the Windows ones) we’re still putting together the plans on whether or not invest into a VDI solution. The next few weeks are gonna be as frantic as the weeks before, I still have to migrate a lot of TYPO3 installations to our new cluster (which sadly needs time, as we need to wait for DNS changes to propagate). Honestly, I might be ending up extending the SAN volume for the MySQL data storage, as even with only three somewhat busy sites, the binary log of the last 5 days is about 2GiB in size. And we still have ~ 20 other busy sites on a separate box. ...

Well, as it is Saturday and I’m having lots of time (whereas I’d usually spend it working), I thought I’d give Windows Server 2008 a try. What interested me most, is the Windows Server 2008 " Server Core Installations", as it’s supposed to lower the security risk (as there is no Internet Explorer, no Explorer nothing running by default, only a simply cmd.exe). As one of my co-workers requested me to upload the Standard/Enterprise/Datacenter DVD (which he got through our Microsoft Select 6.0(?) agreement) to our ISO’ VMFS, I had the DVD already at hand. As for that, I really love the feature set of VMware. ...

After blogging the last time about the PacketPro 450 LoadBalancer appliance, the guys over at teamix seem to have taken that to heart and implemented a rather nifty thing for their new release. It’s called " Port forwarding", which is basically what you’d figure from the name. It bounces ports around the load balancer, but saves you from creating a separate virtual server (and adding the physical servers to that one), but also saves you from modifying the syslog-ng configuration on the balanced servers.

Ok, so after my first day yesterday after a rather long vacation I today wanted to look at the problem that the Administrator password isn’t changed when using VirtulCenter’s clone customization functionality (which relies at least for Windows on sysprep). After a short googling, I stumbled upon this. Simple problem short … Don’t specify an Administrator password for the template. Then you should be able to change the Administrator password when cloning the template. It’s " should", as the VM’s are still updating. ...

Well, it’s yet again New Year’s Eve. Yet again a whole year passed by blazing fast, I didn’t manage to get everything done like I wanted. That includes the following things: getting a better job (and probably better paid too!) getting a better life (well, it’s as it sounds like - my current life is rather unhealthy, and thanks to a friend I got the grip onto myself and started changing a few things - like doing a small workout every day, a bit more movement all over the day and so forth) Which also means I do have some resolutions for the next year … ...

I stumbled upon a real weird problem. Apparently the terminal server licenses called " per Device" ain’t a real per device. From reading on it Microsoft states it like this: Device-based versus User-based Terminal Server CALs Two types of Terminal Server Client Access Licenses are available: TS Device CAL or TS User CAL. A TS Device CAL permits one device (used by any user) to conduct Windows Sessions on any of your servers. A TS User CAL permits one user (using any device) to conduct Windows Sessions on any of your servers. You may choose to use a combination of TS Device CALs and TS User CALs simultaneously with the server software. ...

Yes, yes. I do list a lot of crappy products (go on, laugh; I don’t really care). Yesterday I had quite a struggle with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Terminal services (or more precisely with their way on how to deal with network printers). As most of you know, there a two (possibly three) different ways on how to do network printers. would be, to simply share a local connected printer by simply creating a share for the printer buy a smart printer with integrated print server a combination of 1. and 2. We luckily enough do have printers with integrated print servers, so that wouldn’t be a problem. But you get a problem if you’re trying to monitor the printer queue if you simply create a new TCP/IP connection from another target. You simply can’t tell who’s printing what. ...

As some of you know, the company I’m currently working for, recently acquired some thin clients to replace our old computers for the students to work on. Those PC’s are like P3 800 MHz with 512MB RAM and sadly don’t run Office 2007 anymore, so we replaced them with thin clients and are streaming those applications from a Windows Terminal Server cluster (created by and with 2X Application LoadBalancer). So far so good, getting them to display the applications ain’t hard, the real hard part starts when you want additional things from this Windows XPe (Embedded), like lets say getting them to display a German language. ...

Since we started utilizing Nagios’s power two months ago, I finally came up with a C-based ram-plugin for nagios. The biggest problem I had with the python and perl based plugins, that some distributions (yes, SLES and Debian) don’t install either Python or Perl. Since I wanted a manageable setup (as in unified code base across all distributions), I wanted it to work without installing too much. So I took the swap plugin and basically removed what wasn’t necessary and voila! ...

As some of you people know, we (as in the University) recently purchased some Thin Clients in order to replace some oldish’ computers and solve the software management at the same time. The Thin Clients ain’t bad, they are Wyse V90L’s and they (as in Wyse) use their own management software to manage and deploy those thin clients and software. The bad thing about that, is it’s using it’s own “Scripting Language” (if you can call it that way - it’s more pseudo scripting since you can’t do much with it besides some basic actions). ...