Welcome to BAFM

Disclaimer: I don’t take any responsibility for faults within the software, I just provide the RPM’s! Feel free to ask me about stuff concerning these RPM’s, but I ain’t accountable if your stuff goes kaboom! Oh, and those RPM’s aren’t recommended or supported by VMware! Since we recently upgraded our VMware Infrastructure to VMware vSphere, I finally had a chance to refresh the RPM’s for the KMP for 2.6.16.60-0.39.3-0.1 and 2.6.27.21-0.1. You can find the source RPM here. ...

Well, after I finished my first OCF agent back in October 2008, we have it running in production now for about ten months. During that time, we found quite a few points in which we’d like to improve the behaviour with that Linux-HA should handle TSM. Shutdown TSM nicely if possible (Cancel client sessions, cancel running processes and dismount mounted volumes) Better error handling So, after another week of writing and testing with a small instance, I present the new OCF agent for Tivoli Storage Manager. It still has one or two weak points, but they are negligible. I still need to write the documentation for it, but the script should just work …

Well, after yesterday’s episode with our tape library today continued to be a taxing day. After restarting a few exports that were hanging yesterday due to our library problems, something similar returned. TSM was unable to locate a few (two to be exact) tapes in the library. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ANR8300E I/O error on library LIB3584 (OP=00006C03, CC=314, KEY=05, ASC=3B, ASCQ=0E, SENSE=70.00.05.00.00.00.00.0A.00.00.00.00.3B.0E.00.C0.00-.04., Description=The source slot or drive was empty in an attempt to move a volume). Refer to Appendix C in the 'Messages' manual for recommended action. ANR8312E Volume 000400 could not be located in library LIB3584. ANR8358E Audit operation is required for library LIB3584. ANR8381E LTO volume 000400 could not be mounted in drive DR6 (/dev/rmt0). ANR1402W Mount request denied for volume 000400 - volume unavailable. ANR1410W Access mode for volume 000400 now set to "unavailable". Yet the library reported the tapes were still inventoried. 🤷 Here we are again, looking completely baffled. After a short while trying to figure out what to do, we went through the Data Cartridge inventory again. As it turns out, through putting the library in “Pause”-Mode and restarting TSM multiple times, TSM apparently completely forgot that it had these tapes put into drives. ...

Well, Laura Kedziora (Marketing Manager) from Rove contacted me about two months ago, whether or not I’d be willing to write up a review about their upcoming release of Mobile Admin supporting Nagios! At first, I didn’t even know what " Mobile Admin" was .. though I heard some good things about Rove. After playing with it in a VM, I do have to admit that it’s a real neat piece of software. You can cover the whole (well, pretty much everything) shebang dealing with Nagios with the cell phone. But not just that. I could also manage our VMware Infrastructure (or vCenter) with it, as well as a SCCM environment (if we had any that is). Since I only have a shitty-old Nokia (not the required Nokia 6xxx), I ended up borrowing my brothers BlackBerry to take some photos.

Well, if you remember back to last December, I had some severe troubles with this fake ass RAID controller. At the time I posted my last problem (or rather, my conclusion) I already bought a 3WARE Escalade 9550SXU-8LP on EBay (used, since I didn’t want to spend ~400 EUR). Now after the controller arrived in mid-January, I ended up buying a new main-board, processor, memory, … in order to put the 3WARE card to use; initially I thought the 3WARE card would fit into my A7N8X-X, but apparently that only had a 16bit PCI-slot. ...

Disclaimer: I don’t take any responsibility for faults within the software, I just provide the RPM’s! Feel free to ask me about stuff concerning these RPM’s, but I ain’t accountable if your stuff goes kaboom … Oh, and those RPM’s aren’t recommended or supported by Novell or IBM! After working with the novell-kmp solution, I think it’s actually rather easy to create a " Kernel Module Package". In the end, I created two additional KMP’s, one for the tools component of the VMware-Tools shipped with VMware ESX, and another for the lin_tape SCSI driver, used by our IBM TS3400 as well as the IBM TS7530. ...

Well, as I wrote last year, I spent some time with my brother on Spiekeroog (that’s where he’s currently living and working). As I left on December 4th, it started snowing like crazy .. If you read the old article, you might remember that I mentioned Spiekeroog is 100% free of fossil fueled vehicles. That being said, let’s continue with the story I’m about to tell. Anyway, my brother was walking me back to the hotel boat and we waited a bit in the harbour since we were a bit early. Now, every item is delivered by ship to the island, since there’s no other way (besides by air, which is kinda expensive ..). Anyway, them dockworkers ain’t stupid. They needed some snow-free space, and they started clearing the snow. But how ? ...

Well, I am an enthusiastic user of Xmarks (or Foxmarks) and played with this again and again. So this weekend, I finally decided to do it properly. I sat down, recreated the whole WebDAV stuff (even if I cheated of this HowtoForge article). Always redirect traffic to HTTPS, since transmitting username and passwords via HTTP ain’t that secure (MITM) Okay, so here are the shortended setup instructions: Enable mod_access, mod_auth, mod_redirect and mod_webdav in /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf Create the necessary directories Create the htpasswd-file Configure the redirections 1 2 3 mkdir -p /var/www/dav/{web,auth,sql} chown -R lighttpd:lighttpd/var/www/dav/{web,sql} htpasswd -c /var/www/dav/auth/htpasswd chrischie Since we just created the necessary directories, as well as a htpasswd-file containing a user we should be able to change the configuration now: ...

Well, my co-worker just called on my cell (it’s Friday, 16:00), and asked me which start-up script he needed to change in order to restore the database. My first response was, “ummm, that’s gonna be hard, we’re using heartbeat”. Okay, so after a bit of asking I got out of him what he wanted to achieve by changing the start-up script. Apparently he did something to crash Tivoli Storage Manager (or rather repeatedly crash it) and wanted to restore the database. He talked to one of the systems partner we do have (and I’m happy we have them most of the time), who in return told him how to do it, but forgot a minute after he hung up the phone. ...

Well, I just stumbled upon something .. My Nagios at work wasn’t working anymore, and I went looking. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 nagios3 ~ [0] > tail -f /var/log/nagios/nagios.log [1238658394] Error: Unable to save status file: No space left on device [1238658403] Error: Unable to save status file: No space left on device [1238658413] Error: Unable to save status file: No space left on device [1238658423] SERVICE ALERT: tsm1;POWER WARN;OK;SOFT;4;-u OK - 0 [1238658423] Error: Unable to save status file: No space left on device [1238658433] SERVICE ALERT: tsm2;LOAD;WARNING;SOFT;1;WARNING - load average: 6.25, 5.72, 5.36 [1238658433] Error: Unable to save status file: No space left on device [1238658443] Error: Unable to save status file: No space left on device [1238658453] Error: Unable to save status file: No space left on device [1238658463] Error: Unable After that, zip - nada. Next thing, check whether or not the device is really full … Okay, df .. ...