Welcome to BAFM#
This blog is a collection of thoughts, experiences, and technical insights from a sysadmin’s perspective. Here you’ll find posts about system administration, infrastructure challenges, troubleshooting adventures, and the occasional philosophical rambling about technology and its role in our daily work.
Whether you’re a fellow sysadmin looking for solutions, someone curious about the behind-the-scenes work that keeps systems running, or just stumbled upon this corner of the internet – welcome! Feel free to explore, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions or want to share your own experiences.
Follow me through my journey through life with all it’s neat little tricks, caveats and side-quests.
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Last updated: January 2026
Well, at last I’m getting somewhere with my troubles. This only seems to be happening when creating an RAID5 multiple device with four disks, this doesn’t happen with three.
Now, the next thing I tried was to create a three disk array, and then adding the fourth disk as spare and then extending the array with that fourth disk. After that, all these errors seem to appear again yuck So I either possess rather faulty disks, or something else is fishy, since I’m having another four disk RAID5 array with the old disks …
Well, I don’t think my problem has anything to do with the DawiControl card anymore. I did a little experiment today. I created a 1TiB EXT3 file system on a single drive (one of the new 1TiB drives obviously) and started syncing data over to it (roughly 800MiB).
Now, then I unmounted the drive(s), ran fsck -C -f /dev/sd${deviceletter}1 and it went through without any trouble. Then I removed the partition and created a 1GiB partition on each drive, which I then used to build a new device mapper RAID5 array (with EXT3 on top …).
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As I posted earlier, I tried working around some limitations in Microsoft’s Active Directory by teaching the script some intelligence.
But, since we recently started using Thin Clients, all the stuff I did with the fancy vbs was just a waste-of-time. Turns out, Windows XP Embedded doesn’t work quite the same as a " normal" Windows XP (that’s where I tested the script on), and it simply dies when running the WMI Query. Bollocks.
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Well, we had our TS7530 delivered in late September, the day after the IBM service guys came by to prep the VTL for our needs (IBM sells the thing as black box). Now, since that day; they fought with the Call Home functionality. The trouble was simply, that the Call Home Service running on the Virtualization Engines just didn’t start.
After about 6 weeks of trial and error (and the IBM service guys popping in every second week), they finally found the cause of the Call Home Service not being able to start. Domain Name Resolution. Neither the IP addresses of the VE’s nor the VE console were registered in our DNS/or local host files.
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As some people know, I previously " created" (mostly modified the check_swap plug-in to print RAM usage) check_ram in C. Now one of my problems for the past few months was putting the C plug-in as well as " supported" environment under the same hat. Today I had another look at the amount of available plug-ins in NagiosExchange. There are quite a few plug-ins available, but as I do have some experience with Python, I used the one written in Python.
It was rather easy hacking in support for performance data into it, as the below shows. Someone else already posted a non-unified diff for performance data support, but that ain’t quite right according to the Nagios plug-in development guidelines.
Well, when they delivered the VTL about four weeks ago, nobody figured this thing would be such a mess. Apparently IBM hasn’t set up that much VTL’s with engine failover.
Point being, the VE’s have eight HBA ports (four inside, four outside the black box). Now, as they configured the VTL, the ports were all in initiator mode. And we needed the fourth port in target mode as well, as it’s better to have 4 independent paths to the VTL. The only problem was, the VE console didn’t think so.
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At first, as we prepped the zoning for the VTL, we did it WWN-based. Now the trouble with the HBA’s of the VTL is simply that it has different WWPN’s on the same WWN. And WWN-based zoning simply doesn’t allow access to that.
So off we went and switched to Switchport-based zoning, and see. It just works 🤷
I just had another look at what I wrote the week before last (you know, being home-sick/on vacation has it’s advantages) and additionally read up on " OPTIMIZE TABLE" again. The comments in the manual mention " SHOW TABLE STATUS", which gives you a complete list, but it doesn’t allow you to filter certain kinds of things out (like I only wanted to see MyISAM tables in the list, I only wanted database and table).
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Well, today I had a rather weird error. I was testing the adapter bonding on one of the boxen designated as Tivoli Storage Manager Server, when I noticed that the bonding wasn’t working as expected when simulating an error (that is unplugging one of the TP cables for the bond).
Now, the bond had “mode=6 miimon=100” as options. After running “linux bond debug” through Google (which turned up nothing useful, besides one document on the Oracle Wiki about IOS/Linux adapter teaming), I figured “Hey, just lets test switching the arguments.” And guess what ?
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Well, once you thought you don’t have any more problems, another one just pops up. I’m currently bashing my head against the wall, why the hell the forwarded (or is it redirected ?) drives are not shown in the in the “My Computer” explorer view. I pretty sure have an idea why (basically, HKEY_CURRENT_USERS\Software\Classes isn’t writeable, but that’s where Windows, or rather the Terminal Services – or whatever is creating the associations), just don’t know a clever way around/by it.
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