Welcome to BAFM

One of my co-worker approached me today with a weird problem. Yesterday he had a disk in a 900GiB array failing which he replaced. After that, he run a rebuild/verification, fsck’ed the file system and tried to mount the volume again. Apparently the mount produced a kernel oops (guess what, the 900GiB is running reiserfs), thus leaving the kernel tainted (or what do they call it ?). So he tried to reboot the box but it didn’t reboot. It started rebooting but then hung (as in not continuing the reboot). He tried to ssh back to the box, and it worked just fine. ...

Here I am, preparing our environment for the first (of hopefully many) tester for our upcoming VTL project. So I ended up installing the ISC and Administration Center for Tivoli Storage Manager on a 64bit guest (that is SLES10 for AMD64), just because I forgot to include support for later versions with our current running one. Guess what, na- na na na na. Exactly, didn’t work, the same errors I got while trying it before in a virtual environment. “Portlet is not available.” ...

If you’re using a 2.6 based distribution, the FC HBA (or more correctly the corresponding driver) should create entries in /sys/class/scsi_host. Now you only need to get the host-number (basically the # of the host bus adapter) and you can get started .. Simply doing this, is going to tell the FC HBA “rescan” and discover new devices .. 1 echo "1" > /sys/class/fc_host/host/issue_lip That should do the trick, and you should be able to get udev to recognize the new devices attached via FibreChannel without the need to reboot the whole box (which might be a bit tricky).

Well, as some people already figured out; yesterday was my birthday. Chrissy noted it on my blog, as well as about every channel we’re together in (so did Chris); so thanks a lot for that 😉 Anyway, Saturday morning as I was forced to head downstairs due to my aunt calling (that was at 9am), my brother managed to take a shot at the presents as well as something else: ...

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.

… I’d break a butterfly on a wheel … I was coming out of the office, and found my car this way: Up close Birdie view Well happy me, I had some sort of cleanup detail for 20:00 local time (as in get all that birdie poooo of my damn roof!), and surprisingly once I was finished cleaning all the shit up, it started raining. Now, I’m never, * ever* gonna park below that dove/whateverdamndevilbirdyouare housing tree no more!

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, it’s April. And usually when it’s April, there’s April’s weather. In the morning I was rather surprised by the weather. And after I picked up Michel, we some when arrived at work (that is one hour later), we had our own adventure park in front of the work place: Collapsed trees Apparently, the trees in at the entrance collapsed (thanks to Michel for the pictures), so we had to make our way through somehow … was rather funny way to start the day … 🤷

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): ...