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.
Last updated: January 2026
As I was kinda bored after work today, I had a closer look at what I saw during my fuckup in the morning. Well, Steve said, that when he looked at metadata.xml it’d be " really common" .. still that isn’t making it right .. There is a reason we do have a herds.xml (exactly for the reason to associate people with packages, and that’s what the tag is for in metadata.xml) file. So after a preliminary look through the repository, here are the winners: ...
So Petteri came up with a nifty python script ( local), which in return spit out this. Which generated a rather complete list ( local), that looks like this: 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 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 700: perl 569: maintainer-needed 128: media-video 126: xemacs 47: sound 32: ha-cluster 32: crypto 19: desktop-misc 16: netmon 15: forensics 13: web-apps 10: pam-bugs 8: vserver-devs 8: mips 8: embedded 8: app-backup 8: apache-bugs 8: alsa-bugs 7: net-im 7: kde 6: tcltk 6: media-tv 6: dev-embedded 5: voip 5: theology 5: samba 5: net-p2p 5: freedesktop-bugs 4: sparc 4: java 4: graphics 2: net-mail 2: ldap-bugs 2: kernel 2: fonts 2: cpp 1: x11 1: wxwidgets 1: www-servers 1: tex 1: shell-tools 1: sgml 1: sci 1: qmail-bugs 1: python 1: proaudio 1: media-optical 1: kerberos 1: hp-cluster 1: amd64
… that’s the question. I’ve been thinking lots and lots about my involvement with our " beloved" distribution. I talked to some of the users (that is Gordon), some fellow developers (hello Christina, Łukasz, solar, Jorge, Anders) about whether or not I’m actually still wanted and/or needed. Turns out, the collective opinion is, that I am fun to have around ( 🤷 don’t ask me why, I don’t find myself particularly funny/amusing) and that’d I’d be the person to have around. ...
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 …
Well, as for replacing my current fileserver (which I seriously need to consider replacing), I’ll just pick up these things: 3WARE 9550SXU-8LP (that’s 399,00€) plus riser card VIA EPIA EK 8000EG (that’s 201,69€) Kingston ValueRAM DIMM 1 GB DDR-400 (that’s 57,00€) 4x Seagate ST31000340NS (that’s 279,00€ each - making a subtotal of 1.116,00€) So after browsing some more for a replacement for my current fileserver, I’d like to share the latest stages with you people. Thanks to Mike (who mentioned that binutils-2.18* already does the LDFLAGS="-Wl,-z,relro" part) I replaced it with "-Wl,-O1". Same old place, there’s fresh stages … (and thanks again to Mike, with working util-linux-2.13-r2). ...
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 ?? ...