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OK, as Stephen recently asked why there is a double inclusion of in kernel/sysctl.c (and I asked Greg and Randy); I finally decided to write a patch to the LKML for possible inclusion. But, git ain’t easy for people like me (who are used to the easiness of say - subversion or even cvs). So here’s what I did (thanks to Fernando for the help earlier today): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 $ vim kernel/sysctl.c // change something $ git checkout -b sysctl // create a new branch from your changes, based upon the master repository $ git commit -a -s // commit the changes to your newly created branch $ git format-patch master..sysctl // Enter a subject and then a separate description // and you should have a new file in the current working directory starting like 0001-*.patch Now you should have a mailable patch, ready to be sent upstream that looks like this: ...

Since my talk with Robin on Thursday regarding the autogenerated userinfo.xml, I finally found some time today to get all the info’s I need out of userinfo.xml. Since I don’t really want to manually enter all those mail addresses from userinfo into LDAP manually, I figured sed might be my best friend. BUT sed ain’t easy .. But thanks to Fabian and Gilles, I learned something new about sed today .. Basically I searched for a way to transform userinfo.xml into a datafile for ldapedit. ...

As apparently the guys at Teamix read my recent blog post about their cluster solution, someone of their technical support called me on friday at work 😳 And pointed out That I’m free to express my thoughts about their product (which I recently did) That there is a better way to workaround this issue He also said, its something which they had asked multiple times. It’s as simple as editing the Virtual Server and changing the service inspection from “Connection” to “None” .. duh ...

So we bought some Fujitsu Siemens P5916 Intel vPro back in January/February for the Boss and his secretary. These boxes are quite nice, come with a Core 2 Duo (which is waaay to overrated for simple business applications like Word, Excel, Access and Outlook), but he insisted on having Windows Vista Ultimate ready PC’s. We got them, as expected completely blank. Wasn’t so much of a problem though, since we have a Select 5.0 6.0 contract with M$. Only problem was, they refused to install Vista (as in freezing after preping the HDD). So I called our local vendor, who told me " Go, grab the latest BIOS from the support page and perform a BIOS update!" - Which I wasn’t so happy about to hear and to do … That didn’t work, the box would freeze on boot now … ...

What would you figure from the above ? Hopefully the rather obvious, that it’s a really shitty combination. So we figured it would be a nice thing to test our new setup before going into pre-production testing or production, but we don’t have an extra spare box. So we took one of the power4 boxes we have mounted in the rack basically consuming energy all day (that’s about 38kWh a day) and installed SLES10 onto it. Which wasn’t all that bad (at first the box repeatedly started back to AIX, from CD and after convincing the SMS - that’s basically the bios on the power*-boxes also known as System Management Services with a hammer to boot from the first hard disk). ...

So I have one or the other file, that needs to be extracted to a directory. And why not name it as the archive itself .. Only problem with it is the handling of variables with bash … Try it yourself, stuff some directories with a space in inside a variables, and use something like this: 1 2 3 epimetheus tmp [0] $ mkdir files epimetheus tmp [0] $ touch files/"I hate directories.archive" files/"Me luuv you looong time.archive" epimetheus tmp [0] $ for i in $( /bin/ls --color=none files/ ); do mkdir "${i/.archive/}"; done And now take a look at the output of that .. ...

Today I played a bit with our PE Chassis, or more specifically the DRAC/MC (remote management console). One of the things I’ve been experiencing was that the DRAC/MC was rather slow when browsing on the web interface (as in waiting a minute for the jnlp for the KVM to download). So I went ahead, fired up net-misc/atftp on my notebook, put the firmware update provided by Dell in the TFTPROOT and executed this in my telnet session on the DRAC/MC: ...

After today’s adventure with the kernel bonding, I just took a look at the code … 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 if (miimon) { printk(KERN_INFO DRV_NAME ": MII link monitoring set to %d msn", miimon); } else if (arp_interval) { int i; printk(KERN_INFO DRV_NAME ": ARP monitoring set to %d ms, validate %s, with %d target(s):", arp_interval, arp_validate_tbl[arp_validate_value].modename, arp_ip_count); for (i = 0; i < arp_ip_count; i++) printk (" %s", arp_ip_target[i]); printk("n"); } else { /* miimon and arp_interval not set, we need one so things * work as expected, see bonding.txt for details */ printk(KERN_WARNING DRV_NAME ": Warning: either miimon or arp_interval and " "arp_ip_target module parameters must be specified, " "otherwise bonding will not detect link failures! see " "bonding.txt for details.n"); } If I read it right, you only get the KERN_WARNING for “either miimon or arp_interval” only if miimon or arp_interval isn’t set … but at least my config says it is .. 🤷 .. bed time for me :rolling_eyes:

Okay, yet another day passed by blazing fast. I had a good day at work, spent nearly the whole day trying to get my bloody systems hooked up to our SAN (which was interrupted by a non-working SAN-switch, disappearing WWN’s, lunch and my trainees), messing around with our internal network, hacking our Blade Chassis switches to get me what I want and some random paperwork. But first things first .. We installed SLES10 on a pSeries box the other day (I think on Monday), and now I’m trying to get the WWN of it’s Emulex HBA, out of either sysfs or procfs. But whatcha’ thinking ? ...

Yessir, I’m back home. Bought a new bed (god, I forgot how good sleeping can feel) and spent the first two days at work already (yes, it’s Friday afternoon already). I really thought catching up after having a 2 week vacation would take more time, but it just took yesterday morning (till ~9am). I’m surprised by the taste of black tea with milk and sugar (yes, I was like yikes initially, but I like it pretty much now 😀 ) and by the ability to rise at 7am in the morning 😛