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
Well, I was at work for a brief moment, where I grabbed me one of our SATA->USB bridges, since I need to migrate some (~750GB) data of the old raid-array and onto a new one. The troublesome about that is simply, that the current RAID controller only supports four attached devices, that’s why I do have to use something like this … Sure I could have bought a new RAID controller, but why spend 45+ EUR on something, that you can solve differently ? ...
Well, after I had so much trouble with the USB converter (which isn’t really suited for Linux), I went ahead and bought a DawiControl DC-154 (which is using a SIL3114) controller to migrate my stuff. After fucking up the new RAID array with the 1TB disks on the old controller (luckily I had the old hard disks still lying around, which still contained the RAID array), I plugged the 1TB disks onto the new controller and started building the array. So after 760 minutes (that’s nearly 13 hours) of synchronizing the newly created array, I was finally able to create the file system – that should be without trouble, right ? ...
As I pointed out back in October, it’s rather easy to create a setup which syncs a built binary package to a remote node (which is serving them to the world - via http,rsync,ftp - pick your poison). Now, ever since we had slight space problems on miranda ( 🤕 my binpkgs 🤕), I wanted to look into methods on how to get rid of storing them on the buildnode and the webnode. I think now (hehe, it’s only 7pm), I finally managed to get a " proper" bashrc which does a lot of that foo. Take a look at this: ...
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 … Well, I just looked at opsview again (haha, thanks Alex 😛). Only trouble is, the people over at opsview don’t distribute RPM’s for that … After registering for their site, to download the SRPM’s (or to download anything), I got the RPM’s and started looking at them. ...
For those of you, still using my binary packages. It’s just a waste of disk space for me (6.8G to be exact), so I decided to remove them. I’m gonna give people one week to grab yourself a copy. I’m gonna keep the bashrc and all the other stuff I wrote back when I was still interested in binary packages, but the binary packages are gonna vanish! ...
Well, today I once again had the case where a virtual machine (in my case a Virtual Machine Template) was kinda stuck. You couldn’t remove the template (as in the entries for “Remove from inventory” was grayed out) and you couldn’t re-add the Virtual Machine’s VMX from the datastore browser either. VI Client - Disconnected templates Though, a simple putting the host into maintenance mode and rebooting helped that problem. Maybe there is a simpler solution for this, I just don’t know about it. ...
Well, I just had another look at our client scheduler services on our Microsoft Cluster. A while back we noticed that those scheduler services were going nuts after some time. Well, as it turns out, I can tell why. Microsoft Cluster Services have a feature called registration replication, which replicates a given key, if changed when the resource is online, to all connected cluster nodes. Now, we added the obvious registry key to the settings of our cluster resources for the scheduler services ( SOFTWAREIBMADSMCurrentVersionBackupClientNodes) and the scheduler service would use the same registry key to store it’s passwords. But it seems we were far off with that assumption. ...
Well, Arne recently (not really recently though .. 😛 ) complained about my blog being waaay to technical, so I ended up writing this lil’ anecdote. I’m finally on my long awaited, the remaining year lasting vacation. Last week was interrupted by a short job interview in Nuremberg, and also by the flu (not " again", I still got it in me, haven’t been able to shake it now for about three months). ...
Well, kernel updates on our Linux servers running IBM’s RDAC driver (developed by LSI) is a real pest .. especially if you have to reboot the box two times in order to install the drivers/initrd correctly. So I sat down and looked at the Makefile. Turns out, it just needs four tweaks in order to be working with a different kernel version (which you have to pass using environment variables to make). ...
Well, after yesterday’s lesson about getting the IBM RDAC to install for a not-yet-running kernel, I decided to take it a step further. Novell does have some documentation about KMP’s, which is actually rather good, especially the guide written by Andreas Grünbacher. After a short tinkering, I got it actually working. I was kinda surprised, at how easily it actually is. One problem I still have to deal with, is modifying the %post, to generate the mpp-initrd image. For now, the KMP only contains the default %post, which updates the modules.* stuff. ...