Novell KMP: Useable version of ibm-rdac-ds4000

After some more tinkering, a lot more looking at the macros in /usr/lib/rpm/rpm-suse-kernel-module-subpackage and /usr/lib/rpm/suse_macros, I think I finally have a usable RPM’ified version of IBM’s Multipathing driver ready for use. There is still one major annoyance left: each time you install a new ibm-rdac-ds4000-kmp RPM, you also need to reinstall the corresponding ibm-rdac-ds4000-initrd package, as the macros in /usr/lib/rpm don’t allow for custom %post or %postun. As mentioned before, I’m gonna send them to LSI/IBM for review, and maybe, MAYBE they are actually gonna make use of that. ...

August 8, 2014 · 2 min · 278 words · christian

Weird TS3500 problem

Well, today we had a rather weird problem with our TS3500. TSM running on AIX basically went bonko and spit out weird media sense errors, all stating that there is a hardware or media error of unknown nature: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ANR8943E Hardware or media error on library LIB3584 (OP=00006C03, CC=-1, KEY=04, ASC=44, ASCQ=00, SENSE=70.00.04.00.00.00.00.46.00.00.00.00.44.00.00.00.00- .00.40.82.00.00.00.40.00.00.02.00.48.01.A1.00.00.00.00.0- 0.06.1B.00.01.09.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.- 00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00- .00.00.00.00.00., Description=An undetermined error has occurred). Refer to Appendix C in the 'Messages' manual for recommended action. ANR8381E LTO volume HG4480L4 could not be mounted in drive DR9 (/dev/rmt8). After restarting the TSM server (as in the service, not the whole box) five times, which didn’t resolve squat we decided to take a look at the TS3500 itself. We opened up the Management interface and tried moving a tape into a drive. That didn’t work. Hrmmmmm. ...

August 8, 2014 · 2 min · 269 words · christian

Linux-HA and Tivoli Storage Manager (Finito!)

As I previously said, I was writing my own OCF resource agent for IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager Server. And I just finished it yesterday evening (it took me about two hours to write this post). Only took me about four work days (that is roughly four hours each, which weren’t recorded in that subversion repository) plus most of this week at home (which is 10 hours a day) and about one hundred subversion revisions. The good part about it is, that it actually just works :-D (I was amazed on how good actually). Now you’re gonna say, “but Christian, why didn’t you use the included Init-Script and just fix it up, so it is actually compilant to the LSB Standard ?” The answer is rather simple: Yeah I could have done that, but you also know that wouldn’t have been fun. Life is all about learning, and learn something I did (even if I hit the head against the wall from time to time ;-) during those few days) … There’s still one or two things I might want to add/change in the future (that is maybe next week), like adding support for monitor depth by querying the dsmserv instance via dsmadmc (if you read through the resource agent, I already use it for the shutdown/pre-shutdown stuff) I still have to properly test it (like Alan Robertson mentioned in his one hour thirty talk on Linux-HA 2.0 and on his slides, Page 100-102) in a pre-production environment I’m probably configure the IBM RSA to act as a stonith device ( s hoot t he o ther n ode i n t he h ead) - just for the case one of them ever gets stuck in a case, where the box is still up, but doesn’t react to any requests anymore

August 8, 2014 · 7 min · 1337 words · christian

XBMC: Adding the ppa keys to apt

I recently bought an Acer Aspire Revo and had one of my trainees put XMBC on a SDHC card today. So after a bit of toying earlier, I started looking at the thing (from the command line that is). One thing, if you enable the PPA (ppa.launchpad.net) sources, apt/aptitude is gonna babble something about an unverified key. 1 2 3 4 5 Fetched 119kB in 2s (41.4kB/s) Reading package lists... Done W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 6D975C4791E7EE5E W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 2BBD133164234534 W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY A956EB81318C7509 I ended up looking the error up (since I only have an Ubuntu desktop). There’s a simple solution for this: ...

August 8, 2014 · 1 min · 201 words · christian

XBMC on the Acer Revo

As I wrote a month ago, one of my trainees put up with my stubbornness to put XBMC on said Acer Aspire Revo. Now, initially he put the Live Edition onto it, which didn’t really fly with me. I’m usually the CLI guy, so I needed to install it myself (again). Since I wanted to use the VDPAU features the later GeForce cards offer (and the Revo has such a graphics cad), I had to install the current development builds (you know – I love bleeding edge!) ...

August 8, 2014 · 3 min · 509 words · christian

Weird lighttpd troubles

Well, since about a week or so I keep having troubles with my vHost and lighttpd. The point being, after some time (up till now it’s been something between days and minutes) lighttpd completely freezes and doesn’t serve no content anymore. I don’t know if this is related to PHP (might be, I did perform an update to dev-lang/php-5.2.9-r2 on Thu May 28 12:18:57 2009), but I have to figure this out since the restart cron-job is getting annoying. ...

August 8, 2014 · 1 min · 135 words · christian

Lighttpd troubles resolved

Well, after last weeks lighttpd troubles with PHP (or was it without ?), they finally seem resolved. First thing I did, was upgrade to the new php-version (5.2.10). After that, I ran revdep-rebuild, which apparently found issues with lighttpd being linked to a wrong pcre-version. After remerging lighttpd the issues seem to be gone! Well, guess I was to quick in saying the problem was resolved .. it’s still there, just not happening as fast as it would in the past ….

August 8, 2014 · 1 min · 82 words · christian

Lighttpd issues

At first, it seemed that my lighttpd issues were resolved by updating PHP/remerging lighttpd. But apparently not. After putting in a crontab entry, that restarts lighttpd every 15 minutes (which completely sucks), the issue was minimized in it’s impact but not really solved. 1 */15 * * * * root /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart &>/dev/null Thanks to Michél (I guess, again) – who helped me looking at the strace logs, and of course Christian (aka hoffie – one of my old Gentoo buddies), the issue seems finally resolved. It turns out it was neither a PHP nor lighttpd issue. It was a simple matter of (stale) symlinks in /etc/ssl/certs if you can imagine that. Apparently a stale symlink forced PHP into a loop or something, from which it couldn’t recover on it’s own. ...

August 8, 2014 · 2 min · 225 words · christian

VMware: New VirtualCenter 2-5 Update 4

As many people on the VM-Planet already blogged about this, I ain’t gonna write just about it. Let’s turn the clock back a few months, to January 2008. As the institution I work for, is part of the DFN we took the opportunity to be a part of the " I want you to run our RA"-gang. In January 2008 we thought about changing the vCenter certificate. Now, apparently there’s a slight difference between the DFN-PCA and what VMware considers common practice. ...

August 8, 2014 · 2 min · 242 words · christian

Xen dom0 failing with kernel panic

I’m building a 6-node cluster, using Xen at the moment. For the last few days, I tried my setup in a virtual machine, simply because VM’s boot much faster than the real hardware. However, certain things you can only replicate on the real hardware (for example, the InfiniBand interfaces, as well as certain nfs-stuff). So I spent most of the day to replicate my configurations onto the hardware. After getting all done, the moment of the first boot … kaput! Doesn’t boot, just keeps hanging before booting the real kernel. Now what ? I removed the Xen vga parameters and rebooted (waited ~2 minutes in the process) until I finally saw the root cause for my trouble: ...

August 8, 2014 · 2 min · 219 words · christian