Ibm

Well, I just stumbled about this again (and I don’t know right now whether or not this is documented inside a RedBook or not) today, so I thought maybe I’m gonna write it down. Slot-Amount Property of a Virtual Tape Library Please keep in mind, when creating the virtual library to think hard about the amount of slots you might need. It ain’t that bad, you just can’t decrease the amount anymore. So if you think about creating 50 different virtual tape libraries with 500 slots each on your TS7530, think again. The current software level only supports 25.000 slots on a global level.

Recently, we got the recommendation from our system partner to use static allocated tape cartridges instead of dynamic allocated ones. Apparently using dynamic allocating cartridges comes with a performance penalty if more than a few nodes are backing up a large amount of data at once. And yet again, I noticed that the IBM Virtualization Engine Console (aka Falconstor Software) is really error prone. In order to change the allocation type, we had to shred the old cartridges first (500 x ~100M up till now), chance the allocation type at the virtual tape library level, and then recreate the 500 cartridges with a fixed size (500x 102400MB). Now, as I was kinda optimistic, I decided to create all 500 cartridges at once. ...

Well, I was just a bit curious earlier what distribution might be running on our IBM TS7530 Virtualization engines .. well, I just had a look-see .. 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 vetapeservice@VTL-B:~> cat /etc/SuSE-release SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (x86_64) VERSION = 10 PATCHLEVEL=1 vetapeservice@VTL-B:~> uname -a Linux VTL 2.6.16.46-229-smp #1 Sun Apr 13 05:21:49 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux vetapeservice@VTL-B:~> free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 4022 1378 2643 0 342 552 -/+ buffers/cache: 484 3537 Swap: 3815 0 3815 vetapeservice@VTL-B:~> cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 1 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 15 model : 65 model name : Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 8218 stepping : 3 cpu MHz : 2600.186 cache size : 1024 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 1 cpu cores : 2 Main difference to a " normal" SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 installation (there’s about zip normal with that kind of installation, thus the quotes) thus far are: the build for the VE uses busybox as init IBM stripped man/info they are running Xorg/Fluxbox on it Just don’t ask me why there’s a DE ( d esktop e nvironment) running, it ain’t even hooked up to a monitor. Only reason would be for the RSA’ remote monitor stuff … lala

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). ...

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 ? ...

OK, so I skipped rebuilding a newer RPM version (for now) and I’m currently rebuilding anything that fit’s into app-dev according to IBM … The list reads like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 $ ls -al ~/app-dev autoconf-2.59-1.aix5.1.noarch.rpm automake-1.8.5-1.aix5.1.noarch.rpm binutils-2.14-3.aix5.1.ppc.rpm bison-1.875-3.aix5.1.ppc.rpm coreutils-5.2.1-2.aix5.1.ppc.rpm cpio-2.5-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm diffutils-2.8.1-1.aix4.3.ppc.rpm flex-2.5.4a-6.aix4.3.ppc.rpm gawk-3.1.3-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm gcc-4.0.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm gcc-cplusplus-4.0.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm gdb-6.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm libgcc-4.0.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm libstdcplusplus-4.0.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm libstdcplusplus-devel-4.0.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm libtool-1.5.8-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm m4-1.4.1-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm make-3.80-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm OK, I’m not exactly rebuilding these old versions, I’m actually using their old specs to compile newer versions of these. I’m currently at coreutils-6.7, which really takes ages. But will see about the rest. ...

We are still waiting for the money promised by the state and the country for our HBFG (again, it’s “Hochschulbauförderungsgesetz”), that hopefully is reducing or eliminating our storage/SAN problem we have currently. Right now we have to Cisco MDS9216 (that’s a 16-port 2GBps SAN-switch, two for redundancy), which means we only have 16 SAN-ports. That isn’t much, but still is to less, as we have like 30 machines or so, that really need access to the SAN, so we either end up unplugging some of them from the SAN or merge them onto some big machines (like our x366). ...

OK, so I tried to install the AIX Toolkit today, to build some newer rpm’s (yaaaaah, I hate RPMS myself, still it’s way better than distributing plain tar.gz archives) but looks like either AIX or rpm-4.4.7 doesn’t like me. Now I’ve to figure out how to get libm (that’s /lib/libm.so) installed on AIX. Will see about that later and/or tomorrow.

We just received the long awaited shipment of sixteen 300GB FC-HDD’s (2Gbps with 10000rpm) for our SAN (a pretty old DS4500/FaStT 900). But there’s still the software option missing we ordered within the same breath. So I called our trustworthy IBM distributor (hah!) and asked the guy responsible for sales, what the ETA on this software option is (if someone is interested its VolumeCopy/FlashCopy). He told me, that we’ll receive a letter with the license key about 4 weeks after commission !!!!!! ...

christel, you remember the mood-swings we were talking about ? I think I’m undergoing just another 😞 I’m currently pretty much pissed. Basically everything is pestering me currently (except #gentoo-dev and Gentoo work). Work just ripped another piece of me (hah, thanks VMware & BigBlue). I started the day with a ice cold shower (if I’m talking about ice cold it was ice cold), they’re currently replacing our old gas heating and unfortunately that means no warm water at all! arg