Safekeeping on BAFM

Create a Proxmox Ubuntu Cloud-Init Template

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 19:02:19 +0000

Step 1: Download the Ubuntu image

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SRC_IMG="https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/jammy/current/jammy-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk-kvm.img"
#VMSTORAGE="/vmstorage"
VMSTORAGE="/var/lib/vz/images"
IMG_NAME="jammy-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk-kvm.qcow2"
IMG_PATH="$VMSTORAGE/$IMG_NAME"
wget -O $IMG_PATH $SRC_IMG

Step 2: Add necessary packages

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sudo apt install -y libguestfs-tools
sudo virt-customize -a $IMG_PATH --install cloud-initramfs-growroot,atop,htop,nano,vim,qemu-guest-agent,curl,wget,unattended-upgrades,git

Step 3: Modify /etc/ssh/sshd_config

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sudo virt-customize -a $IMG_PATH --run-command "sed -i 's/.*PasswordAuthentication.*/PasswordAuthentication yes/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config"

Step 4: Modify `/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades`

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export EDITOR=nano
sudo -E virt-edit -a $IMG_PATH /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

Step 5: Modify `/etc/default/grub`

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export EDITOR=nano
sudo -E virt-edit -a $IMG_PATH /etc/default/grub
sudo virt-customize -a $IMG_PATH --run-command "update-grub"

Step 6: Install `ohmybash`

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sudo virt-customize -a $IMG_PATH --run-command "git clone https://github.com/ohmybash/oh-my-bash.git /opt/ohmybash"

Step 7: Fix timezone

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sudo virt-customize -a $IMG_PATH --timezone "Europe/Berlin"

Step 8: Create the Proxmox template

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TEMPL_NAME="ubuntu2204-cloud"
VMID="9000"
MEM="512"
DISK_SIZE="10G"
DISK_STOR="vmstorage"
NET_BRIDGE="vmbr0"
qm create $VMID --name $TEMPL_NAME --memory $MEM --net0 virtio,bridge=$NET_BRIDGE
qm importdisk $VMID $IMG_NAME $DISK_STOR
qm set $VMID --agent enabled=1
qm set $VMID --scsihw virtio-scsi-pci --scsi0 $DISK_STOR:vm-$VMID-disk-0
qm set $VMID --ide2 $DISK_STOR:cloudinit
qm set $VMID --boot c --bootdisk scsi0
qm set $VMID --serial0 socket --vga serial0
qm set $VMID --ipconfig0 ip=dhcp
qm set $VMID --ciuser=christian
qm set $VMID --cipassword="bla"
qm set $VMID --searchdomain=ka.beiheimdaheim.de
qm resize $VMID scsi0 $DISK_SIZE
qm template $VMID

RPM spec: Installing a custom init-script

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:14:51 +0000

Well, I’m sitting again here grinding my head on how to fix up a certain package. Now, I had to look it up again, so this time I’m writing it down!

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Source1: ${name}.initd
...
install -o root -g root -m 755 %{S:1} $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/init.d/ndo2db

Windows: Running msconfig as non privileged user

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:38:38 +0000

Well, the title is kinda misleading since you need administrator privileges to run msconfig in it’s full scope. But this is just a hint to myself on how to execute msconfig without logging out and then logging in as administrator.

`1`	`runas /user:Administrator C:WINDOWSpchealthhelpctrbinariesmsconfig.exe`

TSM client: Backing up files with umlauts on SLES

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:21:10 +0000

In the past, I always had problems with SLES and our Tivoli Storage Manager client’s when backing up files with german umlauts. Well, today I looked a bit harder, and quite quickly found a solution.

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sles9 root [0] > env | grep ^LC
LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8

As you can see from the above, SLES9/10 ain’t setting LANG or LC_ALL (which I searched for first), but is setting LC_CTYPE.

So, simply changing the LC_CTYPE in the init-script and/or prepending the dsmc command line with a new LC_CTYPE fixes my umlauts problems!

Nagios: NSclient++ in a clustered Environment

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:50:36 +0000

Well, most of you already know that I’m a Nagios fanatic. I like to watch as many aspects as I possibly can. So, yesterday I started figuring out ways to watch our different cluster groups (housing a bunch – try above 20.000 – of file shares).

Now, my first tries failed horribly. I brought down a complete cluster group, resulting in a major annoyance. Now, today I went at it a bit smarter 😛 I cloned myself two VM’s off my Windows Server 2003 Enterprise R2 template, created a new cluster.

Linux: Getting information about an EXT3 filesystem

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:52:01 +0000

You know, I’m not getting any younger. It’s getting harder remembering every damn command … so here is how you get information out of your EXT3 filesystem:

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sles10sp2 ~ [0] > tune2fs -l /dev/sda2 | grep "^Filesystem"
Filesystem volume name: <none>
Filesystem UUID: 8eec8235-4d9e-4b58-acf9-3c68c977d5ea
Filesystem magic number: 0xEF53
Filesystem revision #: 1 (dynamic)
Filesystem features: has_journal resize_inode filetype
 needs_recovery sparse_super large_file
Filesystem state: clean
Filesystem OS type: Linux
Filesystem created: Tue May 27 10:48:56 2008

Restarting the NSclient++ service without the management applet

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:21:36 +0000

For people, who are as click and point-lazy as me, here is how you restart the service without using the service management applet.

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net stop "NSClientpp (Nagios) 0.3.5.2 2008-09-24 w32"
net start "NSClientpp (Nagios) 0.3.5.2 2008-09-24 w32"

MySQL: Setting up an InnoDB raw device

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 13:34:45 +0000

Well, since I had to brood about this (again I might add), I’m gonna write it down this time …

Setting up the InnoDB raw device isn’t that hard, just make sure the device has proper permissions (either add mysql to the disk group or create a udev rule).

`1`	`KERNEL="sdb2", OWNER="mysql", GROUP="mysql"`

Now after that (and a reboot/udevcontrol reload_rules later), you should be able to initialize the InnoDB device. Yes, the InnoDB device needs initializing.

Monitoring the IBM BladeCenter chassis with Nagios

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:40:00 +0000

Today I ended up working out the details on what we want to monitor regarding our BladeCenter. The most interesting details (for us that is) are these:

Fan speeds for Chassis Cooling/Power Module Cooling Bay(s)
Temperature
Power Domain utilization

It wasn’t * that* hard to implement. Only trouble(s) I ran into, were ( 1) IBM did a real shitty job with the MIB’s. If you look closely into the mmblade.mib, you’re gonna notice, that not a single OID is specified for the events. ( 2) As the MIB’s weren’t documented anywhere, I had to look them up via snmpwalk (which I had never used before). So as a reminder (to myself), here’s how it is done:

`1`	`snmpwalk -v1 -c public -O n 10.0.0.35 .1.3.6.1.4.1.2.3.51.2.2`

This will get you a list, with a lot of output (5154 lines to be exact). Lucky me, the web interface of the management module/ssh interface is rather verbose, so all you need to do is compare those values with what you are looking for.

So for myself (and anyone interested) read ahead for the list of checks we are currently running on the management module.

Installing SLES10 via network with no DHCP available

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 11:24:08 +0000

In our current fight against the BladeCenter switches, we’re currently facing the problem that the blades ain’t able to send/receive DHCP-traffic.

So in order to move forward, we had to use static IP addresses. And since SLES10 ain’t straight forward on that, I had to look it up. Now, here’s for me (and everyone else tired of searching) how to do it:

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install=http://ftp.barfoo.org/install/SLES10-x64/CD1
 netdevice=eth0
 hostip=10.0.1.240
 netmask=255.255.255.0
 gateway=10.0.1.1
 nameserver=10.0.1.2
 domain=home.barfoo.org
 insmod=bnx2
 splash=verbose

Updating path information for TSM

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:11:31 +0000

As I did some switching today (between the new lin_tape version by IBM and our own lin_tape version), I ended up writing those lines a dozen times. Here is (just for me, if you don’t care .. skip ahead) on how to generate a list of commands:

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for i in $( seq -w 1 32 ); do
 token="${i/0/}"
 path_prefix="/dev/lt/IBMtape12245775"
 echo "DELETE PATH TSM1 VTL1_DR$i SRCTYPE=SERVER DESTTYPE=DRIVE LIBRARY=VTL1"
 echo "DEFINE PATH TSM1 VTL1_DR$i SRCTYPE=SERVER DESTTYPE=DRIVE LIBRARY=VTL1 DEVICE=$path_prefix$((token+11))A1"
done

which should get you a list like this:

Sidenote: Amount of Slots per Virtual Tape Library

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:32:57 +0000

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.

Trusted vendors in SUSE Linux Enteprise 10

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:31:19 +0000

The other day I had a closer look at the zypper logs (well, I was digging for a time-history of installed packages). First … damn does zypper produce a lot of logs on a " productive" (or rather on a maintained - as in up-to-date) system.

But glazing over the logs, I found out something new about zypper. It actually has an internal list, which only purpose is to identify a trusted vendor …

Cleaning up /tmp

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 13:26:59 +0000

Well, I just looked into /tmp on one of our boxes and noticed that SSHd left behind some (try 400) directories .. Now, I could use a simple rm -rf /tmp/ssh-*, but I didn’t want to kill my current agent forward file.

After looking at the man-page of find, I stumbled about -mtime. And that seems to work out quite well.

`1`	`find /tmp -name "ssh-*" -mtime +5 \| xargs rm -rf`

VI Client: Changing the language from the system default

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:12:45 +0000

Well, as I am in fact running a german Windows XP, the VI Client started displaying all menus and operations in German when I updated to 2.5u2. Normally, I wouldn’t have much of a problem with that, but recently it started to annoy me, since the translation is a bit off from the real meaning of much of the operations.

So today, in the morning I started looking for ways to revert the VI Client back to displaying everything in English. And guess what. There’s no way to switch the language from the VI Client itself. There’s just a workaround.

Removing newlines (n) with sed

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:35:42 +0000

Today I had to search again on how to remove newline special characters with sed. Thanks to Kamil over at linux.dsplabs.com.au, I found it again rather quickly.

Now, this is just for my own safekeeping, so I don’t end up googling for it again … 🤷

`1`	`echo -e "Line containing nnewlines!" \| sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/n//g'`

Retiring people

Wed, 28 May 2008 12:55:34 +0000

I’m not sure whether or not I blogged about this before, but here it is just for me to actually remember what, in which order I need to do. If you got the list in form of a csv file, simply do the following:

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wget -q http://tinyurl.com/4atkz7 -O - | grep "(" | cut -d'(' -f2 | cut -d')' -f1 | awk '{ print tolower($1) }' > retirements
for developer in $( < retirements ); do
 retire.py --metadata $developer /cvs/gentoo-x86/ | diffstat > ~/metadata.$developer
done

That’ll give you a detailed list of which metadata.xml need to be changed.

Rescuing a rebooting machine that's hanging

Sat, 24 May 2008 17:14:56 +0000

One of my co-worker approached me today with a weird problem. Yesterday he had a disk in a 900GiB array failing which he replaced. After that, he run a rebuild/verification, fsck’ed the file system and tried to mount the volume again.

Apparently the mount produced a kernel oops (guess what, the 900GiB is running reiserfs), thus leaving the kernel tainted (or what do they call it ?). So he tried to reboot the box but it didn’t reboot. It started rebooting but then hung (as in not continuing the reboot). He tried to ssh back to the box, and it worked just fine.

Getting a FC HBA to rescan it's attached devices

Mon, 19 May 2008 11:50:48 +0000

If you’re using a 2.6 based distribution, the FC HBA (or more correctly the corresponding driver) should create entries in /sys/class/scsi_host. Now you only need to get the host-number (basically the # of the host bus adapter) and you can get started ..

Simply doing this, is going to tell the FC HBA “rescan” and discover new devices ..

`1`	`echo "1" > /sys/class/fc_host/host/issue_lip`

That should do the trick, and you should be able to get udev to recognize the new devices attached via FibreChannel without the need to reboot the whole box (which might be a bit tricky).

Flushing the disk cache

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 02:46:21 +0000

I’ve been looking for this over and over and over, until I had some inspiration today (thanks to Andew and Chris) .. this has one and only one sole purpose: safekeeping, so I don’t end up searching for it all over again …

To free pagecache:

`1`	`# sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches`

To free dentries and inodes:

`1`	`# sync; echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches`

To free pagecache, dentries and inodes:

Nothing to see here - wget stdout

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:22:41 +0000

Actually there’s nothing to see here. It’s just to get it somewhere more obvious then my irc logs …

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$ wget -q http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/incr/patch-2.6.23.8-9.gz -O - |
 gunzip | patch -p1

grub via serial console

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:09:17 +0000

As I have quite some trouble every time I need grub via serial console, here’s just my personal reminder on how to do it right:

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# cat /boot/grub/grub.conf
serial --unit=0 --speed=38400
terminal --timeout=15 console serial

title hardened-sources-2.6.20-r1
root (hd0,0)
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-hardened-r1 root=/dev/hda1 console=ttyS0,38400 console=tty0

Additionally the agetty entry for ttyS0 in /etc/inittab needs to be uncommented and changed accordingly to the serial speed