Sles10

Since one of the requirements for my current project is having NIC redundancy, I didn’t get around looking at the available " adapter teaming" (or adapter bonding) solutions available for Linux/SLES. First I tried to dig into the Broadcom solution (since the Blade I first implemented the stuff uses a Broadcom NetXtreme II card) , but found out pretty soon that the basp configuration tool, which is only available on the Broadcom driver CD’s shipped with the Blade itself, pretty much doesn’t work. ...

So, as the previous try on getting the teamix people to fix the bloody LoadBalancer (as in sending at least an identification string for the SSH check) didn’t work so well (they told me, I should configure MASQ uerading/ ROUTE ing on the PacketPro(which is kinda icky), I went on today and looked at what SLES10 installs as default logger. Surprisingly they install a rather new syslog-ng (well, syslog-ng-1.6.8 is what they ship) so it was rather easy to workaround the situation. ...

I’m coming back today from a six day vacation in the warm south (that is Stuttgart), back at work and find three sheets of paper on my desk. Two tell me something I haven’t done yet, the other one tells me something I haven’t seen yet. One of my colleagues had to restart one of our web nodes and now the thing can’t mount the logging volume (and thus, logrotate / awstats failed to do it’s job). OCFS2 ain’t spitting any error messages, when trying to mount the volume you see it joining the domain the volume belongs to on the other nodes, so from a first glance at things .. nothing is wrong ? ...

Well, it turns out that building stuff on ppc64 is a real pain in the ass, at least on anything SUSE related. I do have to tweak every damn spec to include this: 1 2 3 %ifarch ppc64 export LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -m64" %endif Otherwise, ld is gonna fail when linking, as it’s gonna try linking the generated 64bit code ( -m64 is passed on via RPM_OPT_FLAGS to CFLAGS) as 32bit code, which ain’t gonna work at all … ...

As I wrote earlier, I recently virtualized our nagios. Along with that came a complete " redesign" of how checks are applied. Up till now, I defined checks for each and every single server, thus ending up with ~25 files, each holding roughly 6 checks which are in the same file just sorted by hostname. As you can imagine, it gets quite confusing with that amount of checks (~150). So the last two days I spent on reorganizing (with Visio), on which object/hostgroup placing a check would make sense. Now, this is my first result of two days planning, reorganizing, reordering and moving hosts into different hostgroups. ...

We’re currently having a really weird problem with our VM’s. Sometime last week, SUSE released a kernel update. Now, once you install it and you reboot the selected VM with a DVD/CD image present, you’re gonna see this: msg.vmxaiomgr.retrycontabort.unkown The only workaround so far has been to unmount any cleanse any CD-Drives attached to the VM. And yes, this is reproduceable, even reinstalling from scratch doesn’t change the fact, that after installing the patch the VM quits working. ...

Well, after some searching today (we applied the VMware Update 2 today, thus the VMware Tools update too), I finally found out what is causing that problem. Though the problem seems to be not limited to virtual systems alone, I just browsed through this Novell Forum thread which pretty much describes my problem. I found the same error in the VM’s I tried to mount a CD image. ...

Well, there is this “nifty” tool called patch2mail, which basically converts the XML for the updates to a more readable format. But you’re screwed if you want to do the same on SLES10. Since it ain’t shipping with the zypper xml wrapper thing, you need to do it a bit different. So I ended up writing a small (and yet, ugly) shell script to generate me a mail of my liking .. ...

Well, since we received part of our shipment on Wednesday, I finally looked at how we’re gonna deploy our active/active Tivoli Storage Manager configuration. Right now, we do have a single pSeries box hosting ~100 client nodes which we’re looking to split by two (since we do have two x366 for that purpose now). Now, as there ain’t no solution for this scenario yet (neither from International Business Machines nor someone out of the open source community), I sat down and started writing an OCF Resource agent for dsmserv (that is the Tivoli Storage Manager server). ...

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. ...