Christian’s blog

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 MASQuerading/ROUTEing 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.

Here’s what already was in the syslog-ng.conf.in (more on that later):

  filter f_iptables { facility(kern) and match("IN=") and match("OUT="); };
  filter f_messages { not facility(news, mail) and not filter(f_iptables) };

which I just extended with the following:

  filter f_iptables { facility(kern) and match("IN=") and match("OUT="); };
  filter f_messages { not facility(news, mail) and not filter(f_iptables)
                      and not match ("Did not receive identification string from 172.16.(123|234)");
  };

Afterwards just a quick SuSEconfig -module syslog-ng, restart the syslog daemon and the messages were gonse. Sure I know it’s a rather ugly hack , but since they refused to provide a “true” fix and it seemed like that question has been asked more than once it works for me, so *shrug*
But now you’d ask why syslog-ng.conf.in ? Simply because Novell figured it would be too easy to just invent things like CONFIG_PROTECT for RPM/YaST, so they placed yet another file in there; from which the syslog-ng.conf files is generated every time SuSEconfig is being executed (that’s like every time you install a package using YaST).

Life PacketPro, SLES10, syslog-ng, Teamix, Work

So we bought some Fujitsu Siemens P5916 Intel vPro back in January/February for the Boss and his secretary.

These boxes are quite nice, come with a Core 2 Duo (which is waaay to overrated for simple business applications like Word, Excel, Access and Outlook), but he insisted on having Windows Vista Ultimate ready PC’s.

We got them, as expected completely *blank*. Wasn’t so much of a problem though, since we have a Select 5.0 6.0 contract with M$. Only problem was, they refused to install Vista (as in freezing after preping the HDD). So I called our local vendor, who told me “Go, grab the latest BIOS from the support page and perform a BIOS update!” - Which I wasn’t so happy about to hear and to do … That didn’t work, the box would freeze on boot now …

So we reprimand our local vendor, who pushed the liability away from themselves and onto Fujitsu Siemens Computers (since they labeled these things Vista Ready). Next thing I know, I was talking to the sales person responsible for the R&D (F&L in german) in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, claiming “It would have been bettar if you bought these with Vista preinstalled - eh ?“, which I doubted (and still doubt) since drivers can’t change if you can install Vista on it when Vista itself considers the BIOS “not ACPI compatible” …
That was about the time when I stopped listening and thought about buying Dell desktops from now on … since I’m completely sick and tired of being treated like the last low-tech moron by a) sales representatives, b) vendors, c) lvl2 technical support and d) engineering.

Anyway - I was trying to tell today’s story .. So the Boss called me in around 9′, asking me to take a look at his Outlook since it complained about “H:\Outlook.pst” not being present (H:\ is the drive for the roaming profiles and the private data for every employee). So I looked a bit further, into the Event log of this Vista box where I found something like “No Logon Server found, your last locally saved profile is being reused, please contact your administrator”. From there on, I was rather - err -puzzled about the way Windows Vista is handling Roaming profiles.

Opened up a command prompt, tried ping‘ing the router in the subnet and got a garblish response from ping (which I’ve never seen before). First I checked whether the cable was OK (it was), afterwards I went grabbing his computer back to the workroom, plugged in a separate NIC, which worked but Vista didn’t had drivers for. So plugged in the next one, googled for Vista drivers (which I luckily found), plugged in my pendrive and hoped they’d work with Vista .. but NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

So I pulled the NIC again, only to see that the model numbers differed in the second digit (I plugged in a 500TX while I had a 530TX in my hands to look at the model number). Plugged in the NIC in my hands, did the same game again .. and Voilà, “Houston, we have lifted off … “.

Carried the PC back into his office, plugged it in, told him he could try to login now … and at finally around 10:30′ish he had his PC in a working condition back, and at least it seemed as if he was rather happy about it

Life Fujitsu Siemens, Work

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).

The real bad part started later. First the box committed suicide sometime on the weekend (the last one that is), which is rather not so good.

So we installed the ocfs2-tools (which is obviously needed if you want do writes on a SAN volume mounted on two separate boxes), configured the o2cb thing to start automatically on boot and added the entry to /etc/fstab.

So far so good, but as we slowly activated the apache-vhosts, we finally came to what cost me about three damned hours of my life:

child pid ### exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

Now guess what … ZendOptimizer just went bye-bye … Damn and what now ? So I looked at the Knowledgebase on zend.com, even found an Article stating it’d do that from time to time …

And attached also the usual crap .. “Please update to the latest version”. Only problem with that is that the latest version is indeed available for x86_64 (meaning amd64 in Gentoo terms), but ain’t for ppc (even if the product page states it should be).

So I went home, knowing what the problem is - since it was already past 4pm - swearing a short “frack that“.

Now that I’m home, ate something (a rather good salad), listening to some Korn/Kid Rock/Offspring and after doing some undertakers work, I asked myself “Why exactly do we need that crappy application anyway ?” (beyond the obvious point, that the ZendOptimizer is like/ is a php-compiler cache).

It turns out, one of my co-workers wrote a TYPO3-plugin interfacing our local research database .. and the catchy thing is, guess what …

He “guarded” it with ZendGuard, thus we need to use the ZendOptimizer thingy; otherwise we couldn’t use it either …

O RLY ?

Life AIX, IBM, PHP, SLES10, Work, Zend