The usual IT babble
Life
VCP410 exam
Dec 24th
I’ve been learning for my VCP-410 exam the last week or so, and what can I say ? It helped … 463 points of a total of 500 points ain’t that bad at all (considering I spend twenty minutes doing it).
Sure, I could have spent more time, and do better than 92,6%, but then again: why should I ?
The achieved points (nor the percentage) don’t appear on the certificate (or at least it didn’t on the old one), so why bother. Anyway, that was my christmas present to myself, it that light; happy christmas ya’ll.
Monitoring Brocade FC switches with SNMP/Nagios
Dec 21st
I looked into the mess a bit more, and as it turns out, the weird crap I was talking about only happens if you have a port with LossofSynchronization, LossofSignal or LinkFailures value with the base of ten (i.e. 10, 101 or 10.000).
Additionally, the OID’s for those three failure elements seem to be dependent on the firmware version, as with 6.3.x they appear as different OIDs. So I may need to introduce another command-line switch, which selects the firmware version and depending on that, the OID.
Even despite those problems I just described, I ended up using the plugin to watch our SAN infrastructure. I even wrote a simple pnp4nagios template, so all the data would show up in a single graph and not a graph per data source.
Graph: 4 Hours
Monitoring Brocade FC switches with Nagios
Nov 23rd
The last four days I spent looking for ways on monitoring a Brocade Fibrechannel switch (in my case IBM 2145 B32/F40). The first thing I came up with, is using SNMP. As it was already configured for the previous monitoring with Munin, getting information should be quite easy. After looking through Google for a bit, there is already one script that worked for me.
Only trouble I had with that script, is that it crams every single port into one result. As I wanted something, that a) could watch a single port and b) return performance data, I went ahead an used the script to do a basic rewrite. But after a short while, I grew antsy and started writing a script from scratch, using the OIDs I got from that script and a Cacti template.
More >
PXEBoot the VMware ESXi installer
Nov 20th
Some of you may know, that VMware released vSphere 4.0 Update 1 yesterday. I took this as a reason, to finally wrap my head around booting the VMware ESXi installer from my PXE/TFTP box. Since VMware was kind enough to provide (a somewhat worthless) document, that explains how to extract the necessary files on Windows. But that quite doesn’t work with Linux — and VMware just states that you should be using mount and it’s option offset.
Luckily there are smart people around. Cameron shows exactly as to how you’d mount the dd-image. If the dd-image is mounted, you just need to copy over cim.vgz, license.tgz, oem.tgz, sys.vgz, vmk.gz and vmkboot.gz. After doing so, you should add a section to your pxelinux.cfg that kinda looks like this:
LABEL 3
MENU LABEL VMware ESX^i 4.0 installieren
KERNEL addons/mboot.c32
APPEND boot/esxi/4.0/vmkboot.gz --- boot/esxi/4.0/vmk.gz --- boot/esxi/4.0/sys.vgz --- boot/esxi/4.0/cim.vgz --- boot/esxi/4.0/oem.tgz --- boot/esxi/4.0/license.tgz
IAPPEND 2
Just make sure, everything following APPEND and before IAPPEND is in a single line.
Custom Keymap.xml with XBMC
Nov 15th
If you intend to use a custom Keymap.xml with XBMC you might need to be aware of a change that recently happened. Up till now the Keymap.xml was placed in ~/.xbmc/keymaps. Recently (not exactly sure, which svn revision it changed) although it changed.
Since r21442 (that’s after the current 9.04.1 release), the default keymapping files are stored in the system/keymaps/ subfolder of your installation. To alter the default keymapping simply add one or more xml-files in the Userdata/keymaps/ folder with the changes you wish to make. If the keymaps folder doesn’t exist, create it. For backwards compatibily, Userdata/Keymap.xml is still read.
If you place the Keymap.xml in ~/.xbmc/keymaps you’re gonna see weird things happening. Basically, most commands work however not everything. Once you move the keymap.xml to ~/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps, everything magically starts working again.