http://blog.barfoo.org The usual IT babble Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:13:23 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Well, as one can read in about every damn post you can find afor that topic, the /console switch is now silently ignored, as well as the rdp file option "connect to console:i:1". Now, what you don't find anywhere (only in some scenario explanation), that it is allowed to specifiy the ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/07/23/connecting-to-a-remote-console-with-mstsc-606001 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: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="msg.vmxaiomgr.retrycontabort.unknown"][/caption] The only workaround so far has been to unmount ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/07/22/suse-linux-enterprise-server-10-on-vmware-esx Well, it turns out that my thought was ultimativly flawed. When defining the hostgroup_members in the lower tiers, nagios is association the checks from the lower tier with the upper tiers. Thus propagandating all checks upwards, and me ending up with ~250 checks instead of ~150. Gonna have to try to ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/07/19/nagios-hostgroup-inheritance-continued 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 ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/07/17/nagios-hostgroup-inheritance As virtualization seems to be a trendy thing to do, I went ahead and virtualized our nagios (while reinstalling the whole thing ...). Now as I went into work today and started my email client, I received 4 nagios warnings about a LOAD service reaching critical state. Looked at the nagios ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/07/15/nagios-virtualization Well, as some people know, I keep around a small set of packages for my own needs (stuff I need from time to time, packages currently in the distributions but yet too old). So here are some additions to my small repo (that is so far this month): iftop 0.17-7 for SLES10 ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/07/14/latest-sles10-rpm-additions Remember my last post about cpu masking ? Well, turns out that you can do it to a "template". The only point you don't need to do, is to mark the VM as a "template". You still can clone it and move it around and all that other stuff, but the ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/07/14/extending-vmotion-compatiblity-continued Well, it seems to be getting a "trend" for me, to integrate stuff into our Active Directory. Now that I know why, and how easy that is, I expect to add more stuff. The good thing about the integration is, that you only need to maintain a single source for ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/07/14/nagios3-with-active-directory-authorization-on-sles10 Today I did something horrible. I yet again noticed that I bought the wrong CPU's (basically I bought Xeon DP's with four cores). Those have apparently a feature called SSSE3, which makes VMotion with our old Xeon DP's (dual cores) fail before even trying. But as we had a cooling outage ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/07/04/extending-vmotion-compatiblity Recently I got the task, to implement unixODBC/freetds on one (well, it's really three) of our web servers, as someone wanted to use Microsoft SQL Server 2005 with PHP (without using the MSSQL functions, which PHP provides soo nicely; don't ask me why). With that I also got a set of ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/07/03/managing-unixodbc-connections-on-sles10 Okay, so I ended up toying with subversion via WebDAV on SLES today (I know, I know .. it's bloody Sunday). It wasn't much of a hassle though, after reading this. Sure, I made a few errors at first (simply confused the logic behind "Location" and "Directory"), but after that ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/06/29/subversion-on-webdav-with-active-directory-authorization-on-sles10 Remember, I talked about building RPM's on SLES10SP2 on ppc64 ? Well, turns out I was rather stupid .. and it was rather simple (don't ask me why I didn't think of that). I tried asking solar, I used google (apparently with the wrong search parameters), nothing though. Not a ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/06/26/the-clue-to-build-ppc64-rpms 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 ... *shrug* echo -e "Line containing \nnewlines!" ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/06/24/removing-newlines-n-with-sed I'm just got back from four days in Rostock over at S&N, where I was attending a VMware design course and here's a list of questions I did ask the trainer: What's the disadvantage of having a 1016 ported vSwitch ? Any clues on how to exchange the default certificate of the ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/06/20/vmware-design-rules As I was building the updated RPMs for SLES10, though needed to refresh my old patch. Also, I was getting strange messages from autotools and fixed these quirks, Now, I prepped a patch for it, and finished building new RPMs for i585 and x86_64. http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/06/17/updated-check_ram-plugin Well, it's been a loong time since I first thought about retiring (yes, I know that #-dev's topic states "developer blogs" ain't for announcing important things, but my blog has to do for this; if not, I don't care anymore :!: ). But I think it's about time for me to ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/06/16/looong-time 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: %ifarch ppc64 export LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -m64" %endif Otherwise, ld is gonna fail when linking, as it's gonna try linking the generated 64bit ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/06/14/building-rpms-on-sles10sp2-ppc64 Well, to begin with we had this really weird problem that the thin clients as well as the terminal server would only load user based group policy if you are a member of the group of local administrators. While that's ok for the thin clients (users can't actually change ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/06/05/gpo-behind-the-scenes OK, so about an hour (yeah, yeah; I know .. I shouldn't be working at that time, but it really gave me sleepless nights) ago, I finally figured out why the hell both my Windows XP Embedded thin clients as well as my Windows Server 2003 systems where showing this ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/06/04/windows-xp-embedded-windows-server-2003-and-gpo-settings-the-solution Ok, as I promised my fellow collegue, I wanted to search for all the components I need to build my EPIA desktop. And here's the list: VIA EPIA SN10000EG - Hanobox - 206,60€ Kingston ValueRAM SO-DIMM 2GB (DDR2-667) - Alkon-PC - 29,90€ each Transcend SSD 2.5", 8GB IDE - K&M Elektronik - 86,35€ Ably ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/06/01/shopping-list Well, guess my "solution" didn't work sooo good. Lemme tell you what's happening. I successfully added the node to the cluster group, but I can't get *any* resources online. The node tries bringing it online, then shows a failure and immidiately moves them over to the next node. There the resource ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/06/01/windows-cluster-service-continued 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: $ wget -q ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/05/28/retiring-people Okay, so we received a brand new x3650 the other day entitled to replace one (or better two) of our NAS frontend servers. We installed Windows on it the other day (had to create a custom Windows Server 2003 CD first, since the default one doesn't recognize the integrated ServeRAID), ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/05/28/ibm-rdac-and-windows-cluster-service Well, as I said in my previous post, I do have some weird things happening. Apparently adding the domain user to the local group "Administrators" makes everything just works fine, yet he can't do administrator like stuff (like turning off the write protection, changing local user accounts, ...). Also, if you're ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/05/26/windows-xp-embedded-and-gpo-settings-continued 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 ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/05/24/rescuing-a-rebooting-machine-thats-hanging Here I am, preparing our environment for the first (of hopefully many) tester for our upcoming VTL project. So I ended up installing the ISC and Administration Center for Tivoli Storage Manager on a 64bit guest (that is SLES10 for AMD64), just because I forgot to include support for later ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/05/23/ibm-tivoli-integrated-solutions-console We're currently having a weird issue (which we had before); the Windows XP Embedded powering our Wyse V90's isn't applying any GPO settings if you log on with a user that has a configured profile. Googling (is that a valid word yet ?!) for it, only resulted in one useful link, ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/05/19/windows-xp-embedded-and-gpo-settings 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 ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/05/19/getting-a-fc-hba-to-rescan-its-attached-devices 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 ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/04/21/patch2mail-for-sles10 Well, as some people already figured out; yesterday was my birthday. Chrissy noted it on my blog, as well as about every channel we're together in (so did Chris); so thanks a lot for that ;-) Anyway, Saturday morning as I was forced to head downstairs due to my aunt calling ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/04/20/april-19th ... I'd break a butterfly on a wheel ... I was coming out of the office, and found my car this way: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Up close"][/caption][caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Birdie view"][/caption]Well happy me, I had some sort of cleanup detail for 20:00 local time (as in get all ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/04/17/thats-why As Mike wrote about his experiences with hardware vendors, I'm gonna devote this here post to my favorite software company in the world. We recently bought two copies of a software called "2X Application Server Enterprise Edition". As one would think from reading the specs of the software, it's near ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/04/14/software-support-and-key-account-managers Well, it's April. And usually when it's April, there's April's weather. In the morning I was rather surprised by the weather. And after I picked up Michel, we some when arrived at work (that is one hour later), we had our own adventure park in front of the work place: [caption id="" ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/04/08/april-weather Well, we do appear to be having some strange load problems with our main TYPO3 box hosting several home pages of the local universities, as you can see below. [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="LOAD 05:00-19:00"][/caption]We repeatedly tried to figure out which of them was the one responsible, but neither I nor ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/04/07/typo3-hogging Well, as we do have quite a few custom built RPM's, I was searching for a new solution to manage the repo(s). Currently I do have a single repository per distribution. One thing one needs to know about createrepo (from createrepo), it doesn't support this type of thing in the first ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/04/02/creating-multi-distribution-rpmxml-repositories Well, after a loooong time of trying to get the modules and all the other stuff (read: init-script for the guest daemon and modules) working, I think I'm about there. I finally fixed a long-standing issue, with the postinst/prerm scripts, and the tools should be about ready. Gonna try and send ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/03/27/open-vm-tools-for-debian-etch So Petteri came up with a nifty python script (nopaste|local), which in return spit out this. Which generated a rather complete list (nopaste|local), that looks like this: 700: perl 569: maintainer-needed 128: media-video 126: xemacs 47: ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/03/14/metadataxml-the-third As I was kinda bored after work today, I had a closer look at what I saw during my fuckup in the morning. Well, Steve said, that when he looked at metadata.xml it'd be "really common" .. still that isn't making it right .. There is a reason we do have ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/03/14/metadataxml-the-second So I ended up cleaning out some retired (~20) people from metadata.xml, where I found this interesting piece of metadata.xml: kernel-misc crypto@gentoo.org Crypto herd masterdriverz@gentoo.org Charlie Shephered And here the hint for all you people again: A DAMN HERD AIN'T NO MAINTAINER. SO IF YOUR HERD IS MAINTAINING ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/03/14/metadataxml ... that's the question. I've been thinking lots and lots about my involvement with our "beloved" distribution. I talked to some of the users (that is Gordon), some fellow developers (hello Christina, Łukasz, solar, Jorge, Anders) about whether or not I'm actually still wanted and/or needed. Turns out, the collective opinion ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/03/09/to-be-or-not-to-be As the guys over at FreeWyseMonkeys demonstrated with JoinDomain.zip, it ain't hard to integrate a Windows XP Embedded system into Active Directory. You basically need this: A system powered by Windows XP Embedded netdom.exe (from any Windows XP - SP2 in your MUI language) some know-how, on how to use netdom to integrate it ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/03/07/integrating-windows-xp-embedded-into-active-directory Well some people apparently completely *don't* understand the use of a backup client like dsmc, additionally they don't seem to have the slightest clue on how to draw up a "clever" backup solution. Lemme describe the situation for you. We do have two Solaris systems at work, housing our mailing system(s). ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/03/07/backup-solutions OK, it turned out that said collegue wasn't responsible at all. Turns out, the *real* trigger was me creating a new volume on our SAN, on the same array that houses the OCFS2 volume. Apparently, during creation of an additional SAN volume, all other SAN volumes in this array are either ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/03/07/ocfs2-follow-up Turns out, that said colleague has been playing with NFS on one off the web nodes, thus apparently rendering the remaining nodes offline (or semi-offline). Now after all web nodes hung themselves, we had to hard reset them, now everything is tingly again .. *yay* for a great first day ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/03/06/ocfs2-fun 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 ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/03/06/ocfs2-fun-yet-again As I mentioned before, we decided against the Citrix Presentation Server solution in favour of the 2X LoadBalancer and ApplicationServer combination. You're gonna say, but Citrix does the same and it's only one "application frame". 2X is exactly the same. Citrix Presentation Server features: Application isolation Single-Sign-On Application-Level Load Distribution CPU management Memory optimization 2X Loadbalancer & ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/02/21/getting-the-2x-service-up-and-running Well, I happen to be back at my favorite application. Today I stumbled upon a "nice" thing. If you turn on the Zend Optimizer (doesn't matter whether it is 2.6.2 or 3.3.0), one of the TYPO3 back ends ain't showing *any* content in the preview pane. Once you turn the ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/02/19/zend-optimizer-again I just found a rather oldish picture of myself. The date says it's from last year (Fri Feb 9 22:33:06 2007 to be exact) ... [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Me with beard!"][/caption] One year later, I can't imagine having such a beard ever again ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/02/17/scaring-people Well, as it is Saturday and I'm having lots of time (whereas I'd usually spend it working), I thought I'd give Windows Server 2008 a try. What interested me most, is the Windows Server 2008 "Server Core Installations", as it's supposed to lower the security risk (as there is *no* ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/02/16/windows-server-2008 Well, apparently some people don't have any value for other people's property. It's that way in big cities, but apparently it's the same is this shitty, lil' village. [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Scratch - Take #1"][/caption][caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Scratch - Take #2"][/caption]Whoever did that had serious fun with a key ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/02/16/other-peoples-property Well, it's been quite a while since most of the people last heard a word from me. The last few months I've been extremely busy with work-related tasks (and as a side-effect of that, didn't want to spend much time in front of the computer after 9 hours of work). ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/02/16/been-a-while 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: # sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches To ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/01/17/flushing-the-disk-cache After blogging the last time about the PacketPro 450 LoadBalancer appliance, the guys over at teamix seem to have taken that to heart and implemented a rather nifty thing for their new release. It's called "Port forwarding", which is basically what you'd figure from the name. It bounces ports around the ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/01/15/packetpro-170 Well, as for replacing my current fileserver (which I seriously need to consider replacing), I'll just pick up these things: 3WARE 9550SXU-8LP (that's 399,00€) plus riser card VIA EPIA EK 8000EG (that's 201,69€) Kingston ValueRAM DIMM 1 GB DDR-400 (that's 57,00€) 4x Seagate ST31000340NS (that's 279,00€ each - making a subtotal of 1.116,00€) So after ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/01/14/epia-fun Ok, so after my first day yesterday after a rather long vacation I today wanted to look at the problem that the Administrator password isn't changed when using VirtulCenter's clone customization functionality (which relies at least for Windows on sysprep). After a short googling, I stumbled upon this. Simple problem short ... ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/01/08/deploying-vm-templates For what it's worth, I've been trying to get some stages together the last few days. Thanks to solar and Brent, the ppc-stages are now coming along quite fast. I haven't really tested them yet, but for what it's worth, you'll find stages based on Saturday's snapshot (that is 200780105 for ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/01/08/stages Ok, so I ended up lying in bed for two hours, so I stood back up and searched for some stuff that floated my mind. The end result seems to be the following: VIA EPIA SN10000EG (199,30€) 2x Kingston ValueRAM SO-DIMM 2GB PC2-5300U CL5 (DDR2-667) (each 31,31€) Club 3D GeForce 7300 GT, 256MB ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2008/01/08/cant-find-sheephsleep As I pointed out back in October, it's rather easy to create a setup which syncs a built binary package to a remote node (which is serving them to the world - via http,rsync,ftp - pick your poison). Now, ever since we had slight space problems on miranda (cough my binpkgs ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/12/31/buildpkg-chroots Well, it's yet again New Year's Eve. Yet again a whole year passed by blazing fast, I didn't manage to get everything done like I wanted. That includes the following things: getting a better job (and probably better paid too!) getting a better life (well, it's as it sounds like - my current ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/12/31/looking-back-yet-again Actually there's nothing to see here. It's just to get it somewhere more obvious then my irc logs ... $ wget -q http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/incr/patch-2.6.23.8-9.gz -O - | \ gunzip | patch -p1 http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/12/08/nothing-to-see-here-wget-stdout Well, some of you know I'm a bit clumsy. Ok, I went buying some stuff for Saint Nicholas for the ones I love, which came to me about ten minutes before the shops are closing. Navigated my butt into the car, drove the ~6km to the nearest store (which still ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/12/05/life-as-god-it-wrote I stumbled upon a *real* weird problem. Apparently the terminal server licenses called "per Device" ain't a real per device. From reading on it Microsoft states it like this: Device-based versus User-based Terminal Server CALs Two types of Terminal Server Client Access Licenses are available: TS Device CAL or TS User CAL. A ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/12/04/device-cals-aint-no-device-cal Well, it's been a full month since I last wrote something. Back then I had some problems with 2X, Windows Terminal Server and printing (I still have problems, but not those anymore - I resolved them). Work has been unusual frantic the last month, as well as I don't pay much ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/12/01/frantic-work-private-life-friends Yes, yes. I do list a lot of crappy products (go on, laugh; I don't really care). Yesterday I had quite a struggle with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Terminal services (or more precisely with their way on how to deal with network printers). As most of you know, there a ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/10/30/windows-terminal-services-network-printers As I posted earlier, I tried working around some limitations in Microsoft's Active Directory by teaching the script some intelligence. But, since we recently started using Thin Clients, all the stuff I did with the fancy vbs was just a waste-of-time. Turns out, Windows XP Embedded doesn't work quite the same ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/10/25/vbscript-active-directory-and-printers-continued OK, since I last posted about my problems with screen and irssi being unable to handle unicode chars, I got a lot of feedback (here or on IRC), and actually it was Alexander who pointed me into the right direction. LANG=C doesn't seem to support UTF-8 characters. So after ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/10/25/screen-and-utf-8-continued Since I got annoyed by umlauts being printed as ░, I figured I'd install a UTF-8 capable font on this box here and all my problems would be gone. But not so fast. screen is a real fucked up thing. If you're starting screen via screen -U everything is nice and ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/10/20/screen-and-utf-8 Well, since our current solution for mapping printers is an ugly batch file, which needs to be put into Startup, I today poked at doing it in VBscript (I know, but it's less ugly than the batch script, trust me). As some of you know, printers are only applicable to users ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/10/13/vbscript-active-directory As some of you know, the company I'm currently working for, recently acquired some thin clients to replace our old computers for the students to work on. Those PC's are like P3 800 MHz with 512MB RAM and sadly don't run Office 2007 anymore, so we replaced them with thin ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/10/13/thin-clients-active-directory OK, since Alex asked me last Sunday what exactly needs to be done to turn a simple chroot (or even a bloody box) into a binpkg producing environment, here's a little howto .... First, lets start from a freshly unpacked stage3. catalyst/x86 stage3-amd64-hardened # chroot . /bin/bash --login # Now, make sure you ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/10/12/turning-a-simple-chroot-into-a-binpkg-repository Since we started utilizing Nagios's power two months ago, I finally came up with a C-based ram-plugin for nagios. The biggest problem I had with the python and perl based plugins, that some distributions (yes, SLES and Debian) don't install either Python or Perl. Since I wanted a manageable setup (as ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/10/06/nagios-plugins As some of you people know, we (as in the University) recently purchased some Thin Clients in order to replace some oldish' computers and solve the software management at the same time. The Thin Clients ain't bad, they are Wyse V90L's and they (as in Wyse) use their own management software ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/10/06/thin-clients Somehow, there still seem to exist honest people on this world ... I just found my drivers license in the mail, somehow the office responsible for the district I lost it in (it seems I lost it somewhere in Greifswald, since I got mail from the office in Landhagen) found ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/09/09/drivers-license Apparently the TYPO3 version we are using, doesn't play too nice with the MySQL Master< ->Master replication. Sometimes, something like this is going to happen: 070826 0:44:32 [ERROR] Slave: Error 'Duplicate entry '75-222419149' for key 1' on query. Default database: 't3nb'. Query: 'INSERT INTO cache_pagesection 070826 0:44:32 [ERROR] Error running query, ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/09/08/typo3-and-mysql-replication Well, the title nearly says everything .. I managed to loose my second pair of car keys, today I somehow found out that I was driving without a drivers license, so I have to go to the registration office and apply for a new one, hopefully should be done in ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/09/08/being-oblivious OK, as Stephen recently asked why there is a double inclusion of in kernel/sysctl.c (and I asked Greg and Randy); I finally decided to write a patch to the LKML for possible inclusion. But, git ain't easy for people like me (who are used to the easiness of say - ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/08/16/git-lkml-for-stupid-people-like-me As apparently the guys at Teamix read my recent blog post about their cluster solution, someone of their technical support called me on friday at work :shock: And pointed out That I'm free to express my thoughts about their product (which I recently did) That there is a better way to workaround ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/08/05/packetpro-450-and-ssh-checks Since my talk with Robin on Thursday regarding the autogenerated userinfo.xml, I finally found some time today to get all the info's I need out of userinfo.xml. Since I don't really want to manually enter all those mail addresses from userinfo into LDAP manually, I figured sed might be my best ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/08/05/praise-teh-sed 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 ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/07/12/bloody-cluster-solutions-continued 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 ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/07/12/fujitsu-siemens-onboard-nics-quality-assurance-and-vendors 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 ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/07/10/sles-zendoptimizer-and-ibm-powerpc4 So I have one or the other file, that needs to be extracted to a directory. And why not name it as the archive itself .. Only problem with it is the handling of variables with bash ... Try it yourself, stuff some directories with a space in inside a variables, ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/07/07/handling-filesdirectories-with-spaces-in-for-loops Today I played a bit with our PE Chassis, or more specifically the DRAC/MC (remote management console). One of the things I've been experiencing was that the DRAC/MC was rather slow when browsing on the web interface (as in waiting a minute for the jnlp for the KVM to download). ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/07/06/dell-poweredge-1855-dracmc-firmware-updates-telnet-and-csrs After today's adventure with the kernel bonding, I just took a look at the code ... if (miimon) { printk(KERN_INFO DRV_NAME ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/07/04/miimon-arp_interval-and-the-code In preparation to get our website (and all those other websites - like www.fh-neubrandenburg.de or www.hmt-rostock.de) clustered, someone bought the cluster version of the PacketPro 450. These things are nice, especially considering you don't need to fiddle around with LVS yourself (which is a *real* pain in the ass). The only ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/07/04/bloody-cluster-solutions 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 ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/07/04/adapter-teaming-on-sles10 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, ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/07/04/sles10-on-pseries Yessir, I'm back home. Bought a new bed (god, I forgot how good sleeping can feel) and spent the first two days at work already (yes, it's Friday afternoon already). I *really* thought catching up after having a 2 week vacation would take more time, but it just took yesterday morning ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/06/29/being-back-home On Monday I finally got to do an expanded test drive with my shiny, new car (that is driving it up from Stralsund down to Stuttgart). I really can't complain, the fuel consumption is like I expected (~6.6l/100km while driving between 160 and 180km/h), the noise while driving that fast ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/06/29/stuttgart Here's just a note for you people out there, how're crazy enough and want something from me in the next week (that's 18th till 26th June): I'm on vacation ... Means I won't be around to fix anything (as I'm gonna try and relax a bit), so if you encounter something ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/06/17/vacation OK, it turns out that I was rather stupid when configuring the my.cnf. As it turned out, the effect I was seeing was due to the presence of two log-bin lines, which looked like the following: [mysqld] port = 3306 datadir = /mysql/dbase log = /mysql/logs/dbc-mysql1.log log-error = /mysql/logs/dbc-mysql1.err socket = /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock bind = 172.16.234.31 # custom paths ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/06/16/continuing-on-sles10 Here I am, sitting at my desk on a Thuesday evening thinking about what happened the last few days. I finally got to play around with our PacketPro 450 Cluster (nifty LoadBalancing appliance) We reworked the network the way *we* want it (and not that tool of a wannabe sysadmin) We mostly figured ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/06/12/back-at-sles10 We're finally making some progress with apache-2.2. It left the package.mask on the 8th of May (that's like 3 weeks from tomorrow), we split some helper scripts into a separate package (app-admin/apache-tools). I already fixed a few screwup I did myself (like apxs missing from either apache and apache-tools, or the ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/05/28/progress-with-apache-22 Well, I haven't blogged in ages (like about a month). To answer some of the questions I got either via mail or on IRC ... yes, I'm still alive; you ain't gonna get away that easy :-P yes, I finally managed to buy my shiny new car I'm still working on apache, virtualization, mobile, ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/05/28/personal-progress Interesting title ... *shrug* I'm sitting back home, in my bed, while I'm supposed to be at work. I'm now a certified sicko due to a common cold. Watching the toaster series once again (that's Battlestar Galactica) and trying to think about some things. Heh, well thinking isn't the right term; ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/05/04/bla-bla-bla-yada-yada-yada 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: # 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 ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/04/10/grub-via-serial-console As I'm way better writing stuff than saying it with my own words, here a short "Thank you!" Christel, you have been a gracious and honest person, thanks for all the advice and help in the last year Chrissy, thanks for the inspiring words, you really made/make me feel better Alec (antarus), you've ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/04/08/saying-thank-you As some of you know, I had some company the last few weeks by two amiable girls from Belgium. We did some hanging out, went out a couple of times and basically had a great time. One thing I didn't thought was possible, is them getting close to me (as in ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/04/08/the-letting-go-why-does-it-hurt-so-much Some of us attended this years FOSDEM in Brussels (thanks to Dimitry it was *really*, *really* great). We (at least the ones attending) got to know each other a bit better (I even got to know some pre Gentoo devs .. yeah, you), and some time after FOSDEM (I think it ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/03/26/post-fosdem-2007-thoughts-do-i-know-you OK, today we had somewhat of an emergency. The core-router for our entire network at work had some kind of hardware defect and repeatedly rebooted every three minutes caused the whole network to go *cabooom*. Usually (you would think), stuff in the same subnet (or VLAN) would still see each ... http://blog.barfoo.org/2007/03/14/cisco-sucks