Fun with iSCSI

Yesterday I heard about openfiler "Openfiler consolidates several open source technologies on the Linux 2.6 kernel base to deliver a comprehensive storage management solution that meets the needs of enterprise applications, users and administrators." (from openfiler website).
I always wanted to play with iSCSI but didn't have any appliance to play with it but with openfiler i just needed another PC. But then since I had just one PC I came up with the following idea.
Install VMWare-server 1.0.5 on my laptop (Dell Vostro 1500) running Slackware 12.0 installed openfiler on the VMWare (VM image available on openfiler's website), and also cerated a M$ windows XP VM. Then installed iSCSI initiators on my Slackware 12.0 using the open-iSCSI project and on the win XP i installed Microsofts iSCSI intiator. Then mounted iSCSI targets from openfiler on Slackware and XP, made several I/O operations.
In my tests I olso tried to expand a published iSCSI disc. However this was not possible through the web-UI but was able to expand the disk via the commandline interface by using the "lvextend" command as openfiler uses LVM for it's disk management. But I had to restart the iSCSI service to have the change visible to the iSCSI initiators.

Updating Frenzy

Today I found the Linux kernel 2.6.25 was released so I promptly downloaded the source and compiled me a fresh kernel. So since I was already updating my kernel and had to recompile the NVidia Driver to have X working, I also decided to update to the latest NVidia Driver. At that point I was taken by an update frenzy and downloaded the latest GSlacky and had my gnome desktop updated. So now I have a nice updated system running, here's an overview of the new version numbers I'm running.

* Kernel went to 2.6.25
* NVidia driver went to 169.12
* Gnome was updated to 2.22

All updates went quiet smoothly expect the NVidia driver because of the newly kernel which lead to an error during the kernel module compilation. But this was solved by applying a patch to the NVidia installation package. I found the patch in a forum by doing some googeling.

So now I'm waiting for the new Gnome release to use the evolution mail client to access my work's mailbox since our mail is managed by M$ Exchange 2007. And currently evolution only supports till Exchange 2003.

Search your data with Splunk

While I was gathering information about plugins for Nagios, I found out about splunk. Put in short splunk will accept any data you put into it and you'll be able to isearch and report on the data. Splunk does provide a way to customize how it index your data. As an example I took the os-monitoring bundle available on the splunkbase.com website, what it does is feed output from vmstat,lsof,netstat and other commands into splunk at that point you can search for system status data and generate reports (the bundle is shipped with several reports alredy created).

Splunk comes in a free and commercial version. The diffrences can be found here, shortly the commercial version has some interesting features like access control and distributed indexing.
One possible probelm of the free version is that it's limited to index 500Mb of data a day.

Kittens @ war

Doing some shopping for dinner last night at the supermarket i found a book entitled something like "kitten vs kitten" it collected several photo's of kittens and the result of the people voting the cutest kitten. Reading the introduction of the book I found out these photo's were taken from the site KittenWar! . So I decided to have a look and maybe enter my kittens into the contest !

Spread the penguin

Spread the penguin and Get Linux

2007: Microsoft in Review

Stumbled accross this article reviewing M$ activities in 2007

Excerpt:
"It’s no small secret. I hate Microsoft. I think they are the most vile and corrupt corporation in the tech industry. Their monopoly hampers innovation and they favor litigation, corruption and marketing tricks to maintain their position over simply creating great products. I have read and heard many people claim Microsoft is changing, improving, and the evil Microsoft of the pass is fading; I strongly disagree with this view, and it takes no more then a cursory look through Microsoft’s actions in 2007 to see why:"

read more in the article

Veritas NetBackup Backup Windows

Ever tried to manage Veritas NetBackup with about 35 Policies with both full and incremental schedules having only 1 tape drive in your library ? The first problem I ran into was the various backup windows set on the policies. Since I was unable to find some easy overview of all configured backupwindows inside the Veritas Netbackup GUI, I created a small Perl script to generate me a report off all configured active schedules inside netbackup. If you're interested you can find the source of the script here

Mycity.com

I stumbled accros this funny site, and created my lovely little city :

http://hartcity.myminicity.com/

Nagios 3-RC1 in a jail

I configrued a Nagios 3-RC1 in a jail on a FreeBSD 6.3. At first the nagios daemon spawned a second process and then wouldn't exit, had to kill it with a kill -9. Eventhough it hanged the web interface displayed the data but service & host checks remained in a pending state.
After some googling i found a thread in the nagios mailing list for a similar problem. I created a file "/etc/libmap.conf" and added.

[/usr/local/bin/nagios]
libpthread.so.2 libthr.so.2
libpthread.so libthr.so

This made the nagios start and execute the service checks. However due to being in a jail nagios could not do some checks like pinging, due to the jail limitation. Adding thefollowing line in sysctl.conf

security.jail.allow_raw_sockets=1

Will allow ping to function inside a jail.

Changes

After 4 years I changed job and now work as a sysadmin for another company. It was time to change since there was no chance of improvement or new opportunities. In short the working environment was bad,it seemed like people were "praised" for doing nothing. Bringing improvement was not noticed.

Lotus Notes 8 on SLackware 12

Today I successfully managed to install IBM Lotus Notes 8 onto my Slackware 12 workstation. To be able to install Lotus Notes I installed GnomeSlacky wich is a project for porting Gnome in a non intrusive way into Slackware. I needed this since Lotus Notes Depends on some of the Gnome project libraries. The installation went quit good apart from the final step wich hang the first time. However after looking at the installation logs I found out that the last step tries to start e local webserver on port 80, since I had Apache running on my workstation the setup could not complete and halted. Thus I stopped my Apache and relaunched the setup, this time all went ok. I started Lotus by typing "/opt/ibm/lotus/notes/notes" into the command line, ( I need to create a shortcut on my desktop or menu for this) and I received the common lotus notes configuration wizard as you get on a windows machine. Once finished you have a nice working Lotus Notes 8 running on Linux.

Linux Clusters

On friday I had talk about Linux Clustering in a Red Hat environment. I've never been in touch with a Linux Cluster. In the past I read something about HA-clusters using "hearthbeat" but there my experience with clusters stop. So wondering about this Clustering I looked up some info on the Red Hat site and where found they have a Cluster Suite in the Red Hat Enterprise 5. Which uses Global Filesystem (GFS) , GFS provides shared filesystem. However "GFS differs from distributed file systems (such as AFS, Coda, or InterMezzo) because it allows all nodes to have direct concurrent access to the same shared block storage" (From Wikipedia ) . Then There's the Cluster suite. There's so much to read about this so I'll just put in some links here that'll take you to the stuff ;)

Red Hat Cluster Suite : Configuring and Managing a Cluster

Red Hat GFS 6.1 : Administrator's Guide

Breaking the silence

It has been some time since i wrote an entry.
But anyhow I wrote already some code for that Java project I have. I've put together what I call a distributed event handler. Well basically you have a Java class EventDispatcher which reads which reads a configuration file (now XML) from which it knows who can handle the various events. In case the the handler is on a remote host it'll open a network connection and write the event object to the network connection. The EventHandler on the other side will handle the received event and reply if needed. I tested this first version and it works even though it is not optimized. I'll try to have the code hosted somewhere and publish link on this blog.

Personal java project

I decided to finally start with a big programming project to increase my Java knowledge. The Idea is to create a web based game like Travian. But in such a wat that it is very flexyble that almost every aspect of the game can be changed with minimal code changes, or better with some kind of plug-in mechanism. As this project is just started it's still an idea. I'll have to start with the analysis and the design phase.

We'll see where I'll get in the future.

Internal Helpdesk fun

Today I received a very funny message in my mailbox from a user complaining about a problem :
"La mia memoria virtuale e' strapiena,me ne scarichi un po' per favore?Ciao"
Translated in english this would be "My virtual memory is full, can you please free some ? Bye "
That's just terrific :)

FreeBSD

I Decided to give FreeBSD a real try, so I removed the windows harddrive from my laptop computer (I now use that as backup drive) an put in a brand new harddisk (it was a gift from friends) and installed FreeBSD 6.0 First week it was compiling a lot of programs (usefull a broadband internet connection in the office) not that it was compiling 24/24h but here's a summary of what I compiled Bash,Emacs,Eclipse,mc,Apache22,php5+extensions,Mysql,KDE 3.5.2, windowmaker, etc... the one that took most was KDE 3.5.2 off course.

But I can say that it's running very smoothly ;)

Now that FreeBSD as even Java due to an agreement with Sun I has gained a lot of points for me since I do a lot of java programming. Even that I could have used gcj for java but that one has still some missing graphical support.

Apache iBatis

I found Apache Ibatis today wich seems very usefull. see
ibatis.apache.org for details in short it's a framework wich maps SQL
results to Java classes. Configuration and query defenitions are done in
XML files thus enabling you to change queries without recompiling your
java appilication as you would have to do if you're using plain old
style JDBC

check it out

First steps with Apache Struts

Here I am for another update of my blog ;)

This weekend i played around with Apache struts wich seems very powerfull. I also read something interesting about Apache iBatis aframewrok for mapping SQLColumns to JavaObjects.

Since I'm studying at the university after my workhours (wich is quiet hard 8:30-18:00 working then 18:30-21:30 university) where I have a Java course all this helps me to have a larger view about java. Also at work I've created my forst Java servlets for data inquery of ourcustomer information.

My age of reinventing the wheel (as i did a lot of times in the past) is gone it's time to use the tools provides by the OS-community.

One big thanks to this fantastic community.

First looks on FreeBSD 6.0

So I decided to give FreeBSD a try on my AMd duron700. First impression is very good fast and easy installation. Also installing of ports through source is very nice. Performance is very satisfing , probably also because off the limited applications installation.

Let's see how it will go later on , right know it's compiling KDE 3.4.3 :)

Then i'll try some diffrent window managers

To Bsd or not to Bsd

I find myself with a big question...
Should I try FreeBSD 6.0 or should I stick with Linux ??

BSD seems very stable and fast.

I realy don't know. Any visitor has any comment please leave one then :)