Solaris Volume Manager
I had the pleasure of adding a “hot spare” filesystem to our Solaris box today. Actually, it was a continuation of what I started the other day. Now I’ve never been particularly exceptional with disk devices (or block devices in general) in Solaris, so I knew this was going to be a challenge. And who doesn’t like a good challenge?
As a basis for my rant, let me start by saying that I’ve had no problems picking up the other UNIX’s (HP-UX and AIX) LVM implementations. Both are structured similar to Linux (or should that be Linux is structured similar to them? 
). Anyways, both follow the relatively simple notion of physical volumes, volume groups and logical volumes. Physical volumes are your physical devices (disks and other block devices). Volume groups are pools of physical volumes. Lastly logical volumes are your partitions upon which you create your file systems.
Solaris doesn’t implement any of this. At least not in the same manner. Near as I can tell, they roll the last two layers together to form what they simply call a volume. The worst though is the CLI tools used to create and manage them. It doesn’t help that I inherited this box from the guy that left, and without much notes. He didn’t split the file system up very well. If this were the other boxes I’d simple add another PV to the VG and then expand the drowning LV’s. Instead I can read through books on this subject to understand Sun’s take on LVM.
I ended up skirting the issue and not using their SVM. Since this is just for emergency sake, LVM isn’t really neccessary. Still it would be nice to conquer SVM.
Kick’n It
So I’m doing my first RHEL kickstart. I’m quite impressed. I’ve known about it for sometime (who doesn’t) but never really used RHEL and therefore didn’t have a reason to use it. But now that I’m “the linux guy”, and RHEL is an obvious choice for enterprise environments, I standardized on RHEL as the distro of choice for us. So why not kickstart everything?
Damn, its done…
So that went really, really quick! This is really just my trial install: a generic base install that I can build upon in a modular framework. The ultimate goal is an autonomous install where we define a system’s config in a database for use with cfengine/puppet and the system automatically builds itself. But I gauge that will be sometime out in the future.
For now, I’m just nailing down our base RHEL install plus local rpms for OV agents, HP stuff and EMC stuff.
First Impressions of KDE4
Well, installation was a breeze. In fact with the move to cmake, compiling the masked ebuilds of KDE4 took only a few hours! Wow. Overall it is great. However, one must remember that really just the core of KDE4 is production ready. The surounding applications that make up the remander of the desktop are still in there infancy. I get several graphic artifacts, flickering widgets, and the like from time to time. But its really all worth it.
Jumping to Wordpress 2.5
Just made the jump to 2.5 (from 2.2) and I must say in true Wordpress fashion the move was easy as pie. They standard backup database, disable plugins, then upload/copy files process. Some cool new features are the built-in tag support and redesigned dashboard. Moving from Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) was a simple matter of importing the tags into the new db schema, then updating my theme. I followed this blog post as a guide.
I also took the opportunity to move the blog into its own subdirectory. Again an easy task with Wordpress. In fact, the good folks at wordpress.org already have a quick guide on do this.
There are a few other lingering quarks, but like the other problems, I’m sure they easy to remedy.
KDE4
So, I figured that now is a good time to install KDE4. Gentoo published an official guide, so here it goes.