theClonchs.com

Solaris Volume Manager

chris — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:54:14 +0000

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

chris — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:37:59 +0000

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

chris — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 01:26:33 +0000

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

chris — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 23:50:12 +0000

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

chris — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:38:16 +0000

So, I figured that now is a good time to install KDE4. Gentoo published an official guide, so here it goes.

Re: Version Controled Configs

chris — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 01:03:36 +0000

Ok, so I just ended up backing up my configs and diving in head first. It is really much easier than I thought, although I had to fiddle with subversion to do the in-place import. Answering my earlier questions…

Repository location - I know how to use the old RCS version control software, which kept everything in the same directory of what you were controlling. So with SVN I would designate a different location in the filesystem (say /var/lib/svn) and store everything there? This seems nice as it would be the same root location for all my repos (assuming an increased usage of SVN down the road). Answer: Not a big deal. I ended up placing the repo in /var/svn/systems//etc hoping this will prove to be a generic enough layout to hold more system stuff in the future. Then /etc is just a working copy of the repo; no need to edit the files in one location and check them out to /etc. However, that turns out to be the added benefit as I could… To any machine running subversion too.
However, in the normal daily routine would I have to checkout everything to a different directory so that I can edit it using my non-su account? Using my regular user account would be the preferred route (and more SA-correct way) but really I’m the only one who access the files so do I just use root for everything? Answer: Not really an issue. I su to root, make modifications, then when checking everything back into the repo I use the –username arg and specify my name. It is not error-proof, but it works.
File owner/group permissions - How would this work? If I use my regular account, would I simply su to root and checkout files to /etc to “activate” them? Answer: This might be the only real problem. It appears that subversion doesn’t keep track of either of these which could pose quite a problem. However, there isn’t an issue with editing as I am doing so with root (or sudo) anyways.

The main thing to remember is once I’m done with editing, I have to run some additional subversion commands. Namely, svn update to verify what’s changed, make any add or rm’s depending on additions or deletions, then svn ci -m “whats changed” –username to check it all in, and finally svn up to keep everything in line. Now I can run svn log to see my change history. Schweet.

New Job

chris — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:03:26 +0000

Ohh, almost forgot. I got a new job as a UNIX System Administrator at Mount Carmel Health System. Yeah me! They want me to help define their Linux standards. And hopefully I won’t fear blogging about work so I can post about my adventures. Very cool.

Power Problems

chris — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:59:05 +0000

Well, the power supply in my “server” finally went south and took the site offline for a week and a half. Should have been proactive and purchased a new one ahead of time. But of course that only was the first thing that went wrong.

Swapping the power supply was not as easy as I had hoped. The newer one packed 50 more watts so the manf was nice enough to change the MB connector. They really shouldn’t be allowed to call it an ATX power supply if the connector is different; I’m a firm believer in a change in form/fit/function = change in naming/numbering. Anyways, the new connector has an additional 4 pins on it. Now they were nice and notched the connector so that it would be backwards compatible. However they didn’t take into consideration MB manf who place small caps next to the power input connector. The work-around: bend the caps. I was able to bend them far enough that the connector makes contact. Just don’t bump the case or it may loose power.

Then if that wasn’t enough when I brought the server back up, a number of daemons didn’t want to start including mysqld. And with a database-driven website, if the database doesn’t work neither will your website. Turns out “bind=127.0.0.1″ was set in my.cnf. Commenting that out allowed mysqld to start. Now I don’t believe mysql has been updated recently so I’m questioning my recent kernel upgrade as I’m still having problems with a couple of other daemons and it just so happens that they are network related ones…

Version Controlled Configs

chris — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:14:03 +0000

I’ve been reading up on using subversion to manage my various system config files, namely /etc. While not familiar with using subversion (only knowing about it and what it does), I have been using a couple of websites as role-models: Scott Scriven’s how-to, Peter Murray’s gentoo specific how-to, and Noah Gift’s Red Hat Magazine article. Of course the official subversion docs have been helpful as well. Right now, the bits have me hung up are:

Repository location - I know how to use the old RCS version control software, which kept everything in the same directory of what you were controlling. So with SVN I would designate a different location in the filesystem (say /var/lib/svn) and store everything there? This seems nice as it would be the same root location for all my repos (assuming an increased usage of SVN down the road). However, in the normal daily routine would I have to checkout everything to a different directory so that I can edit it using my non-su account? Using my regular user account would be the preferred route (and more SA-correct way) but really I’m the only one who access the files so do I just use root for everything? Which leads me to my next question…
File owner/group permissions - How would this work? If I use my regular account, would I simply su to root and checkout files to /etc to “activate” them?

I’m sure more questions will come but I wanted to get these down on “paper” before I forget them as Renee is now home and this means it is time to put up the toys for the day…

Comedy

chris — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 21:45:56 +0000

Renee, Chad and Nette took me to the Funny Bone last night for my b-day. Pete Lee opened for Dan Grueter. Both were hilarious although Pete had me in tears. I figured I would post something to drum up a few clicks for them from my readers, all three of you. If you have a chance to see either of these guys do it. I ended up buying one of Pete’s tees and am wearing while I type. He was that funny. Dan looks like an older relation to my high school buddy, Bail. Thats funny too.

Should have brought my camera so I could have got a picture with him. Rats.