Post FOSDEM 2007 thoughts (do I know you ?)

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 was ~3 days afterwards), Petteri (betelgeuse) asked me why people all of the sudden start to call him with his first name on IRC.

I think the cause for that is just seeing each other for some time (like 2 days in a row), talking to the other(s) in person makes you feel closer to him/her (you hopefully know what I mean 😯 ). Or maybe that’s just me.

After FOSDEM the virtual bonds changed, I started to call quite some people by their first name as did others.

Cisco sucks

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 other (again, you would think) .. but apparently the VLAN/subnet database is stored on the core router and took *all* subnets with it.

So the core router took our NAS cluster down (as they lost their “PUBLIC” interface) and apparently a minute after the core router went down, our FC storage started sending resets to the FC bus … and there went our ESX cluster ..

I’m still pretty unsure what *exactly* caused the FC storage to send those TGT resets, but it looks like is has something to do with the core router vanishing, as the same thing happened already two times in the past exactly after the core router blew. Still this shouldn’t be happening, as the FC network and the normal network are completely separated (despite the storage having a management port). So stay tuned for some more IBM fun *sigh*

SLES-9 (once again)

OK, so today was the highlight of the week … We updated apache2 on Tuesday (yeah, that’s still 2.0.49, so if you have some exploits – try them 😛 ) and now out of the sudden we have major performance issues. We looked nearly the whole forenoon for a reason, *why* the frackin’ apache was using 236% of the CPU’s.

In the afternoon, when my co-worker decided to go home (that was ~1500), I decided to revert back to the old patch level. But that isn’t as easy as you think (at least on SLES). The only thing I wanted to do, was something like this:

Looks like SuSE (or Novell who bought SuSE sometime 3 or 4 years ago) doesn’t consider reverting to an older patch level. Which means I would have to remove apache2, apache2-prefork, apache2-mod_php4; fetch the basic RPMS from our FTP server (which sadly forbids directory listing, so I can’t exactly look for the original RPMS) and I tried to blindly to fetch them.

Foooked. Didn’t work .. now I cron’ed the POS to restart every half an hour, so at least we have *some* solution. Will see about reverting the the last patch tomorrow again, hopefully I’ll find the original RPMS.