Category: Life

PacketPro 1.7.0

Christian Leave a comment

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 load balancer, but saves you from creating a separate virtual server (and adding the physical servers to that one), but also saves you from modifying the syslog-ng configuration on the balanced servers.

EPIA fun

Christian 1 Comment

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 browsing some more for a replacement for my current fileserver, I’d like to share the latest stages with you people. Thanks to Mike (who mentioned that binutils-2.18* already does the LDFLAGS=”-Wl,-z,relro” part) I replaced it with “-Wl,-O1”. Same old place, there’s fresh stages … (and thanks again to Mike, with working util-linux-2.13-r2).

I also tried getting a Gentoo/Hardened stage for PowerPC working, but that fails as due to >glibc-2.3 needing =gcc-4*. Though luck ….

Oh, yeah. If anyone is looking for the specs, they are in my overlay.

Deploying VM templates

Christian Leave a comment

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 … Don’t specify an Administrator password for the template. Then you should be able to change the Administrator password when cloning the template. It’s “should“, as the VM’s are still updating.

And it really works. After emptying the Administator password, the cloning works just fine. Damn sysprep bug …

stages

Christian 9 Comments

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 those not smart enough to take a look at the calendar) here for the following profiles:

  • uclibc/ppc (normal/-softfloat)
  • uclibc/ppc/hardened
  • uclibc/x86
  • uclibc/x86/hardened
  • hardened/amd64
  • hardened/amd64/nomultilib
  • hardened/x86/2.6 (x86/i686)

Now remember, this isn’t *official* release material. This is just *MY* effort (for now) to provide current stages.

And just a side-note for those brewing their own (uClibc) soup: if you remerge system/world, you’ll have to keyword =sys-libs/uclibc.0.9.28.3-r2. Otherwise you’ll stumble on bug 195368, which is fixed thanks to solar, just not marked stable yet.

Can’t find sheep^Hsleep

Christian 1 Comment

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:

  1. VIA EPIA SN10000EG (199,30€)
  2. 2x Kingston ValueRAM SO-DIMM 2GB PC2-5300U CL5 (DDR2-667) (each 31,31€)
  3. Club 3D GeForce 7300 GT, 256MB DDR2, 2x DVI, TV-out, PCIe (CGNX-HG736) (55,00€) — still need to find a riser card
  4. Transcend SSD/IDE 8GB (169,00€)
  5. 2x Samsung SyncMaster 204B, 20.1″, 1600×1200, VGA, DVI (LS20BRDBSQ) (each 309,00€)

I still need to find a fitting power supply, but I’ll leave that for tomorrow. The above leads me with about 520,00€ for the “PC” and 680€ for the TFT’s (as I don’t have any). And that’ll give me a full silent (as in not a single moving part), quiet workstation for my desk.

Another thing I went looking, was the at the “Unquoted value” stuff repoman started printing. Thanks to GNi (and solar) I was able to compute a rather looooooong list quite fast …

For my own remembrance, here’s the (combined) command I used:

The *real* original (from history):

Oh, may come in handy too:

  • repoman-full-20080107.log (2,1M) as well as
  • repoman-quoting-20080107.log (1,4M)

Looking back (yet again)

Christian Leave a comment

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 life is rather unhealthy, and thanks to a friend I got the grip onto myself and started changing a few things – like doing a small workout every day, a bit more movement all over the day and so forth)

Which also means I do have some resolutions for the next year …

  • Become more active (like do a longer workout each day)
  • Get a better paid job (even if that’s going to hurt some people)
  • Fix my remaining health problems (like my foot, the back, …)

Now that sounds like I didn’t get anything done in the last 365 days, but that I sure did.

  • I finally managed to make my way through the slackers list (Fabian accused me I’d be orphaning half the tree – if at all, it was 1/12),
  • I did some major changes at work (though I still need to do some things – like fixing the MySQL replication with TYPO3).

I do have the feeling that the next year is gonna get interesting real soon. I do have a project for the implementation of a VDI based class-room scheduled early next year (budget still pending – so it’s a maybe); we still do have to review the available possibilities (which includes Dell – who apparently implemented exactly this for some university/technical university in Brandenburg), as well as some other small purchases.

Gentoo wise I can’t tell yet whether or not I still want to be part of it. The last few months have been rather tough for me, I’ve been haunted by guilt for other things, so I couldn’t care much about Gentoo. I’ve put away some of the burdens I had, in order to focus on the fun aspects of our beloved distribution (there isn’t much left sadly).

I’d like to thank those who had extra patience with me, thank those who took the time to talk to me, those who cheered me up when I needed it. It’s been a tough time, but thanks to a lot of amazing people (Norman, Michel, Christina, Alex, Diego, Ned, Chris, Robin, …) I got through it and I’m still here – alive and kicking 😛 !

Oh, and a happy new year !!

Life as God it wrote

Christian Leave a comment

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 had open, that was around 20:00).

Got all I wanted, went back to my car (you know, this one) and put the stuff into the trunk. When closing the trunk, I felt some opposition, so I closed it a bit harder. “Closed” I thought and went back into my car. When turning on the ignition the bord computer suddenly complained “trunk open“, so I went back out, trying to open the trunk. *WTF* .. I couldn’t get it open. So I tried again, still nothing.

Okay I thought, since it was kinda closed and I couldn’t get it open with some brute force, I decided to go back home. On the way back home I remembered the parking lot of one of the DIY superstore’s had rather good lighting. So I went by.

On the parking lot, after parking my car, I went over the back seats below the trunk deck into the trunk, removed the trunk deck and saw that I somehow stuffed one of those plastic cooling bags into the lock of the trunk. I went *WTF* and tried brute force again opening the trunk. Still a no-no.

Ripped out the cooling bag (eventually everything of it), went back onto the back seats and tried to open the left rear door, but that didn’t work. Again *WTF*. Toggled the central locking system with the appropriate switch on the front panel. Still *WTF* it didn’t open. So I crawled onto the front seats, where I saw a tiny red light glowing, which is where I figured that the child safety lock for the rear doors was still on .. that at least explained why I couldn’t open the rear door from the inside.

Finally back outside, I went around the car to the trunk, tried to open it. Nothing, again with some force, *TADA* and I got it open. Removed the remaining parts (what was left of the cooling bag), and finally could close the trunk like it’s supposed to close. *pfew*

Device CAL’s ain’t no Device CAL’s ?

Christian Leave a comment

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.

  1. A TS Device CAL permits one device (used by any user) to conduct Windows Sessions on any of your servers.
  2. A TS User CAL permits one user (using any device) to conduct Windows Sessions on any of your servers.

You may choose to use a combination of TS Device CALs and TS User CALs simultaneously with the server software.

If I take the above and take a closer look at my terminal server license server I’ll see something like this:

Terminal services license manager
Terminal services license manager

As you can see, I *do* have devices with more than a single license (in fact, several of them do have more then four), which from my understanding ain’t what Microsoft had in mind.

After noticing this, I initially thought my terminal servers had the wrong license mode, but as you can see below, they are using “per Device“.

Terminal service license settings
Terminal service license settings

Which means, I am completely clueless at this point, as they *really* should be using just a single license, and not multiple ones.

Update:

Ok, after experimenting a bit with it, it seems that a license seems to be tied to the SSID. Which would explain, why I see different CAL’s for a single device. We reflashed the thin clients in between (and within that process, the SSID is freshly generated), so that’d be the only explanation I’ve got for what I’m seeing.

Frantic work, private life, friends

Christian Leave a comment

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 interest to all the things in Gentoo anymore (that was an advice from my shrink), as it just keeps putting on my anger/urge to do something nobody wants me to do even more. So I invested my time into doing other things (like baking or reading one of the many books that I buyed of Amazon and didn’t ever get a chance to read) I enjoy more.

I haven’t been completely dormant when it comes to Gentoo work, I finally went through the slacker list of last month (resulting in some retirement bugs, some already resolved – others not). Also I’ve been working hard with Robin on getting the auto-synced userinfo.xml working, in order to get away from two different sources of data. So be advised, you should rather edit LDAP (you can edit most of your own record by now – besides gentooAccess of course).

Now, my remaining task is, to get the missing data from people I mailed (most of them answered, others didn’t which is a real shame). Once that is done, we can simply lock the userinfo.xml in the gentoo/ repo, and then simply turn on a script to grab the userinfo.xml from LDAP and push it to the webnodes.

As for my personal life, it has improved at least a bit. I’ve been seeing a shrink to help me through some stuff (you know how life is – challenging), but also some of my friends helped me (heya there 😛 Diego, Alex, Christina, Norman, ……)