Category: Work

Posts related to my Work

Working with IBM’s Virtualization Engine Console

Christian Leave a comment

Recently, we got the recommendation from our system partner to use static allocated tape cartridges instead of dynamic allocated ones. Apparently using dynamic allocating cartridges comes with a performance penalty if more than a few nodes are backing up a large amount of data at once.

And yet again, I noticed that the IBM Virtualization Engine Console (aka Falconstor Software) is really error prone.

In order to change the allocation type, we had to shred the old cartridges first (500 x ~100M up till now), chance the allocation type at the virtual tape library level, and then recreate the 500 cartridges with a fixed size (500x 102400MB). Now, as I was kinda optimistic, I decided to create all 500 cartridges at once.

Failure during the initiation of 500 virtual catridges

So I ended up creating the 500 cartridges in steps of 45. Which isn’t that big of a deal. But, as we do have two separate logical virtual tape libraries (basically the whole TS7530 is partitioned into two tape libraries), we had to do it for the second one too. But I told myself “Come on, try the maximum amount again!” … And guess what:

Successful initiation of 510 virtual catridges

That worked ❓ Please, don’t ask me why the hell it’s working for one virtual tape library on the same system (well, different virtualization engine), but ain’t for the other one … 😯

Automatic updates on SUSE Linux Enterprise 10

Christian Leave a comment

I had the problem, that the automatic update function of YaST doesn’t work like I want it to. I just wanted it to install only those updates, that ain’t interactive, don’t need a service restart and don’t need a reboot.

YaST does only feature an online update that skips “interactive” updates (I’ve never even encountered an interactive update up till now). So I went ahead and wrote a (hackish) script, that achieves what I need.

And just for me, the crontag entry:

Opsview installation reviewed

Christian 2 Comments

Well, I recently (well, yesterday) built the opsview RPM’s for SLES10, and started fiddeling about with it today. Alex “recommended” I should rather look at Opsview instead of Centreon, but boy was there a surprise waiting for me …

Opsview has the advantage that it at least lets you use the package manager. But, it also needs *a lot* of handy work (just like Centreon, which I really dislike since it’s real error prone).

I started doing the setup, but gave up halfway through … ❗ Dude, and they expect people to pay money for training ?!?

I mean, come on .. you can do a better job at making this thing fit a bit better into the system, and even make the install a bit more straight forward.

Trusted vendors in SUSE Linux Enteprise 10

Christian Leave a comment

The other day I had a closer look at the zypper logs (well, I was digging for a time-history of installed packages). First … damn does zypper produce a *lot* of logs on a “productive” (or rather on a maintained – as in up-to-date) system.

But glazing over the logs, I found out something new about zypper. It actually has an internal list, which only purpose is to identify a trusted vendor …

As you can see from the log, the list of trusted vendors is:

  • ati technologies inc.
  • jpackage project
  • novell
  • nvidia
  • opensuse
  • sgi
  • silicon graphics
  • suse

Cleaning up /tmp

Christian Leave a comment

Well, I just looked into /tmp on one of our boxes and noticed that SSHd left behind some (try 400) directories .. Now, I could use a simple rm -rf /tmp/ssh-*, but I didn’t want to kill my current agent forward file.

After looking at the man-page of find, I stumbled about -mtime. And that seems to work out quite well.

Tivoli Storage Manager Client and Microsoft Cluster Services

Christian 1 Comment

Well, I just had another look at our client scheduler services on our Microsoft Cluster. A while back we noticed that those scheduler services were going nuts after some time. Well, as it turns out, I can tell why. Microsoft Cluster Services have a feature called registration replication, which replicates a given key, if changed when the resource is online, to all connected cluster nodes.

Now, we added the obvious registry key to the settings of our cluster resources for the scheduler services (SOFTWAREIBMADSMCurrentVersionBackupClientNodes<TSM NODE NAME>) and the scheduler service would use the same registry key to store it’s passwords. But it seems we were far off with that assumption.

The scheduler service uses another registry key, it’s quite similar to the one the GUI is using, but it’s different enough (SOFTWAREIBMADSMCurrentVersionNodes<TSM NODE NAME>).

Automating zypper updates

Christian Leave a comment

Well, I just looked into using zypper up to update some of our boxen (I do have a script, which holds the boxen it needs to process in a variable and simply goes through them one by one) — yes, I could activate auto-update, I just don’t want that at this point 😉

So at first I tried just using zypper to automatically update that given list, but even if you pass –no-confirm, zypper would still ask for your confirmation (which seems kinda stupid). After a short while thinking about it, a lesson from solar@gentoo.org came to mind. When working in a chroot, he simply used this:

And analog to that, I simply tried this:

And guess what: it worked 😉

VI Client: Changing the language from the system default

Christian Leave a comment

Well, as I am in fact running a german Windows XP, the VI Client started displaying all menus and operations in German when I updated to 2.5u2. Normally, I wouldn’t have much of a problem with that, but recently it started to annoy me, since the translation is a bit off from the real meaning of much of the operations.

So today, in the morning I started looking for ways to revert the VI Client back to displaying everything in English. And guess what. There’s no way to switch the language from the VI Client itself. There’s just a workaround.

Simply rename the folder in “%ProgramFiles%VMwareInfrastructureVirtual Infrastructure Client2.5“, %ProgramFiles%VMwareInfrastructureVIUpdate” “%ProgramFiles%VMwareInfrastructureVirtual Infrastructure ClientPluginsConverter Enterprise 4.0.2” and “%ProgramFiles%VMwareInfrastructureVirtual Infrastructure ClientPluginsUpdate Manager 1.0 Update3” named “de” to something else. Tada, your VI Client is back in English.

Distribution running on IBM TS7530 Virtualization Engine

Christian Leave a comment

Well, I was just a bit curious earlier what distribution might be running on our IBM TS7530 Virtualization engines .. well, I just had a look-see ..

Main difference to a “normal” SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 installation (there’s about zip normal with that kind of installation, thus the quotes) thus far are:

  1. the build for the VE uses busybox as init
  2. IBM stripped man/info
  3. they are running Xorg/Fluxbox on it

Just don’t ask me why there’s a DE (desktop environment) running, it ain’t even hooked up to a monitor. Only reason would be for the RSA’ remote monitor stuff … *lala*

Read More

IBM TS7530 and DNS

Christian Leave a comment

Well, we had our TS7530 delivered in late September, the day after the IBM service guys came by to prep the VTL for our needs (IBM sells the thing as black box). Now, since that day; they fought with the Call Home functionality. The trouble was simply, that the Call Home Service running on the Virtualization Engines just didn’t start.

After about 6 weeks of trial and error (and the IBM service guys popping in every second week), they finally found the cause of the Call Home Service not being able to start. Domain Name Resolution. Neither the IP addresses of the VE’s nor the VE console were registered in our DNS/or local host files.

After I walked over to the networking department and had them register them IP addresses, everything is honky donkey.