Category: Work

Posts related to my Work

Shibboleth (WTF is that?)

Christian Leave a comment

OK, I’m sitting now again in train (hrm, I get the feeling I’ve done that already in the last few days – oh wait, I was doing that just on Monday) this time to Berlin.

My boss ordered me to attend a workshop covering the implementation of Shibboleth (for those of you, who can’t associate anything with that term – it’s an implementation for single sign-on, also covering distributed authorization and authentication) somewhere in Berlin Spandau (Evangelisches Johannesstift Berlin).

Yesterday was quite amazing workwise, we lifted the 75kg Blade Chassis into the rack (*yuck* there was a time I was completely against Dell stuff, but recently that has changed), plugged all four C22 plugs into the rack’s PDU’s and into the chassis, patched the management interface (which is *waaay* to slow for a dedicated management daughter board) and for the first time started the chassis. *ugh* That scared me .. that wasn’t noise like a xSeries or any other rack-based server we have around, more like a starting airplane. You can literally stand in behind of the chassis, and get your hairs dried (if you need to). So I looked at the blades together with my co-worker and we figured, that they don’t have any coolers anymore, they are just using the cooling the chassis provides.

Another surprise awaited us, when we thought, we could use the integrated switch to provide network for both integrated network cards (Broadcome NetExtreme II). *sigh* You need two seperate switches to serve two network cards, even if you only have two blades in the chassis (which provides space for 10 blades). *sigh* That really sucks, but its the same with the FC stuff …

So, we are waiting yet again for Dell to make us an offer, and on top of that, the sales representative doesn’t have the slightest idea if the FC passthrough module includes SFP’s or not … *yuck*

I must say, I’m impressed by the Dell hardware, but I’m really disappointed by their sales representative.

AIX 5.3 Linux Toolkit

Christian 4 Comments

OK, so I skipped rebuilding a newer RPM version (for now) and I’m currently rebuilding anything that fit’s into app-dev according to IBM …

The list reads like this:

OK, I’m not exactly rebuilding these old versions, I’m actually using their old specs to compile newer versions of these. I’m currently at coreutils-6.7, which really takes ages. But will see about the rest.

Oh, and btw .. if anyone happens to search for a way to extend a logical volume on AIX, use chfs.

That’s what I used to enlarge the logical volume containing /opt about 4 (what kind of unit is that ?).

AIX-5.3 & rpm-4.4.7

Christian Leave a comment

OK, so I tried to install the AIX Toolkit today, to build some newer rpm’s (yaaaaah, I *hate* RPMS myself, still it’s way better than distributing plain tar.gz archives) but looks like either AIX or rpm-4.4.7 doesn’t like me.

Now I’ve to figure out how to get libm (that’s /lib/libm.so) installed on AIX. Will see about that later and/or tomorrow.

Research project

Christian 3 Comments

OK, as I wrote earlier today I went onto a research mission for today, looking at the alternatives for the 2x stuff. Looks like Citrix Presentation Server is just the software I’m looking for. Watched the demo’s on their website, which are quite impressing, but sadly don’t tell me everything I’d like to know.

Maybe I’ll ask some people in Greifswald and in the vicinity, how stuff works with Citrix. Maybe I should even get in contact with Citrix itself and ask for a test version, or some other sort of demonstration.

Qualcomm Eudora vs. Microsoft Outlook

Christian 3 Comments

OK, so I’ve spent the last day working on my bosses $MAILPROGRAM. In detail, I’ve been trying to get his mails from Eudora (which really is complete *crap*) to Outlook (yeah, yeah I KNOW but he really needs a decent calendar with his E-Mail program, which neither KMail, nor Thunderbird nor Mozilla Suite – aka SeaMonkey can provide).

Problem with all that is Eudora’s crappy way of saving mails (and their attachments). Eudora is saving the mails in regular MBX format, but is putting the attachments into a separate folder. I’ve looked all over the web, and only found one application capable of importing his mails into Outlook including the attachments from the Attach folder.

Luckily I managed to import at least his old address book including the distribution lists with Outlook Express (yeah, this blog post mentions all the crappy Microsoft applications 😛 , as Outlook itself failed and crashed over and over again while importing them (due to a distribution list having ~300 addresses associated).

Finally I’m back at my research project, trying to find some alternatives for plain terminal server usage (such as 2x ApplicationServer and/or 2x LoadBalancer for RDP/ICA. I’ll see what the day turns out to be, hopefully not as wicked as yesterday.

Depression coming up

Christian Leave a comment

As you may now (or not), I haven’t been pretty active in the last couple of days (OK, I admit it has been the last two weeks).

Work is currently being a bitch (I have a 6,36h day normally, but lately that evolved into a 8+h day which I’m not even payed for), personal life is also a bit frustrating (yeah you know those people-people relations called friendship and stuff).

I thankfully saw Diego return from his vacation (well sort-of, line-cuttage ain’t exactly vacation), Benedikt just announced that linux-vserver-2.0.2 is now finally available (after _rc31) and I’m still waiting on some replies from a dear friend.

Also I’m still trying to keep up on Planet Gentoo and mailinglists; gentoo-dev and lkml most of the time (you can’t imagine how many time this takes 😛 ).

Let’s see how that all turns out.

IBM

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We just received the long awaited shipment of sixteen 300GB FC-HDD’s (2Gbps with 10000rpm) for our SAN (a pretty old DS4500/FaStT 900).

But there’s still the software option missing we ordered within the same breath. So I called our trustworthy IBM distributor (hah!) and asked the guy responsible for sales, what the ETA on this software option is (if someone is interested its VolumeCopy/FlashCopy).

He told me, that we’ll receive a letter with the license key about 4 weeks after commission !!!!!!

I nearly fell from my chair when he told me that.

I still can’t believe it, that sending a license key printed upon a simple page is taking 4 weeks 😮

Luca had a nice comment about that:

SLES-9.2 (continued)

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OK, so after yesterdays battle with SLES and rpm, I decided to simply upgrade rpm (again rpmbuild -bb rpm.spec as in from source).

I had to tune (hah, remove stuff that isn’t working on this ancient gcc-3.3.3 ie. -fstack-protector) a bit to get it working, wasted 20 minutes worth of CPU time and ~30 of my time. I finally gave up. I couldn’t persuade neither rpm, nor git to compile on the damn SLES/Dell.

While the above was running, I did some compile-testing on Tim’s behalf (he back ported the e1000-driver updates from 2.6.18 to our 2.6.17 branch), seems to work so far.

On a more personal note, I’d like to stab all people neglecting their promises!

SLES-9.2

Christian 1 Comment

Hrm, today I tried to install some extra programs I need for devel-stuff (quilt, git, subversion) on an ancient (not sooo ancient) SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.2.

Did I already mention I hate rpm-based distros ? Ah and I missed to tell you, that I really love USE-flags …

Ok, so it took me half the afternoon, to rebuild half of all installed packages (heh, kde* depends upon expat*; but who need X or even KDE on a server-machine?) and figured that everything was for nothing.

I found no RPM/SRPM providing te_ams, so I couldn’t install xmlto, which in fact resulted that I couldn’t install git. Also took a look at the git.spec file, where something like –without=docs is mentioned.

Either its this ancient rpm-version, or that generally doesn’t work. So I’m fscked, not git on that machine and short-handed just ssh -e rsync’ed my local linux-git to that machine. It’s a bit inconvenient, but works.

I’ll look into that tomorrow, maybe I even manage to get the damn git working on that machine (or even dump SLES9 in favour of SLES10 / Gentoo!).

Live sucks (again)

Christian Leave a comment

Now is again such a time in live, where you have the motivation or wish to just fade away.

I’m just listening to Fort Minor – Where’d you go and thinking about the stuff Mike Shinoda is singing …

I want you to know it’s a little fucked up,
That I’m stuck here waitin’, no longer debatin’,
Tired of sittin’ and hatin’ and makin’ these excuses,
For while you’re not around, and feeling so useless,
It seems one thing has been true all along,
You don’t really know what you got ’til it’s gone.

The track is really great, I really enjoy that. Some people I know would call it dark or even depressive but it ain’t even like that. It’s just a bit blue, like carving for someone is. 🙂

I didn’t thought that telling someone, that you sense a bit more than friendship would change so much. So much, that even simple talking to each other isn’t possible any more. Oy, that sucks.

And than you get to hear, that’s only for you, so it won’t hurt so much. What a lame excuse.

On the other hand I really start to enjoy my life. Looking the third seaoson of Stargate which DHL just delivered yesterday. Work is getting more exciting.

Hopefully the new IBM System X (well we ordered xSeries 😉 ) will be delivered next week, I’m already studying the ESX documentation.