Tag: PacketPro

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.

PacketPro 450 and SSH checks

Christian Leave a comment

As apparently the guys at Teamix read my recent blog post about their cluster solution, someone of their technical support called me on friday at work 😯

And pointed out

  1. That I’m free to express my thoughts about their product (which I recently did)
  2. That there is a better way to workaround this issue

He also said, its something which they had asked multiple times. It’s as simple as editing the Virtual Server and changing the service inspection from “Connection” to “None” .. *duh*

Don’t get me wrong, the previous rant simply originated from the logs filling up within three day. I still like the PacketPro.

Bloody cluster solutions (continued)

Christian 1 Comment

So, as the previous try on getting the teamix people to fix the bloody LoadBalancer (as in sending at least an identification string for the SSH check) didn’t work so well (they told me, I should configure MASQuerading/ROUTEing on the PacketPro (which is kinda icky), I went on today and looked at what SLES10 installs as default logger.

Surprisingly they install a rather new syslog-ng (well, syslog-ng-1.6.8 is what they ship) so it was rather easy to workaround the situation.

Here’s what already was in the syslog-ng.conf.in (more on that later):

which I just extended with the following:

Afterwards just a quick SuSEconfig -module syslog-ng, restart the syslog daemon and the messages were gonse. Sure I know it’s a rather ugly hack 😆 , but since they refused to provide a “true” fix and it seemed like that question has been asked more than once it works for me, so *shrug* 😛

But now you’d ask why syslog-ng.conf.in ? Simply because Novell figured it would be too easy to just invent things like CONFIG_PROTECT for RPM/YaST, so they placed yet another file in there; from which the syslog-ng.conf files is generated every time SuSEconfig is being executed (that’s like every time you install a package using YaST).

Bloody cluster solutions

Christian 1 Comment

In preparation to get our website (and all those other websites – like www.fh-neubrandenburg.de or www.hmt-rostock.de) clustered, someone bought the cluster version of the PacketPro 450. These things are nice, especially considering you don’t need to fiddle around with LVS yourself (which is a *real* pain in the ass).

The only problem I have currently with them is that they scan the database and web nodes every 30 seconds, and since we have an active node and a hot-standby both do this and producing this:

That’s only the logs from three minutes … now figure you have it running for like four days and figure what the average log size due to such crap is … But at least it looks solvable, though I gonna have to call them tomorrow and ask for a patch/update to get their ssh-scan to send some banner when performing the service check.

Back at SLES10

Christian Leave a comment

Here I am, sitting at my desk on a Thuesday evening thinking about what happened the last few days.

  1. I finally got to play around with our PacketPro 450 Cluster (nifty LoadBalancing appliance)
  2. We reworked the network the way *we* want it (and not that tool of a wannabe sysadmin)
  3. We mostly figured out how to do the LoadBalancing right, we just need to find some bugs in the LoadBalancer software (like the thing is failing over to its slave from time to time, but keeping the IP address for himself) or let the guys at teamix do their work and hopefully get a working release within the next week or so
  4. I figured out how to setup interface bonding with SLES10 (it was quite straight forward, thanks to the excellent in-kernel documentation), and we’re using an active-backup mode for now
  5. I still need to figure out how to do the MySQL Master<->Master replication right .. I’m currently building fresh RPM’s on one of those Dell blades (yes, they ROCK!) which will hopefully be finished till I’m at the office tomorrow.
  6. Pt. 5 also includes figuring out how to pass MySQL a custom location for the binary-log, at least that’s what the handbook says in Chapter “5.11.3. The Binary Log” …

When started with the –log-bin[=base_name] option, mysqld writes a log file containing all SQL commands that update data. If no base_name value is given, the default name is the name of the host machine followed by -bin. If the basename is given, but not as an absolute pathname, the server writes the file in the data directory. It is recommended that you specify a basename; see Section B.1.8.1, “Open Issues in MySQL”, for the reason.

That behavior works for –log-bin-index (like log-bin-index=/mysql/binlogs/$HOSTNAME.idx), but doesn’t for –log-bin. *shrug* I’ll see if that is fixed with something >5.0.18 (that’s what SLES10 currently ships).

I’m also looking for a network topology drawing program (possibly free), as Microsoft Visio (either 2003 or 2007, Standard or Professional) is nice, but still can’t draw shit correctly. So I stumbled upon yEd, which seems to look nice (I haven’t yet looked at it, but will tomorrow) that hopefully gives me the opportunity to draw/visualize my setup at work 😯