Tag: Safekeeping

Stuff worth safe keeping, in case I need it in the future, I know where to look

Sidenote: Amount of Slots per Virtual Tape Library

Christian Leave a comment

Well, I just stumbled about this again (and I don’t know right now whether or not this is documented inside a RedBook or not) today, so I thought maybe I’m gonna write it down.

Slot-Amount Property of a Virtual Tape Library
Slot-Amount Property of a Virtual Tape Library

Please keep in mind, when creating the virtual library to think hard about the amount of slots you might need. It ain’t that bad, you just can’t decrease the amount anymore.  So if you think about creating 50 different virtual tape libraries with 500 slots each on your TS7530, think again. The current software level only supports 25.000 slots on a global level.

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.

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.

Retiring people

Christian Leave a comment

I’m not sure whether or not I blogged about this before, but here it is just for me to actually remember what, in which order I need to do. If you got the list in form of a csv file, simply do the following:

That’ll give you a detailed list of which metadata.xml need to be changed.

Rescuing a rebooting machine that’s hanging

Christian Leave a comment

One of my co-worker approached me today with a weird problem. Yesterday he had a disk in a 900GiB array failing which he replaced. After that, he run a rebuild/verification, fsck’ed the file system and tried to mount the volume again.

Apparently the mount produced a kernel oops (guess what, the 900GiB is running reiserfs), thus leaving the kernel tainted (or what do they call it ?). So he tried to reboot the box but it didn’t reboot. It started rebooting but then hung (as in not continuing the reboot). He tried to ssh back to the box, and it worked just fine.

This is where sysrq comes in handy.

That’ll restart the box, and cha-ching .. 😀

Getting a FC HBA to rescan it’s attached devices

Christian Leave a comment

If you’re using a 2.6 based distribution, the FC HBA (or more correctly the corresponding driver) should create entries in /sys/class/scsi_host. Now you only need to get the host-number (basically the # of the host bus adapter) and you can get started ..

Simply doing this, is going to tell the FC HBA “rescan” and discover new devices ..

That should do the trick, and you should be able to get udev to recognize the new devices attached via FibreChannel without the need to reboot the whole box (which might be a bit tricky).

Flushing the disk cache

Christian 1 Comment

I’ve been looking for this over and over and over, until I had some inspiration today (thanks to Andew and Chris) .. this has one and only one sole purpose: safekeeping, so I don’t end up searching for it all over again …

To free pagecache:

To free dentries and inodes:

To free pagecache, dentries and inodes:

Once that is done, you’ll see the memory (usually RAM) freeing up.