Web Operations & System Administration in the wilds of North Yorkshire
I wanted to install a Fedora 13 machine as a paravirtual domu guest on our CentOS 5.5, xen 3.4.2 host. I also wanted to provision it using koan/cobbler. I ran into a few problems along the way, but I got there in the end!
Continue reading ‘Fedora 13 as a domu guest with xen 3.4.2 on CentOS 5.5’ »
Dell distributes its OMSA software in RPM packages and even has a yum repo available so you'd think that updating to the next version would be as simple as yum update, right? Wrong!
You have to remove the old version first, and then install the new version. Oh, and you also need to stop the Dell services, restart ipmi, then restart the Dell services.
Something like this:
yum -y remove srvadmin-* \ && rm -Rf /opt/dell \ && yum -y install srvadmin-all dell_ft_install \ && srvadmin-services.sh stop \ && service ipmi restart \ && srvadmin-services.sh start
Some kind soul on #bash on Freenode recently pointed me at this excellent document:
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls
(I ran into #20, in case you're wondering)
We've had a bunch of new servers in place for around 3 months now. They seem to be working well and are performing just fine.
Then, out of the blue, our monitoring started throwing alerts on seemingly random servers. Our queues were building up – basically, database performance had dropped dramatically and our processing scripts couldn't stuff data into the DBs fast enough.
What could be causing it?
Continue reading ‘Dell DRAC BBU auto-learn tests kill disk performance’ »
I use cobbler to provision our new Dell servers, which is great but it needs the MAC addresses of the servers to identify each machine.
Previously, I have been doing this manually:
This takes quite a while, and is prone to error.
I recently had another 42 servers to deploy to I looked for a way to automate this process. I found one! Continue reading ‘MAC Addresses of embedded NICs on Dell servers through DRAC’ »
I use the toggl time-tracking service to keep track of the hours I work for my various clients.
toggl make available desktop clients for Windows, Mac, & Linux, but the Linux packages are in .deb format for Ubuntu and, until recently, they did not provide x86_64 packages.
toggl recently released the desktop client as open source so I grabbed it and have built an RPM.
SRPM: TogglDesktop-2.5.1-1.fc12.src.rpm
RPM (Fedora 12, x86_64): TogglDesktop-2.5.1-1.fc12.x86_64.rpm
It seems that several people have been having problems getting Dell OMSA 6.2 to work correctly on CentOS 5.4 x86_64. Specifically, the software does not detect any storage controllers, and therefore also doesn't find any disks. eg.
[root@b034 ~]# omreport storage pdisk controller=0 Invalid controller value. Read, controller=0 No controllers found.
After a little investigation, I found the source of the problem.
Continue reading ‘Dell OMSA on CentOS 5.4 x86_64 – No Controllers found error’ »
I often need to deploy Ruby gems across many CentOS servers. I prefer to use the native OS package management tools (rpm + yum) rather than using Ruby gems.
Here's how to build RPMs from Ruby gems using gem2rpm.
When creating backups or log files, I like to name the files with a timestamp, ie. the date plus the time.
I use the date command to produce timestamps in the appropriate format, but I find the format specifier a bit long-winded and difficult to remember – is %m minutes or month?
There is a better way… date -I
I use puppet to manage the configuration of the machines I manage. So far, I've been rolling out new resources to machines but recently I've wanted to remove resources from machines. Here's how I modified my cron classes so I could remove cron jobs as well as create them.
Continue reading ‘Writing puppet manifests that can remove resources as well as adding them’ »