The Lone Sysadmin

I am trying to figure out if my desktop, currently running Microsoft Windows 2003 SP1, is going to be fine with Vista on it. But no! The Microsoft Vista Upgrade Advisor requires XP or Vista. Why in the flying fuck would it run on Vista and not the other Microsoft OSes? If you are running Vista you already know how compatible it is, right?

The proper response would be to display a dialog indicating that there will be no in-place upgrade path from Windows 2003 to Windows Vista. Then it should continue to figure out if your system is compatible. I’d have preferred that over the snubbing I got. But what do I know? I only have to use this crap as my OS.

Okay, I just installed the Tivoli Storage Manager client, version 5.3.4, on my ESX Servers. This is my concise guide to getting it working, because I couldn’t find any documentation describing any of this in any decent order, at least on VMware’s web site.

I don’t intend to back my .vmdk files up, just the service console settings and whatnot (I’m doing the VM backups from inside each VM). Obviously that doesn’t stop you from modifying this, I just state it so you know what you’re getting into. :-)

0. Log into your ESX Server service console via SSH.

1. Install the client.

It’ll complain about not having ksh installed. Try using “–nodeps”:

rpm -ihv --nodeps TIVsm-API.i386.rpm TIVsm-BA.i386.rpm

I don’t know if this will come back to bite me or not, but it seems to work fine on my servers.

2. Fix the client’s inability to find dsmclientV3.cat.

ln -s /opt/tivoli/tsm/client/lang/en_US \
/opt/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin/en_US

This fixes the errors:

ANS9999E amsgrtrv.cpp(3087): Message No 11000 could not be found.
ANS9999E amsgrtrv.cpp(3087): Message No 11000 could not be found.
ANS0101E Unable to open English message repository 'dsmclientV3.cat'.

3. Add dsm.sys, dsm.opt, inclexcl files.

Those links are to sample files. Feel free to steal them, but you’ll need to set the node name and server settings in both dsm.sys and dsm.opt.

4. Open the firewall so that dsmc can communicate out.

esxcfg-firewall --allowOutgoing

The ‘POLLING’ mode of the client should take care of the lack of incoming connections. If you really need incoming TSM connections (for “PROMPTED” mode) check out the “esxcfg-firewall –allowService TSM” option. I strongly urge you to consider polling mode for all your machines, as it’s easier to maintain.

5. Edit /etc/rc.local and add:

# Start the TSM client
/opt/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin/dsmc schedule >/dev/null &

6. Do whatever else you need to do to register the node.

7. Run the scheduler in the background.

/opt/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin/dsmc schedule >/dev/null &

Rejoice, for you are now backing your service console up.

Ugh, the last two days have not gone anywhere as planned. It’s been a rollercoaster of fires needing to get put out, colleagues being jackasses, and good things, too. Like getting invited to teach a virtualization class at a conference in Phoenix on November 6th. Of course, that’s the day before VMworld, so I’m hoping that I can just drive over to LA and indulge. We’ll see how well that works out.

My stress relief lately has been the batting cages. I swam in high school, but never played any sports that required coordination. That was my brother’s domain, and he excelled at it. As we age he and I are swapping lives. He becomes a sysadmin and I become a softball player. Interestingly enough, learning to hit a ball is the same as learning to be a good system administrator: practice, practice, practice.

It’s demoralizing, though, starting from scratch. To get better you must face how much you stink. Last spring I started going to the cages and I would hit 1 in 30 pitches. Those “hits” would be foul balls, though, with 1 in 100 being an infield grounder. A couple thousand pitches later and it was 1 in 5, all fouls and grounders down the third base line. Two weeks ago I swung at 300 pitches, more that I’d ever hit in a single session. I was on fire and my ratio of ball contact to pitches was 1 to 1.05. Not all good hits, but contact. Like ghostly ball players walking out of an Iowa cornfield the beginnings of fly balls were appearing, waving taunts at me. I was on the cusp of figuring it out.

Tonight I had nothing on my schedule. I was pissed off from work. The cages were desolate, save the terminally bored high school kid reminding me to wear a helmet. One at a time I fed the machine tokens, 30 in all, and faced 480 pitches. I was on fire, didn’t want to stop. Not all the hits were quality, and I began judging them myself. Out. Out. Hit. Double. Out. Foul. Hit. Hit. Sweet. For the first time it wasn’t enough for me to make contact. I had to be productive. I had to get a hit, be on base.

My secret with everything I am good at is extensive practice, alone. When I began going to the batting cages I went with others who would give me hints. Telling me what to do doesn’t work. I have to do it myself to learn it. I am just like that, and it has taken years for me to realize it. Some call me a “kinetic” personality. No matter what I do, whether it’s installing a new OS or trying to straighten out my third-base-line-drives, I need to do it, and do it myself to learn it.

Somewhere around pitch 300 tonight an epiphany occurred: I figured out how to hit fly balls. Intentionally. I started being able to alternate grounders with fly balls. Intentionally. Now I’m itching for a game to try my luck against real humans, and improve my .250 batting average.

For the immediate future, though, I see ibuprofen. :-)

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I am just about finished with my VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 upgrades, and I have made a few observations about the process based on what happened to our clusters.

1. Don’t do an in-place upgrade.

Sure, it might work, but it seems unnecessarily complex. What I did was remove a server from a cluster and use it to start a whole new VI3 cluster, including its own VMFS 3 storage. Then I’d scp the disk images from the ESX 2.5.3 cluster to the ESX 3 machine. When I freed enough capacity in the old cluster I’d remove another machine, reinstall it, and tack it into the new VI3 cluster. This plan worked great. It had several benefits, including being able to just restart the old VM if something went wrong, being able to take VM outages that were more convenient to my customers, and having an opportunity to reassess resource allocation for each VM (why did we give this VM 2 GB of RAM when it needs less than 512 MB?).

A definite down side to this plan was the time it took to copy the disk files, as I was running about 30 minutes per 10 GB of allocated disk. Second, the copies are hard on the service console, so you can only do a couple at a time. Last, you need a lot more disk space available to build a whole separate cluster. Big organizations can handle that but smaller ones will have problems. It looks as if 3.0.1 will have a new utility to ease some of this pain, though. I still like the idea of starting fresh, though.

2. Ensure that your licenses are all figured out beforehand.

We didn’t receive some of our VI3 licenses, and nobody at VMware could figure out why. As a temporary fix my sales rep got me some demo licenses to augment the ones we did have, but it took longer than the permitted 30 days to figure out what was wrong. We got to see what happens when your licenses expire (just don’t shut your VMs off!). :-) It took about three weeks to find someone at VMware who saw that we had three support contracts, not two, and that the one nobody else noticed was expired and had a bogus license administrator person, which meant no renewal notification. Oops.

3. Redeem your licenses in sets of two or four.

If you have 40 CPUs worth of licenses you can redeem them however you want. I just suggest doing it in twos or fours, though. If you ever want to split those licenses up later or make them host-based it’s a lot easier to do so with ten 4 CPU licenses than one 40 CPU license (namely you can do it yourself, rather than having to involve VMware sales support). Unfortunately it also makes it a huge pain to figure out what licenses are what in the VMware redemption center site, so get a spreadsheet.

4. Upgrade your VMware Tools for Windows (to 2.5.3) before you migrate.

If you don’t keep your VMware Tools up to date you’ll want to make sure that you get to version 2.5.3 on your Windows VMs before you migrate. Older versions had all manner of problems with uninstallation. Damian Murdoch over at ozvms.com has a good blurb about it already, so I won’t repeat him. Rather than all the hassle after the move I just chose to update them before the migration.

My Windows VM migration procedure for machines with old tools is: update VMware Tools, shutdown, scp to new cluster, power on, uninstall VMware Tools 2.5.3, reboot, install VMware Tools 3.0 while ignoring Windows detecting new hardware, reboot. It seems like it’s more of a mess than it really is.

5. Have a solid schedule for migrations.

My VI3 upgrade got stalled 4/5’s of the way through as we ended up with VMs whose customers were unwilling to take an outage to move, even after they’d agreed to let us use their maintenance windows. The result was that there was one ESX 2.5.3 machine from each cluster hanging around with the stragglers, while all the other ESX Servers of those clusters had been migrated to VI3. With a single ESX server you can’t VMotion in case of a problem, and it just generally sucks to have a one-off machine out there. My suggestion is to make a definite schedule for what’s moving when, and don’t leave the hard stuff until the end or it’ll drag on forever.

I like VI3 so far. I am waiting for a number of odd things to be sorted out in 3.0.1, though. :-)

Engadget has a blurb about Caterpillar looking to make their product line robotic. Does anybody else remember the scene in “I, Robot” where the robotic demolition machine tries to kill Sergeant Spooner?

Oh, but they don’t have some gigantic positronic AI thing in the lobby to control all their Earth movers, do they? I guess we’re safe.

Update: See, I’m not the only one that worries that the future will be like Sci-Fi movies. Though it is a little odd to see Ars Technica posting about this at nearly the same time.

You have got to be kidding me. Somebody wrote a half-assed tutorial on setting up a DHCP server and it made the front page of Digg? I crap better example dhcpd.conf files.

You know damn well what I’m doing tomorrow. I am going to fight back with my own tutorial. Speaking of which, I need to update my IPMI tutorial. Thankfully Red Hat obsoleted most of it. But for now, sleep!

P.S. No, I am not linking to digg or the tutorial. I don’t want to encourage them.

Sometimes I’m just a sucker for stupid tests on the web. I just took the “Are you a nerd, geek, or dork?” test, and I am a:

Modern, Cool Nerd
52 % Nerd, 52% Geek, 34% Dork

I guess that’s good. I wish I knew what the opposite ends of nerd, geek, and dork are. If I’m 34% dork that means I’m 66% something else, right?