System Administration

Some People Are Just Dicks

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“Hey Bob, how do I get PHP to connect to Oracle?” Dude, it’s called Google. I’m a sysadmin, not development support. Oh, wait, yeah, I am development support. But not like that. Geez, get a damn book or something. “I have a chunk of code I can give you as an example if you want.” Trying. hard. to. be. nice. because. you. are. a. knob. and. I. am. busy. “Oh, I have code that has worked in the past. It just doesn’t work now. I think you’re missing the Oracle part on those new virtual machines.” Why didn’t you just say that to begin with, dick? Cut to the chase. “You’re right. Those don’t have the Oracle stuff built in …

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The Problem With I/O

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It used to be troublesome when someone needed 200 GB of disk space. It was this big negotiation between a system administrator or storage administrator and the DBA, or the user, or the application admin about why and how and how long and space is expensive and etc. etc. I believe the right term for it is “goat rodeo.” With the advent of 300 GB fibre channel drives and 750 GB SATA drives storage administrators don’t need to worry about any of that crap anymore. They don’t even bat an eye at a 500 GB space request because it isn’t a problem anymore. Some of you will say I am spoiled in the environment I’m in, but it’s a fact …

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Musings on What I Want From Storage Virtualization

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Brian over at stereoroid.com commented on my last post about what I want from a storage virtualization engine. Brian, I hope you don’t mind but I’d like to answer outside of the comments section. Your comments were not counterpoint, they were more in the realm of adding clarity, something which my other post may have lacked. I hope this doesn’t scare people away from making comments. 🙂 I really appreciate them. I’m most familiar with EMC and IBM high-end and midrange offerings, and a smattering of whatever LSI Logic is called now (StorageTek/FastT/Engenio/etc.). I don’t know very much about HP EVAs. From what you’ve said it sounds like they are very much like EMC and IBM’s high-end offerings where there …

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What I Want From A Storage Virtualization Engine

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Storage virtualization engines suck. Sure, they make it easy to move your data around. They also add cache, which helps a bit. While they’re doing this they also add another point of failure on your SAN, another potential performance bottleneck, another system to learn how to use. They’re clumsy, they’re feature-poor, and I think they have a real long way to go. I’d think about them more positively if they did a few things for me: 1) Automate array-level failover. Take IBM’s Storage Virtualization Controller, for example. It can mirror your data to another array, but if the primary array dies your hosts will lose their storage. You then have to go into the SVC and promote the second copy …

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How Much I/O Are You Doing?

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How much disk I/O are you doing? Are your performance monitors watching everything they need to? I had occasion to dissect a storage setup recently, and it became obvious that the I/O to and from the arrays, including the remote mirroring traffic, wasn’t really being watched. When your host writes to LUN across a SAN, you: 1) Generate load on the link between the host and the fibre channel switch. 2) Generate load on the ISLs between the fibre channel switches. 3) Generate load on the link between a fibre channel switch and the array. 4) Generate load back out of the array as it writes the I/O remotely. If this is synchronous the host will be waiting for it. …

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VMware License Server

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So why do I get this feeling, this instinctive repulsion, for VMware’s new license server setup? Is it because FlexLM sucks? Maybe it’s the FlexLM license server I run for a customer where the thing hoses the Linux box if anything is wrong with the network connection. Not that it happens often, but once is once too many. I’m just wondering when the VMware license server is going to take a dump all over my setup like that. It’ll probably be while I’m on vacation somewhere. Maybe it’s just the fact that VMware totally messed up my license key deployment for VI3. Instead of getting the 20 CPUs of standard VIN licenses I got 8, mailed to my purchasing dude. …

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Using A Cable Modem to Improve Corporate Security

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Here’s an idea that I ran across about a year ago, and I had occassion to suggest it to another friend: if you want to create a wireless network for anybody to use get a cable modem and a wireless access point. I first saw this at a financial institution that wanted to offer wireless to their customers as they waited in the lobby. However, they didn’t want the wireless access points on their internal networks. So they ordered DSL, bought a Linksys access point, and wrote the WEP key on a white board in the lobby, which they change once a quarter. They installed the equipment near the lobby in an accessible place, so if it stops working (which …

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Using Technology to Torture People

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I was thinking about my post about print Nazis and I thought “boy, printing is a real easy way to screw with people.” What other ways have I seen technology configured to make people’s lives more miserable, and sysadmins busier, all unnecessarily? It’s easy to say that these are caused by management, but in fact it’s caused by the users not speaking up. If you are a user and don’t like something you should say something. It’s more than likely that the people who are doing this to you haven’t even thought about it. Then again, sometimes they have. 1) Labyrinthian print queues with fascist permissions: if you print something by mistake there is no chance you’ll ever be able …

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Print Nazis

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“Hey man,” began the instant message. “Have you ever done Windows print queues using Samba?” “Sure, a long time ago,” I say. “Did it work?” “It worked fine the five or six times I printed to it. And three of those were probably test pages. I was messing around. Why?” “I set up a Linux print server a week ago and it’s not working right. People print big jobs and it stalls, or people can’t print to it. All sorts of weird shit going on.” I’ve seen my friend’s setup. He has HP printers with JetDirect cards. “Why don’t you just print straight to the printers with TCP/IP and skip all the BS?” “We wanted to start using Linux more …

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Apple PCI Express Fibre Channel Card

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Apple’s PCI Express Fibre Channel HBA works great under RHEL AS 4, at least Update 3. So does the PCI-X Fibre Channel HBA, now that I think about it. I thought I’d mention this since Apple hasn’t updated their knowledge base article in some time. These cards continue to use the standard mptbase/mptscsih modules, so if you add one to an existing host you have to stick something like: alias scsi_hostadapter1 mptbase alias scsi_hostadapter2 mptscsih in /etc/modprobe.conf. This is pretty much the standard operating procedure for these cards, so no surprises. I’ve been using an Apple Xserve RAID under Linux for about four years now, and I love it. Dave over at alienraid.org has more information about running Apple’s storage …

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