links for 2009-08-29
Justin (s***mydadsays) on Twitter This guy lives with his parents and Tweets the best things his dad says…
ALUA Rocks
Ack, I was seconds away from writing the same post as Nick Triantos on Upgrading from non-ALUA to ALUA, as I’ve spent the afternoon so far doing this and documenting the process. The process works great, and it didn’t disrupt my clusters at all. The only things I did differently were: 1. I issued the “/usr/sbin/esxcli nmp satp setdefaultpsp –psp VMW_PSP_RR –satp VMW_SATP_ALUA” command on all the hosts prior to rebooting them. 2. I was able to combine this work with the application of the ESX 4.0 patch for the RAID controller cache problems, so Update Manager took care of all the rebooting for me. It does feel good to be lazy some days. If you have a NetApp array …
links for 2009-08-21
Godwin's law – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." So true.
Brent
Dear Vikings, I hope he waffles about retiring and pisses you guys off as much as he did with the Packers & Jets. Congratulations on signing a complete jackass. …Me I think this t-shirt sums it up nicely: (my apologies to my non-U.S. readers for rambling on about stuff like this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if even you knew the ridiculous story)
VMware & Linux Hot-Add Disks
Did you know you can add new virtual hard disks to a running Linux VMware VM, and they can be visible to the OS without a reboot? First, add a new hard disk the way you’d normally do it (Edit Settings -> etc.). Add it to the existing virtual SCSI adapter (don’t create a new one). Then, use a script like Kurt Garloff’s rescan-scsi-bus.sh to pick up the new device. If you’re using the Linux Logical Volume Manager you can partition the new device, run pvcreate, add it to a volume group, and grow a filesystem with ext2online/resize2fs (RHEL 4/5), all without the end users noticing. Just don’t forget to align the partitions on the new device before you use …
It's Been Four Years?
Holy crap, I totally missed the birthday of this blog this year. It’s four, or rather, four + 2 days (8/8/2005 was when it was born). Some stats: 1,231 posts = 0.84 posts a day. 1,628 comments = 1.114 comments a day. 203,360 spam comments = 139.19 spam a day. Yeah, right on track, even with a lot of the posts being from Delicious. Those posts often have remarks from me in them, after all. 🙂 I’m aiming for 0.75 posts a day. Daily would be nice but I sometimes suffer from ranter’s block. 🙂 Anyhow, thanks for reading! When I started this thing I couldn’t imagine who would read it, but I hope my snide commentary and massive ego …
Tell Your Purchasing People: IPv6, VMware
In the world of system administration there aren’t too many things that are black & white. Everything is a shade of gray where admins solve their own problems however they need to, bending to the local desires & needs of their users or management. Everybody is right, nobody is wrong. I’ve come to realize that, and it’s no big deal. I am convinced, however, that if your organization does not have “fully implemented IPv6 support” and “full support under VMware virtual infrastructure” as requirements for purchasing any new hardware, software, or services, you’re doing it wrong[1][2]. Let’s assume that anything you’re buying now will last 5+ years. In 5+ years we will be out of IPv4 address space[3]. And it …
…now with 100% more IPv6
The web server I run this blog’s virtual host from has been IPv6-enabled for about three years. On Monday night I asked myself why I’d never given the blog an AAAA record. So I did. I just looked at the logs, out of curiosity, to see how many of my readers are IPv6-enabled. It’s painful. Discounting myself, 19 unique visitors out of 1683, 1.13%, came in via IPv6. If you aren’t thinking about IPv6 you should start. Enabling IPv6 really isn’t a big problem, by itself, as most ISPs can handle requests like that now. If you’re anything like me the problems that will vex you are the little ones: death by a thousand paper cuts. It’ll be the fact …
Mozilla Weave Just Deleted All My Bookmarks
If you were thinking about using Mozilla Weave I definitely suggest backing your bookmarks up first. In my case, I have no bookmarks anymore, and couldn’t add any bookmarks again until I removed the plugin. Interesting concept, but the implementation obviously sucks. Especially since it removes things (things == everything) without asking. At least it logged all the bookmarks it deleted…
Host CPU is Incompatible…
I now have a cluster of ESX 4.0 hosts running with EVC enabled, in “Intel Xeon Core 2” mode. It’s been working okay so far (there are some rough edges here and there, nothing showstopping) and this morning I decided to convert a couple of my VMs to the new ESX 4 hardware format, “VM Version 7.” As soon as I upgraded the virtual hardware the VMs in question stopped being able to VMotion at all giving me the error: “Host CPU is incompatible with the virtual machine’s requirements at CPUID level 0x1 register ‘ecx’.” no matter where I tried to VMotion it to (even the same CPUs on a different machine). Not cool. These were VMs that were working …
