the BSD box

Here are a couple of random predictions for 09:

1- We’ll wave goodbye to Sun Microsystems. It turns out that the majority holder in Sun these days is an asset stripping company, which after the pretty poor year they’ve had in 08 could signal the end.

2- Apples Market share for laptops and pc’s including the amount of OsX installs will continue to increase.

3- Hopefully i’ll get a job before I’m on the streets selling the big issue.

4- Another plethora of high street shops will disappear, there are current rumors about:

• PC world
• WH Smith

5- Duke Nukem Forever still wont be released

Pretty negative outlook for 09 so far from me.. However film releases for ‘09 look much better. 

Star Trek / Wolverine / Watchmen

Update: My post was built from a drunken chat in the pub. However a friend pointed me in the direction of this article, which explains better what is happening.

Computers Sun

After a morning searching the internet wondering what possibly could be the issue with Oracle clusterware not linking it became apparent i’d made a huge mistake.

Can you spot it ..

[root@Oracle1 orainstall]# uname -a

Linux Oracle1 2.6.18-92.el5xen #1 SMP Fri May 23 23:49:15 EDT 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[root@Oracle1 orainstall]# ls

10201_clusterware_linux32.zip

Read more…

Computers, Oracle -lxml10, libxml10.a

Mortified, you can’t see completely but three are lit up

Computers

Copyright (C) 1999, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.

Exception java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /tmp/OraInstall2008-12-14_02-30-18PM/jre/1.4.2/lib/i386/libawt.so: libXp.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory occurred..

Computers, Oracle 32bit, 64bit, wtf

Oracle installs normally require a long time to change various settings and this is before you can get to the barebones install. A quick step through the ‘basics’ of setting up oracle requires:

- Tuning of Kernel Network parameters

- Creation of Users/groups

- Creation of Oracle directories/correct permissions

- Checking Physical memory/swap

- Configuration of Shared memory segments (more kernel tuning)

- Configuration of Semaphores (Read here (if you care))

- Configuration of File Handles

- Configuration of IP port ranges

- Configuration of various shell contraints

This is before you’ve installed one piece of Oracle software, and can result in some tedious work. I’ve created ‘albeit a rough edition’ a script that should hopefully reduce this tedium to about 2-3 minutes work. It’s only for linux EL at the moment, however it’ll be tuned to work on Solaris as soon as I build another host and tune the script.  Few to-do’s and i’ll upload it, perhaps someone might use it.

Computers, Linux, Oracle

The most common method for networking using xen is to use a network bridge with your physical ethernet and then the virtual nics associated with xen domains. The default install and configuration will result in a default xen bridge (xenbr0) which will have your ethernet and virtual nics in. This information has to be explicitly declared in the various xen configuration files, however xen will take care of the actual plumbing and configuring of the bridge and the interfaces. 

However, xen has an oddity (in my opinion) it appears that xend will monitor the bridges on your dom0 and add any other bridges to it’s state. Which means should you manually create a bridge e.g. 

spike ~ # brctl addbr testbr0

xend will see that this bridge has been created and add it to it’s state configuration. On a reboot or restart of xend, what will happen is that xend will configure the networking back to the state that it recorded. This means that not only will xenbr0 be created so will testbr0, which wouldn’t be a problem if your virtual nics were added to the correct bridge (xenbr0). However they more than likely be added to testbr0 meaning that your domU’s will have no networking, unless you manually move the virtual nic to the correct bridge. 

To permanently remove bridges you need to stop xend (/etc/init.d/xend stop *BEWARE* this will stop all domUs) then go to /var/lib/xend/state/ and edit the network.xml. The entire network uuid section containing the bridge you want removing will need deleting, ensure you back everything up before hand. 

Starting xend now will result in only the correct bridges being created and the domUs nics will be added to the correct bridge.

Xen, virtualization bugs, Networking, Xen

Using the GPS function on my phone I’ve manage to capture some simple statistics of my twice daily journey:

(statistics from train setting off, and train stopping [Manc to Sheff])

Trip Distance: 69.0 km

Trip Time: 01:00:57

Max Speed: 140.9 km/h

Avg speed: 68.4 km/h

This journey is repeated twice a day and 5 times a week, giving a total of 690 km (428.7 miles a week). That’s an average of 1714.8 miles a month, and 20577.6 miles a year. I’m about to finish my second year so thats a grand total of 41155.2 miles, or (given that earths circumference is 24,901 miles) nearly my second lap of earth…

These numbers are based on averages, and don’t include the walk to the train station, the tram to the Salford Quays and the walk to the office.

Grim

Computers

Evidently the person who wrote this has none…

Oh Dear

Click the image to read the rest of the text (it gets worse)

Computers

Been a long while since I updated, partially due to going on  holiday, however more based on the fact i’ve just been lazy. 

Dominican Republic was amazing

Kims Birthday was also amazing/expensive.

In other news before I actually submit and update that has something worth mentioning in it, my dell machine has gone from a Vista with hacked pci-E ports to now running osX 10.5.4 (iATKOS), which runs pretty flawless. I’ve also picked up a PAYG iPhone 3g, which at first turned out to be a bit of a mistake due to not researching it. So the 3G still suffers from a lack of sim unlock, but given that o2 are doing free 3G for the time being i’ll stick with the PAYG sim for a while.

Misc Hackintosh, iPhone

A nice all round NAS/SAN storage system for small businesses fits well into a virtualised infrastructure, a seperate nic is recommended but for a small business a shared core and a reasonable allocation of memory is all that is required. There has been a disk image domU release for openfiler however this official release was version 1.0 and had only a x86 kernel (meaning that x64 xen builds would complain). Here is a simple how-to to having a complete NAS and SAN (using iSCSI) solution using xen.

1. Download domU filesystem image for openfiler (ensure correct architecture is downloaded) At current time openfiler-2.3-x86_64.tar.gz
2. Create a root filesystem for openfiler to live on:
- lvcreate -L 5G -n openfiler rootdg
- dd if=/dev/zero of=/export/openfiler.img seek=5G count=1

These will create either a 5GB logical volume or a 5G disk image to use as a disk for the openfiler filesystem
3. Create a filesystem on the disk/image. This is down with mkfs [path to file system/disk image]
4. Label the filesystem, which is required for the fstab for openfiler. This is done with e2label [path to file system/disk image]
5. Mount the new filesystem and extract the archive into it. If it is the logical volume then directly mount it (e.g. /mnt) or if a disk image a loop back mount will be required (e.g mount -o loop /export/home/openfiler.img /mnt). Copy the archive into the mount, then change directory to the mount and untar the archive (e.g. tar xvf openfiler-2.3-x86_64.tar.gz)
6. Unmount the filesystem and create a second 100mb filesystem. This second filesystem will be used as swap so needs a swap fs creating on it (e.g. mkswap /path/to/swap[fs/img])
7. Create xen config file (this example will need paths altering)

8. Start the xen image with a (e.g. xm create -c /path/to/configfile) and there you go, follow the install instructions from the relevant place on openfilers website to configure and finish the setup.

Note: Obviously this example has no extra disk space attached, it would make sense to add a large third disk to the xen config file. So that openfiler then can use that to allocate space as NFS/SMB or iSCSI etc..

Computers