RHEL 5.0 on HP G6 Proliant
So, we got a new hardware for testing our product. Great, finally. To make sure that we test as close to what we consider Live, we have produced a system image with all required software pre-installed.
It worked perfectly when we provisioned it on our new dev environment.
However this time, we couldn’t get any more DL360 G5 boxes and had to go with a 6th generation.
Being a bit naive, I thought that HP would be considering but no… they screwed up compatibility between newer SmartArray 410i and slightly older 400i so basically our not so new RedHat didn’t see the new controller.
Simple solution is to install new kernel and drivers. But how? when your system is not bootable.
Well, tried many things but the thing which worked well, was pulling the drives out from new server and sliding them in to G5 which was conveniently laying around. Installing new kernel and drivers and voila! boots on G6. Oh kernel came courtesy of CentOS 5.4 so that version was supported by HP drivers!
A bit of an update on my systems : somewhere in late November 2009 I’ve decided to rent a server with www.serverloft.com …
I’m still setting things up there, I’m using VirtualBox to host certain functionalities on separate VMs.
So far there are :
- mta1 for incoming mail, running ESVA , love it! (had experience built with that when Importing to VBox)
- web1 for web sites hosting, running Cherokee!
Still need to get my VPN concentrator, Asterisk, Mail Storage moved there from other systems. Not forgetting move my mobygeek.net site as well!
This will allow me to drop my VM in US, as well as remove some of the services from my home server as my Internet access from home is rubbish in a new place.
Arena Live is sooo much better than Quake Live
It’s amazing , a while back we heard about Quake Live. A game, a Quake which you can play for free online. It had a few glitches , hanged a few times, works only on Windows. Still it was some fun.
Now, as we know, id software has opensources the Q3 engine. So why not create an Open Source equivalent to proprietary Quake Live.
I think, this is how Arena Live came to life.
Arena Live is free, open source and very much playable( even if they say it’s in Alpha stage). What really got my attention is the main platform for it’s development. Not Windows, not Mac (they will come later), but Linux is the first one with a working client available.
Second thing what surprised me is that it’s IPv6 enabled – It’s the first game I ever played over IPv6.
All you oldschool Quake fans, join the game and we may even have a match.
It looks like S.M.A.R.T has told me that drive in my server is failing. Actually I’ve noticed that when my NFS server just stopped sharing data from it. Still, it was a bad sign, quick look at logs and clear failure messages. Cool.
Short trip to a highstreet shop – Maplin and I’ve grabbed a 1TB Hitachi ( I will never buy Seagate again ). I’ve picked up an Air Duster and 12cm fan as well just as I was there. Fan is for my new PC to keep disks cool.
Open the server, loads and loads of dust, Air Duster gets to work ( someone will kill me as it all came out and dispersed in a nice clean living room ). Swapping the drives. Starting the server.
It takes a bit longer for the server to startup as it was not restarted in ages and all timers told it to rescan all systems properly this time.
Starting Solaris … and my volume with missing disk is … OK … weird. Started zfs scrub on it , just to make sure. Finally it found out that it’s missing a copy, volume is degraded. zfs replace and the rebuild starts, tells me it will be an hour to mirror 750GB back on a new drive.
Now this failure got me thinking if I should replace my VM Host , it’s currently OpenSuse 10 with ancient version of Xen.
I’m wondering if I should put an ESX hypervisor or something else. Certainly my experience with ESX is that it’s rubbish at storage management. I am leaning towards OpenSolaris as it has a selection of hypervisors and storage management just proven to be a breeze.
Will see …
I’ve managed to find some time to get my Cherokee server updated to 0.98.1. BTW, it took a while to have new version appear in the Gentoo portage.
Thanks to Alvaro, this update contains improved system_info module, which is now dirt easy to use in Ruby and some other scripting.
Using that opportunity I have updated my munin_cherokee plugin to utilise new functionality.
to Download latest version , follow the link in Munin Cherokee plugin post
After doing converting one of my servers (baptop) from a laptop to Virtual Machine on Xen with full virtualization it didn’t work too fast. Virtual environment was too penalizing. It was less reactive and when calling ( it hosts Asterisk for VoIP ) sometime you we could hear each other for a few seconds.
Now, after failed play with Nexenta Core and Xen DomU, I decided to have a go at para virtualizing the baptop. After a few kernel versions and config files … it works. Still without console but works. Great!
I really wanna try that Debian on Solaris kernel called Nexenta. Unfortunately it looks that it can’t do DomU and ZFS_ROOT at the same time. I have filled a bug report with Nexenta.
I have downloaded Foresight Linux 2 with a hope to see some really cool and up to date Linux distribution.
Yes, it has GNOME 2.22 which just came out ( was it yesterday ? ) and yes, this is cool. But if you are matured computer user, you have your favourite tools. Naming a few for me: gkrellm and unison(this one is new for me). Now, gkrellm is longer on the marked than most of the current cool distributions, Unison is not a toddler as well. They are both missing from Foresight Linux … not only standard installation but also the software repository … c’mon!
I have also learned that Foresight is based on rPath as well as Asterisk Now…
I am worried that I will have to ditch it , like I have done with Asterisk Now, rPath and conary is not really production mature! – at least for me.
I have just discovered a XRDP , which is a RDPv4 server for Linux/Unix.
I am well impressed! Especially that it saves your session between connections. Time to incorporate it into my systems.
This was suppose to be a long post describing the differences and similarities of Linux distributions to other software…
But I just want to say that you should have a look at Mac OS and Ubuntu, I’ve notice they are bloody similar in their current market and … ambitions.
They are both good on a home desktop, they can do as a home server ( they have server editions ). They also lack hardcore enterprise solutions.
After years of consideration I have acquired a Bluetooth HeadSet – finally something what doesn’t screen rob me.
Sound quality is decent! There is one but – outdoor, music source has to really close to your headset , there is shit loads of interferences out the in world. Indoors is perfect, I can roam around whole flat without loosing signal.
I have hooked it up to my E61 which does not do stereo and it shit ( good it’s my last month of a contract ) .
I have hooked it up to my Music Player the StormBlue A9+ which I had for a while and until yesterday I was disappointed with it – now I love it, it works with my headset perfectly.
I have also connected it to my computer at home and now I am about to connect it at home. It’s dirt easy – thanks to Audio Devices How To from BlueZ
btw headset is Motorola S9
