Running Systems

I’ve “fixed” such a computer a with tendency to freeze today. It happened that about every two hours, the computer froze. I let it roam for a while, and noted that the Chipset’s North-Bridge was getting terribly hot. The computer chassis was left open because of driver incompatibility regarding the on-board network interface, so a PCI based NIC was added. However, the PCI NIC was not Small Form Factor (SF), which forced them to leave the computer chassis open.

The model is this one, and if you don’t want to burn it, leave its chassis closed at all times.

And my “lab zone” needs to be packed up. I’ve closed the lid of some of the computers in the lab, and piled them up. Got about 27 computers, some of them in working order, without counting my “Production” (yeah) computers, 6 computers acting as servers, two desktops and one laptop. Two additional laptops I did not count, don’t know why…

Of my non-”production” computers, One is P4, few are P3, many are P2 and P1 (or equivalent, of course). Two Apples, one Sun. Used to have SGI, but it didn’t work, so I gave it to a friend to try and make it work. He failed, as far as I know.

I’ve taken few pictures of my pile in becoming. It is not all of the computers, but it’s a pile of 20 already. Check it out

Front-side view. Only some of the rear raw are visible

Side view. Nothing much to see. It’s one level above floor, anyhow

Rear view. Still, only the upper two and a half floors of the pile are visible

Front view. Again, only the upper two and a half floors are visible

Still got 12 or 13 more computers to add to the pile. Most of them being my “production”, I believe they will be treated better.

Defining an array of 10x300GB SATA disks, we need to utilize it for our needs. It will be joined in the near future by another such array, but since it will be an additional array and not added disks to this existing array, we need to think onwards, and utilize LVM, so we can "join" these two arrays.

Using SLES9 64bit we try using both fdisk and parted and we cannot greate a single partition larger than slightly less than 1TB. We change the disk type from MSDOS to GPT and we are able to create a single partition of up to 2TB.

Finally we decide to create PVs directly on the disk device, by using "pvcreate /dev/sdc "(in this case). Later on, creating LVM by using this PV device exposes the whole size of the disk for our uses.

Installed RHEL4 on a system with both internal storage (HP SmartAray 5i – cciss) and external disks through Qlogic FCS HBA.

During install, the local disks were detected as /dev/cciss/c0d0 while the external disks were detected as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb

After installation was done, Grub started with incorrect mapping. For no apparent reason, Grub searched for its stage2 and date in /dev/sda1 and not in /dev/cciss/c0d0p1.

The quickest way for me to solve it was to replace grub with Lilo (available on the fourth RHEL CD), correct /etc/lilo.conf.anaconda, copy this file to /etc/lilo.conf and run Lilo (with "-v" flag, for safety). It worked like a charm.

Imagine Omniback 4.x to Omniback 5.5 upgrade on HP-UX. Imagine you assume all existing backup procedure (and you were told there is license only for disk agent) is based on filesystem backup. Assume you know there’s Oracle installed on this server, but no relevant agent (again, filesystem only, no DB agents…)

You are cautious. You move the current /opt/omni to /opt/omni.old directory. You hash the line containing the relevant entry in /etc/inetd.conf. You are prepared.

You install the newer version by running the installer script with the flag -install da, so you would install only Disk Agent (after all, this is nothing but a client to this whole backup procedure).

You check everything, and it all seems to work correctly as far as you care or know. Suddenly, someone notices that Oracle Listener (TNS) does not listen anymore. Trying to bring it back up results in a message which seems like this:

/usr/lib/pa20_64/dld.sl: Unable to find library ‘libobk.sl’.

It doesn’t look good. You are in a little crisis. Restart to the Oracle Engine itself results in a shutdown, but it never starts back again. It doesn’t look good.

It appears that there was an Oracle Agent for Omniback installed there previously, and that you removed it uncleanly by your Disk-Agent-Only upgrade.

The solution could have been to install the Oracle Agent. It can be also related to recreating the required links, say from /opt/omni.old/lib/libbo2oracle8_64.sl or from $ORACLE_HOME/lib64/libobk.sl.backup (if there were any…) to $ORACLE_HOME/lib64/libobk.sl, the first is based on the older Omniback, the later is based on the assumption a backup was made.

The quickest solution was to install the newer agent, with the Oracle8i agent (called “oracle8″) and link: “ln -s /opt/omni/lib/libob2oracle8_64.sl ~oracle/lib64/libobk.sl” (assuming we’re running Oracle 8i on 64bit HP-UX PA-RISC).

While trying to install RHEL 4 on VMware ESX 2.1 I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Linux installation which was unable to detect disks.

A quick search in VMware’s web site resulted in a download page for RHEL 4 Update 2, which, unfortunately, wasn’t the version I was using.

Before running around and searching the nearest download of RHEL 4 Update 2, I’ve noticed that VMware configuration for each virtual machine defines vxmbuslogic SCSI adapter which requires, as it appears, special driver for Linux RHEL 4. However, changing the adapter to vmxlsilogic solved the issue, and required no special Linux driver.

I’ve had problem with color names ever since around the time I’ve upgraded to Xorg 7.0

This problem as been annoying, but it was acceptable, just until lately.

I’ve discovered that a required file /etc/X11/rgb.txt was involved, and was required for X to understand color mappings.

For some reason, although x11-common 7.0.20 was supposed to have this file inside, it did not ("apt-get install –reinstall x11-common" left the directory without the rgb.txt file). It seems as if this package is somehow broken (saw same effect on x11-common 7.0.22), so I’m attaching my rgb.txt here, for your convenience. rgb.txt

Note that in order for changes to take place, you must restart your X when done.

This post will be divided into this common view part, and (the first in this blog) "click here for more" part.

The main reason I’ve created this blog was to document, both for myself and other technical persons, the acts required to perform set tasks.

My first idea was to document how to install HACMP on AIX. For those of you who do not know what I’m talking about, HACMP is a general-purpose high availability cluster made by IBM, which can work on AIX, and if I’m not mistaken, on other platforms as well. It is based, actually, on a large set of "event" scripts, which run in a predefined order.

Unlike other HA clusters, this is a fixed-order cluster. You can bring your application up after the disk has been up, and after IP has been up. You cannot change this predefined order, and you have no freedom to set this order. Unless.

Unless you create custom scripts, and use them as pre-event and post-event, naming them correctly and putting them in the right directories.

This is not an easy cluster to manage. It has no flashy features, it is not versatile like other HA Clusters are (VCS being the best one, to my opinion, and MSCS, despite its tendency to reach race conditions, is quite versatile itself).

It is a hard HA Cluster, for a hard working people. It is meant for a single method of operation, and for a single track of mind. It is rather stable, if you don’t go around adding volumes to VGs (know what you want before you do it.

Below is a step by step list of actions to do, based on my work experience. I’ve brought up two clusters (four nodes) while actually doing copy-paste into a text document of every action done by me, any package installed, etc.

It is meant for test purposes. It is not as HA as it could be (using the same network infrastructure), it doesn’t employ all heart-bit connections it might have had – it’s meant for lab purposes, and has done quite well there.

It was installed on P5 machines, P510, if I’m not mistaken, using FastT200 (single port) for shared storage (single logical drive, small size – about 10GB), with Storage Manager 8.2 and adequate firmware.

I’ve been under a huge trackback attack, and, to be honest, closed the whole comment mechanism by a mistake.

It is now announced as open.

I’ve noticed some of the later entries were to my ML110 and Linux post. Now, with comments available, you can feel free to ask for clarification, if needed.

Cheers.