Recent Entries

I'd never run a "grow" on a Linux software RAID array before, but my storage server needed some more space. The manual page for mdadm is not really obvious about how exactly you add drives to a RAID-5 array, but everything went smoothly once I figured out that you first have to add the drives as a hot-spare. Read below for more details.
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I've written up a bit of a report about the networking this year at PyCon. I wasn't nearly as involved in the network this year, for reasons I go into some in the article. If you're interested in the networking for handling 1100 people, follow the link
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I'm sure everyone who is interested has already been to the PyCon web site, and so you probably already know that tummy.com is sponsoring it again. But did you know that I'll be presenting with a talk titled Python in System Administration: How, When, and Why one SysAdmin uses Python. Hope to see you there.
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Nielsen Ratings haven't traditionally been particularly accurate, in that you can't tell how involved someone is in the viewing, whether they're in the room or paying attention, or have friends over also watching the content (and therefore advertisements).

However, if you can post something showing the number of people who "died in a blogging accident", and have the google hits for that term go from 2 to 50,000 practically over-night, that's some important "viewership" information.

The Internet is dramatically changing the information we can gather, sometimes even in useful ways. ;-)
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Just got back last night from this years fudcon in Raleigh, NC. Read on for my recap of the event.

For the recent Holiday, I managed to get a lovely new camera. A Fuji FinePix F50fd. There wasn't anything particularly wrong with my old camera, which I liked quite a bit, it was getting a bit worn, and some of the features on the new Fuji are great.

With the new camera comes the age old problem: How to manage all the photos I take with it. Read on for my thoughts on Linux software for photo management and plea to readers for better ideas...

A few weeks ago, Slashdot had a story about a music executive speaking at a Cellular Phone conference. He was admitting that the music industry was wrong to stand still while their customers were switching to P2P. Of course, he was saying that the mobile industry needed to make sure that they were delivering music to their customers.

However, I think the "mobile operators" are much worse off than just needing to deliver music to their customers. In a very similar way to how the music industry, wireline phone companies, and newspapers are already in trouble. It's all about where the value is: seeing it and being willing to react to it.

Read on for more...
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I was having problems earlier with connecting to PostgreSQL via PgAdminIII, and google was no help. The problem was that connecting from the "psql" CLI remotely was fast, and the initial connect via PgAdminIII was fast, but opening a particular database hung PgAdminIII for several minutes.

For future reference, a postmaster process was taking up 100% CPU time on the server, and a "vacuum analyze pg_trigger" resolved the problem.

A tcpdump of the wire showed that there was this nasty query being sent referencing the pg_trigger table, which took 2 minutes to complete on a very fast CPU.
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I've just finished testing a new mechanism for setting up an encrypted root partition which is much easier than my previous mechanism. This allows for encrypted swap, root, and other partitions, via an encrypted LVM physical volume, so only one pass-phrase is required for access to all the partitions.

Read more in my article titled Encrypted root With LVM on Fedora 8.
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In the past for running virtual machines on my laptop, I had just used a command line using the kvm tool. It worked pretty well, although it had some quirks and limitations. With the recent re-install of my laptop, I decided to check out libvirt and see how easy it was to get working.

Turns out it works quite nicely... read on for more info on my libvirt adventures...

Recently I ran across a blog post from Titus titled What are the 5 best "hidden gem" stdlib modules in Python?. Here are mine.
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Evelyn and I have been speaking about project management mechanisms. There are so many of those, so why not have another one? Many of the project management mechanisms are geared towards software development, where tasks are around 10 times larger than what we normally deal with. Usually the items are unrelated, so you can't rely on the natural ordering of tasks (I can't do this until I do this). So, it's a very real worry that a task stagnates on a task list because other tasks are selected instead of it.

Another contributing factor to this is that I often will select more tasks for my daily task list than I can reasonably do in a day. Even days where I'm not so optimistic, urgent items that come in during that day can contribute to stagnating tasks.

After thinking about this problem, I came up with the idea that it would be nice if tasks grew in size as they sat on my list. In other words, the tasks started coming towards me, becoming bigger and bigger in my vision, to use a physical metaphor. Perhaps displacing other tasks until I just can't ignore it. So an hour long task that's sat on my list for a while could start looking like a 2 or 4 hour task...

This reminded me of the South Park episode where they go hunting. Any animals are in season, as long as you yell "It's Comin' Right At Me"! So, I started calling it ICRAM.
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Last Thursday several big events occurred:

• Fedora 8 - Werewolf was released on the world. This was a pretty smooth and good release cycle I think. If you haven't tried a Fedora release in a while, this would be one to check out.
• My laptop drive started having uncorrectable read errors, which made it less than happy running. It would hit one of those sectors, and then go into a infinite loop of resets and drive access.

Clearly this was a sign that I should do a fresh F8 install on a new drive, and also try out Sean's root encryption HOWTO. Read on for more information about encrypted root filesystem installs.

Tonight Scott was having problems with mutt suddenly having a garbled display. One of the things we wanted to do was to display packages by installed date to see what had changed recently. This is always annoying to find because I can never remember how to get the installed time or the list of available tags. Here's how...
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I know I shouldn't be surprised, because it seems like every time I try to use one of the Heartbeat STONITH plug-ins I find it just doesn't work. Of course, with the exception of the "external" plug-in which I designed, and Scott Kleihege largely implemented. The problem is that STONITH plug-ins are fairly complicated to implement because of the way they're designed. So, getting in and fixing one tends to be pretty hard work. Implementing a new one even harder.

Anyway, the short answer is that the AP7900 just doesn't work with either the apcmastersnmp or the apcmaster STONITH modules. Read on for some more information.
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A client recently purchased a couple of new systems with PCI-E instead of PCI-X (AKA 64-bit PCI, the old standard PCI but in a longer slot). The 3Ware PCI-E board is the new 9650SX. However, this board is only supported by the drivers in the 2.6.19 and later kernels. Read on for more information about using this board with Linux and especially Debian Etch.
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The Fedora "mkinitrd" can read certain defaults from "/etc/sysconfig/mkinitrd", but this file is not really documented in the basic setup. If your normal mkinitrd is missing certain modules, you can use the following syntax to cause them to be created as part of the initrd.

MODULES: This environment variable can be set to a space-separated list of modules to load into the initrd. For example: MODULES="aes sha256 cbc". This is like specifying "--with", so see the man page for mkinitrd for more information.

PROBE: If set to "yes", mkinitrd will try to auto-detect certain settings including: rootfs, rootopts, rootdev, devname, majmin, dev, swsuspdev, and additionally will detect root on NFS, swap on LVM, and modular root file-systems.

PREMODS: Modules to be loaded as if the command-line --preload had been specified. See the "--preload" section of the mkinitrd manual page.

DMDEVS: This is listed in the same section as being able to be configured, but even by looking at the code and searching the web I wasn't able to figure out what this was supposed to be used for.
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With all the stories about laptops being lost or computers being stolen, and sensitive data being lost, there's a good reason to encrypt data on systems. I've written up an article on setting up an encrypted root partition on Fedora 7
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Domain name records include a TTL (Time To Live) value, which allows the domain publisher to give hints about how frequently domain data may change. It's common to set this value to several hours normally, but to push it down 5 minutes when changes to DNS are expected. The longer TTL means faster resolution times because of caching, but also means the data may be stale for longer.

However, it's common knowledge that places like AOL ignore this TTL value and instead force TTLs to be fairly large values such as 1 week. As with much common knowledge, however, this seems to largely be an urban legend...
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I spent most of the day today trying to get IPMI STONITH working with Heartbeat. IPMI is a system management protocol, usually implemented via an auxiliary controller, for doing various management functions including getting sensor data (fan speed, temp) and turning a server on and off. The IPMI controller is on even if the system is otherwise powered off. However, the ipmilan STONITH plugin is in pretty rough shape.
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Since I have been involved in Fedora development, I have spent time in some of the Fedora IRC channels over on irc.freenode.net where a lot of the Fedora development takes place. Last week there was some discussion about the main #fedora channel, where end users come to seek help. So, I decided to hang out there for a week and see if I could help out.

It's been a while since I posted anything. Been very busy, and then last week I was out on vacation in lovely Durango, CO. Once I got back I decided that I should upgrade my FC-6 machines here to F-7. Being the tinkerer I am, I elected to try upgrading via yum. Read on for my experiences with upgrading 3 machines.

I recently had a system that is quite a long distance from me that I needed to reduce the root file-system size on. To make matters worse, the IP KVM is having more than a few issues, so booting into rescue mode was not really an option. I wanted to just put "e2fsck" and "resize2fs" into the init scripts, but the system init scripts are called after the partition is mounted. Here's what I did...
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Man, finding the command-line interface (CLI) management tool for the Dell PERC 5/i controller is a maze of twisty little passages... Because Dell doesn't actually have the download for it, despite grabbing nearly a GB worth of stuff that sounded close. So, to seed the google...

The Dell PERC 5/i controller is actually an LSI Logic based controller, and you need to go to the LSI Logic site and grab the "MegaCLI" program from their support section for the "MegaRAID SAS 8408E" card. This one seems to work with that controller.

The magic really seems to be going to the LSI site and searching for the 8408E model MegaRAID card.
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I picked up a Linksys SPA-942 phone and Grandstream GXP-2020 phone to trial, along with a lower-end Grandstream Budgettone to trial. I was really impressed with the Linksys, and my first impressions of the 2020 was bad enough that I just sent them both back and replaced them with more Linksys phones. Read on for more information on doing the upgrade.
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