Posted by
flyer – 01/06/2010
It’s been a while …
A little late to report on some things, but still, here we go.
Loadays
Was only able to make it one day, Saturday, but it was good!
Really enjoyed it. Rather ’small’ conf ( guess bigger then expected though 
with even some international speakers!
Devops! Talks on system deployment, config management ( we had ‘em all, cfengine, chef and puppet), monitoring …
NLUUG Spring conference
Kris, Kenny and I drove to Holland to attend this anual conference. Main line through this conf was systems administration. Although we spotted some interesting topics, we found them to be not enough in depth.
Eg: the asterisk talk was more like a story about the fact that the speaker and his company implemented asterisk at a client, but didn’t really cover asterisk itself, the part we were interested in …
Puppetcamp
And the last one in row.
Two days on just 1 topic … isn’t that too much?
Well apparently: no it isn’t! Maybe a bit short?
Only attended the first day.
Day schema: talks before noon and open spaces during the after noon.
I really liked Luke’s talk (http://www.slideshare.net/lkanies/portable-infrastructure-with-puppet), the first one of the day.
First part was about upcoming versions, new features etc.
Second part about why puppet exists.
Although Luke mentioned having slept only for 2 hours, he managed to give an interesting and entertaining talk!
The afternoon was filled with openspace slots across the different rooms.
I’ve never ‘openspaced’ before, so I admit: the idea of people walking in and out of rooms, prolly making their point and then just leave … I wasn’t sure this would go somewhere.
But in the end it all turns out very well
Went to the puppet 101 openspace. This ended in a public-driven hands-on overview. Great!
Posted by
flyer – 17/12/2009
When compiling from source, I like to use a prefix like /usr/local/pkgname, and mostly pkgname_version.
Trying to run the binary afterwards mostly gets me a ‘lib not found’ error, so I could add it to ld.so.conf (or wherever the system keeps config for shared libs), or use crle on Solaris or set LD_LIBRARY_PATH. This is what I have been doing for years. (compiling from source was mostly for test purposes)
Both work, but both are not that nice and easy to work with. Especially the use of LD_LIBRARY_PATH is not really appreciated.
And although LD_LIBRARY_PATH can come in handy testing, in a production environment things will prolly get messy if you have been using this VAR before and start changing it.
So I finnally started setting the LD Runtime Path before compiling: just 1 extra line to specify before configure and no LIB-PATH-fiddling afterwards.
eg:
LDFLAGS=”-R/usr/local/testpkg/lib” ./configure –prefix=/usr/local/testpkg
Posted by
flyer – 03/12/2009
Finding SUN Firmware, the ultra fast way: Bigadmin Firmware Patching Center
Posted by
flyer – 03/12/2009
While trying to access the DRAC on a 1950, the webinterface didn’t give me the tab ‘Console’.
Prolly caused by incorrect JVM. On another machine I had the ‘Console’ tab but it wouldn’t work.
So apparently for this DRAC (5 version 1.4) you need firefox 2.0 and a JVM 1.6.
Lost some time finding the correct FF version, so , mostly as a reference for myself, here’s a link to all releases.
Posted by
flyer – 25/11/2009
Samba uses the Trivial Database as backend to store user/pwds. (It does so by default since some time)
What I didn’t know is that Samba can store it’s config in ‘registry’, which by itself actually is a tdb file.
Registry as in Windows registry as in the fact it follows a similar data model: a tree structure of keys, consisting of subkeys with their values.
This comes in quite handy when you have a rather dynamic samba config.
Instead of going through the hassle of regenerating your config and reloading it, you can use the ‘net conf’ commands to configure your shares (and also global config if you like) at runtime, which is a fast and elegant way of automating shares config!
Next to it being handy it also comes with some performance improvements: while each new client’s smbd process had to read the whole samba config without using registry, it now only reads global without loading anything else at that moment. If you have several (hundreds/thousands) shares defined, that will definately make a difference.
Config itself is stored in registry.tdb, found in samba’s lockdir (smbd -b | grep LOCKDIR , /var/lib/samba on debian)
Use tdbdump to see it’s ‘windows registry based’ data structure.
The feature was introduced into samba-3.2.0, haven’t bumped into it till now sadly enough.
Detailed info in this PDF
Posted by
flyer – 09/11/2009
Video cards always come in all kinds and flavours.
The only thing of interest to me was that one had a good tvout chip and was preferably silently cooled.
With all those LCD HD monitors/TVs on the market , this kinda changed to ‘what output connections are available’ and ‘can it handle video offloading by the decoder’?
On my mythtv-setup, I have been using XvMC for quite some time,
which offloads ‘portions’ of the video decoding process to the GPU.
Until I noticed this ‘new’ kid on the block: VDPAU
Like XvMC, it’s an API allowing video programs to take advantage of the video card’s GPU, only it ’supports’ more video formats. (that’s not all offcourse, check the site for some more in depth description)
Wikipedia mentions it as ‘open source’, but that might be open for debate.
Anyway, all documentation and source files are available.
Make sure your NVidia driver is >=180.06 (check your card supports vdpau) and compile your video programs with VDPAU support (mplayer, mythtv).
In Mythtv (settings->TV->playback) select nvdia vdpau acceleration for decoder and OSD.
More info on wikipedia and the Mythtv VDPAU page
On LCD HD screens, You might also want to have a look at the de-interlacers, advanced 2x being the ‘best’, but not suppoted by all hardware. CRTs do not need deinterlacing, TVout on your video card should output interlaced video which will then be handled in the right manner by your TV. 720p content does not need deinterlacing too (mind the ‘p’ ).
More info on deinterlacing here
I’m still playing with this VDPAU-enabled system, trying to figure out which settings work and look best.
At least the offloading part works just fine: 720p content gives almost no additional stress on my system. (30% user cpu without VDPAU enabled, 5% with)
Posted by
flyer – 11/12/2008
As some time ago our beloved grabbers using teveblad.be stopped working, we started looking for alternatives.
Some are using mc2xml now, which is unbelievably fast and has all the info you’ll ever want.
I hacked together a script that used the Skynet-tv guide to get me going again.
Not all info was available, only dates and names, no extra info.
But it worked!
Recently I also added support for a second site.
Having already put some effort into this, I was thinking about making it a little project.
If some people start using it and provide some feedback … svn … bugtracking … feature requests …
There’s only one thing that concerns me.
If a lot of people start using the same site for grabbing data, the sites will take precautions too.
I like the idea of the Mythportal guys: they put the guide online and everyone can download.
Only grabbed from the site once, but downloaded many times from another.
Well, this used to be the mythportal-way of doing it, after tvblad changed things, they were, in a very subtile way, checking wether people would pay for a guide.
So, if people are interested, contact me, maybe we can find a way to make the data available for everyone and to not scare the tvguide-sites too much.
Posted by
flyer – 25/11/2008
So, we received some Zenoss goodies today!
John , you won’t be the only one being spotted on conferences with a Zenoss Tshirt anymore!
[img=images/Image024.jpg popup=true width=300 height=400 ]
Looks like Bart, Dieter and Kris have found the pics too!
Posted by
flyer – 06/11/2008
luconfig: ERROR: Filesystem / fstype ufs,mir does not supported..
ERROR: Configuration of BE failed.
They should get a new tshirt !
Posted by
flyer – 03/11/2008
Is available.
Have a look at the What’s new page.
They finally made it possible to have zones on ZFS!
Well, it was already working, it just wan’t supported
As a Solaris admin, you surely will have had following thoughts:
1. They have zones support!
2. They Have ZFS support!
3. Let’s put zones on ZFS!
So it seems this really wasn’t a good idea as it is only supported in update 6 and above …
Or am I misunderstanding ‘Solaris Containers on a ZFS root file system’
as it doesn’t really matter for a zone wether it’s installed on the root FS or not …
Or is it …
Someone, enlighten me!