June 6th, 2009
Howdy all,
I am still alive people, you can stop looking for me…:)
Lately i have been writing a document. Technically it sounds simple, a single document. Sure….i thought so too! But my problem is that I have multiple computers. One with MacOS X, one with Fedora and one with Vista. None of them had the same word processor. Sure, you will all go yelling at me and tell me to use OpenOffice on them all. Well….i won’t….so shoot me!
Well, to make the story short, I had Office 2007 on the Vista laptop, Pages on the MacOS X laptop and OpenOffice on my Fedora box. The document i was writing was in the DOC format. Every single time i moved to another computer my formatting got screwed! Bah! Interoperability in word processing applications is none-existent!
Moral of the story? Interoperability stinks! Make sure you choose your word processing application wisely!
Bgrds,
Finnzi
Posted in Tech | No Comments »
April 21st, 2009
Howdy,
Yesterday at work i had to extend a disk on a Lotus Domino server that i was not able to stop. Since the LUN was on a LVM group i knew i could extend the VG without disrupting the Domino server but i did not just want to add a new LUN to the VG since that tends to get messy after a while.
So i decided to try out pvmove. I had heard some horror stories that it would take ages etc, but since Red Hat supports the tool i decided to try it.
Amazingly i was able to add a new LUN to the VG (one without a partition for a easy resize experience later). The original PV was around 128GB, and it took about 25-35 minutes to move all the data of the PV!
While HP-UX administrators tend to tell you to just use mirroring instead of pvmove, and then just break the mirror and remove the smaller LUN, i found out that what pvmove really does is to create a mirror, and then copy the extends and in the end, remove the mirror. Just make sure you either background the pvmove task or run it in a screen session, preferably with -i 5! 
I’m off to watch some telly….
Bgrds,
Finnzi
Posted in Linux, Tech | No Comments »
April 10th, 2009
Man …
I was asked to work today on a holiday. Why? I have to extend a filesystem on a HP-UX 11.31 machine.
Amazingly HP does not include online resizing in the base install of HP-UX. Common people! You have to buy IA64 machines from HP, you have to buy the foundation operating system (minimalistic feature version of HP-UX), but you can not extend filesystems on the fly.
This is one of the reason i think Linux is going to rule the future. RHEL includes this. Hell, OpenSolaris gives you the features needed to extend ZFS free. Even IBM includes these features in AIX!
My point is, that in my free (or paid for subscription of RHEL) install of Linux (even on a IA64 machine) i can mirror disks with LVM, i can resize filesystems, i can even migrate data between disk arrays on-the-fly.
HP really needs to start taking care of they’re customers and stop charging for such a simple feature. Enterprise customers will probably start looking into other operating systems now when the budgets are getting tighter.
Hell, why am i even crying about this, i get my overtime, Linux ends up gaining more respect with enterprise customers and everybody wins!
Well, i have to get going, work calls….
*UPDATE*: While doing some partition resizing on my Macbook i realized that i can resize hfs+ on-the-fly (both shrink and extend). I do realize hfs+ is not the most advanced filesystem out there but common, this is a operating system mainly focused on home usage! HP-UX is a enterprise grade UNIX operating system. C’mon HP!
Bgrds,
Finnzi
Posted in Linux, Tech, UNIX | No Comments »
March 7th, 2009
Howdy,
Woke up early today. Got my coffee mug filled up, decided to relax in my fancy sofa, got my macbook and went on to read up on some mailing lists (Yeah….i like to read up on mailing lists…now beat it!). Now the first post i read was from a person trying to add a specific functionality to a certain software product. The mail was something like this:
“Please teach me howto to X”
Bgrds,
Unamed Person
Now, the software product in question here is a widely used piece of high availability clustering software. The manufacturer has some good manuals on how to do X and a quick google will give you a awful lot of information on how to do this.
What i am trying to say here: RTFM or at least TRY to Google your issue before posting onto a list. I’m betting around 70% of the users on the mailing lists are system administrators that are already working in a 150% job and would really like to help, but they won’t help if you don’t even try to read the bloody manual!
Bleh….maybe i have not had enough coffee in the morning….but people…TRY!
I’m off to read up on more mailing lists….wish me luck!
Bgrds,
Finnzi
Posted in Linux, Real Life (tm), Tech, UNIX | No Comments »
February 11th, 2009
Using “ps axm” can show you all threads of all processes…neat!
Posted in Linux | No Comments »
February 1st, 2009
Howdy all,
Just wanted to show some color….i am still alive!
The last month has been quite the ride. The Icelandic economy has been trying to stabilize, the beer prize is going up and our politicians have been fighting for control. Yes….We’re in a bloody recession.
Although everyone seems to be worried and distracted i have been busy learning some new stuff. I’m in the middle of migrating some Lotus Domino instances from a AS/400 machine to Linux on x86_64, migrating off Oracle RAC to a RHCS setup and planning a upgrade of a IBM SAN environment that haven’t seen software upgrades for too long .
Sadly a friend decided to quit his job at Skyggnir after working there for ~8 years. That’s pretty long in the IT business here in Iceland i would say. He got a job at a financial company in the USA which is opening a office here in Iceland shortly. He is now waiting for a private plane to arrive here in Iceland which is going to transport him to Los Angeles….biatch!
I wish him the best, and i sure hope i get to work with him again sometime in the future.
Hopefully i will be busy for the next few months, there are a lot of internal projects going on, as well as quite few large projects for our customers.
Well, just wanted to let the few that care know that i am still alive .
Bgrds,
Finnzi
Posted in Real Life (tm) | No Comments »
December 19th, 2008
Howdy,
I’m wondering if it is better to replace a HA cluster running RHCS, serving GFS through NFS & MySQL through Active/Standby clustering with:
All the clients of this cluster are IBM HS21 blades, running CentOS5, booting of SAN and have 2×1Gbit ethernet interfaces in a bond mode 1.
Those blades could just use OCFS2 instead of NFS, and instead of running MySQL in a Active/Passive setup we could just as well use MySQL MMM.
I guess i have something to think about while on my christmas holiday!
Bgrds,
Finnzi
Posted in Linux, Tech | No Comments »
December 13th, 2008
Howdy,
Long time no blog.
For the last months a lot has happened. We’re going through some kind of a recession. The economy here in Iceland has crashed. But we are all still alive . Rumors have been going around that we do not even go to work anymore …..
That is just not true. Live goes on. People have been loosing jobs, but we’re going to get through this. We’ve done so in the past, just not in the same scale.
The company i work for, Skyggnir (TM Software Infrastructure Management) has been merged with the service part of Nyherji. Now i work in a department called Kerfisveita Skyggnis…it translates to something like Skyggnir ASP hosting.
I even got a new job title, Systems consultant. Yet my job role is pretty much the same.
The people in the department that came from Nyherji are all pretty cool and all around i think this new department is going to work out just fine.
Now Skyggnir is the largest ICT company here in Iceland by far, it was the largest before the merge i think but now there is no doubt ….
With christmas coming up my workqueue slows down a bit but it seems that with the merger there is going to be a lot of projects starting in January that will end up there, hopefully i will just have enough to do!
Well, just wanted to let all of you know that i am not dead …yet
If i will not see you until after christmas i just wish you a merry christmas and a happy new year!
Bgrds,
Finnzi
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
December 13th, 2008
Howdy,
Just upgraded to the new 2.7 release of wordpress. I got to say this release rocks!
The new interface is very clean and i just looooove how those guys always seem to make upgrading the easiest thing in the world
Greetings to the WordPress.org team, you guys rock!
Bgrds,
Finnzi
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
October 27th, 2008
Howdy,
Been wondering about Operations vs Consulting in IT for the last weeks.
The company i work for is being merged with another service company. The managers are creating new departments and moving people around. My new department is called something like “ASP Operations”. We will run all the centrally managed systems, our machine rooms etc.
I’ve always looked at IT as IT….not operations vs consulting etc. My job has always been very much a mix of those two since i work in a team of 3 admins that do work on SAN & Linux environments.
After thinking a bit i decided that i like operations a bit better then consulting for me. I like to create my environments, be they SAN, Linux or whatever. I like to build them, run them and finally replace them.
All hail the System Administrators of the world!
Well….
Bgrds,
Finnzi
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »