My thoughts on life, the universe and beer

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

Using “ps axm” can show you all threads of all processes…neat!

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

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 2x1Gbit 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

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

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

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

Eyyy…

Just watched the newest episodes of The Big Bang Theory & Family Guy. Hot damn!….

The newest Big Bang Theory episode is the funniest ever!….i just laughted my ass off…..god …how can some TV show that’s non-animated be so fucking funny!

Lately i have been reading up on some mailing lists, and i saw that some work is being done on online-resizing of block devices with device-mapper-multipath in the RHEL 5.3 beta. This is exactly the feature i have been waiting for……my fellow Windows admins have been making fun of me for adding a new lun every time i need to resize a disk on my Linux boxes….it sucks! …..

I often wonder if people actually acknowledge the amount of work Red Hat has put in development of Linux….i hate to see all those damn Ubuntu followers badmouth Red Hat for being “Microsoft” of the linux world…..

I often highly doubt that i would be working with linux based systems at all if i would not have bought those Red Hat 4.2 cd’s i did back in 1997 i think it was……Man, does this bring back memories or what.

Today, i work with pretty much anything with a CLI….After i got accepted into our NOC (Network Operations Center) in 2003/2004 i’ve been the goto guy for anything with a CLI interface. My experience is just ridiculous….Networks, SAN’s, UNIX/Linux/Every fricking OS with a CLI interface, VXWorks, whatevah!….bring it on …

After 2 weeks of searching i just found my keyring…..It got lost after the last drunken adventure with my homes @ Skyggnir ….Siggi, Steini, Ommi, Orvar, Halldor, Oli, Baddi, Andri, Saevar….you guys know who you are!

Well …off to watching some TV …laters homes!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Howdy,

Just finished a small upgrade from VMWare Server 2.0 RC2 to the final build on a small setup i did earlier this summer. As always the upgrade went without any pain and it goes on to show that VMWare has yet again proven it self as the virtualization solution of choice for me (hey, Xen/KVM guys, sorry, but your windows virtualization simply sucks!). This setup runs 3 servers, 2 Windows machines and 1 Linux. Everything went without a hitch but what i feel is the only thing missing for VMWare solutions is a client for MacOSX to be able to use the virtual machine console.

I am sick, started on friday evening, but on saturday night there was a party at work so i had to go and have some fun. Left the party at 00:00 after feeling not so good and have been tied to my sofa since then…feeling awful.

Hopefully i get back to work tomorrow!

Well …off to watch some more Familiy Guy!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Man …

Yesterday & today i have been preparing a IBM JS12 machine for a client. I got a JS20 machine few weeks ago to use in a test and was not extremly happy with the hardware, but the OS, AIX 5.3, has been a surprise. I find all patching and installation tasks to be very easy to perform. I have been a bit burned from my experience with HP-UX & Solaris (i do not consider my self a expert on the OS’s, but have done some HP-UX work for few clients and do run some MC/ServiceGuard clusters.

It is also quite nice to not have to go through hoops to install software like Oracle (Trying to find a consistent guide of what RPMS should be installed on a RHEL5 system for Oracle has not been very easy to find, but somehow i managed to create one). I had to install 2 packages to be able to install Oracle on my new install of AIX 5.3 TL8.

Now, i am not saying i loooove everything about AIX but IBM have made something really good here. Combined with Power6 (and soon, Power7) i am pretty sure i will start consider AIX for my projects at work where i find that i need more power, more stability & more maturity then Linux can offer. Again, i am not saying Linux is not mature enough for most of my projects, but there are places where i could really use AIX.

HACMP is one of the products which can replace MC/ServiceGuard, you do not need a license for basic things like mirroring your volume groups (in software) and you will probably never ever have a bug in a licensing code stopping you from forcing an unmount of a VXFS filesystem on your AIX system (HINT HINT, HP-UX anyone?).

Well ….I’m off….
Laters,

Finnzi