SPARCed.org blogsberg

...als ich via UMTS-Telefon und komprimierendem Tunnel




Zumindest in Sachen Upstream muss ich mich wohl nicht verstecken und in die andere Richtung komm ich immerhin fast an den derzeitigen wilhelm.tel-Anschluss meiner Freundin ran(die wegen bisheriger Nichtbenutzung ursprünglich den 256kbit-Anschluss bestellt hat und inzwischen auf stolze 512kbit hochgestuft wurde).


Nachtrag:
So siehts dann daheim in Norderstedt aus:



Scheinbar ein guter Tag für Downloads heute, ich hatte es nicht so schnell in Erinnerung

With all the latest improvements to NIM like "alternate master" and the like, I recently ran across something it doesn't do automatically: Copying a subset of a NIM servers objects to another server.

At work, we have several different NIM masters in different locations. All of them serve the same resources but with different clients. We use rsync to keep the actual data on disk in sync and create NIM objects accordingly(which means that we create SPOTs only once, at the "master master" and copy the SPOT data to the other machines and simply add the SPOT object to NIM without recreating the whole thing).

When the rootvg of one of our servers failed, I simply sent a set of harddisks there, containing nothing more than the base operating system and an old copy of the NIM instance. I didn't need to care about the actual installation images, because they were on a RAID5, but the NIM database was out of sync with what was on the disk.

If you asked me what my current job was, I would probably answer something along the lines of "I create and destroy partitions on Power5
systems for a living" and it's true. On an average week, I install between 10 and 40 partitions spread across several systems.

If you've got that kind of work to do, you wouldn't want to spend your time clicking your way through some gruesame application like
WebSM.. And I can do without it as well.

But I haven't found much help on the net, so I have decided to make a blog entry with my HMC commandline cheat sheet which should get
you on the way to partitioning IBM pSeries systems without WebSM

This article might be useful to people from outside Germany, so I used the chance to write something up in English again.

My old rootserver has gotten a little out of date lately with its 1.2GHz Celeron CPU, 40GB harddrive and, worst of all, only 256MB of RAM, things were getting a little crammed there. It was time to rent a new server and Strato was one of the first providers to include unlimited traffic in their offers and therefore got the deal.

So, having that box set up nicely by Strato was a nice idea(they even mirror the harddisks for you), but I rented this machine with a friend who plans to run some Java applications on it and in my opinion, you can't beat Java on Solaris. It might just be my very subjective impression, but I've always had the feeling, Java applications run a little "smoother" on Solaris machines, especially when there's a SPARC CPU in it.

So, I wanted to try out Solaris on my new rootserver and first of all, I've had a look if someone already did it.. Installing operating systems without the ability to insert or change CDs isn't always easy, but I haven't found any decent guide on how to do this, only someone who started one, but didn't finish or even include the nasty bits.

Then an idea struck me: Why not install Solaris in a virtual machine..

With XEN mentioned everywhere and remote console access, it should even make a nice way to load up CDs, power on and off the Solaris "machine" with a serial administration console to a non-networked XEN installation and the network routed to the Solaris domain.

But that was a no-go, because Solaris cannot handle XEN block devices (yet).
To cut this short: VMware server was just released with the possibility to assign a physical disk to the virtual machine, use ISO images and.. install Solaris(and discard VMWare afterwards).

And this is what I did..

Da ist man mal drei Wochen in geheimer Mission im Süden Deutschlands unterwegs, passiert schon wieder unglaublich viel in Sachen Gartenhaus..

Hauptmieterchen meinte zwar, er sei kaum zu was gekommen, aber sichtbar sind die Fortschritte trotzdem:

Hauptmieterchen war mal wieder äußerst fleissig und mittlerweile hat das Gartenhäuschen schon sowas wie ein Dach und ich saß gerad mit ihm herum, hab seine Arbeit bestaunt und wir haben uns n bischen was für den Innenausbau und die Elektrik ausgedacht..

(Klick aufs Bild zeigt eine große Version an)

Kaum passt man mal nicht auf, wird aus nem alten Klappergerüst, das bei jedem Schritt wackelt, ein halbfertiges, festes Haus..

Hier die Bilder vom 31.08. und gestern, dem 05.09.(Klick aufs Bild zeigt die große Version an):

Während ich heut meinen neuen Tacho-Pulsmesser-Höhenmesser-Mikrowelle-Kaffeemaschine-Uhrenschnickschnack ans Rad montiert hab, hat Hauptmieterchen schon einmal angefangen, einen Dachfirst zu bauen und das fünfte Fenster einzubauen:

Lang haben wir die Materialen gesammelt, noch viel länger war es geplant, heute ging endlich der Bau unseres Gartenhäuschens los.

Nachdem sich mein Hauptmieter schon über die käuflichen Pappkonstruktionen in den Nachbargärten geärgert hat, hat er heute schon einmal angefangen, ein Skelett aus alten Gerüststangen zu bauen und den Boden aus dicken Brettern draufzulegen.

Gegen Mittag wurde ich dann ebenfalls shangheit, um die ersten Fenster einzusetzen...