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I just removed KDE and GNOME from my Linux machine again, because it didn't "feel" comfortable.
A while ago, I was introduced to tiling window managers and ion3 was the window manager of my choice, because it was not to hard to learn(if you're used to using screen) and not too hard to customize and it had support for floating windows(for applications like The Gimp and similar) and it had a cool thing called the "scratchpad", a workspace which could be made visible and invisible on demand, an ideal place for things like media players and a spare shell.

But then, the author of ion3 went berzerk on many Linux package maintainers, trying to force them to ALWAYS use the latest snapshot of the source code which was hard to fulfill for distributions like Debian which have a long release cycle and put a lot of effort into creating a nice mixture of current features and proven versions of programs.

So I went back to GNOME and then to KDE, because I couldn't get packages for ion3 anymore.. Now, a couple of months later, I missed the advantages of a tiled desktop and went out to try a few other window managers.

I tried the X11 equivalent of screen, ratpoison, for some time, but always got confused with the actual screen sessions I was using, then I tried wmii, but for some reason, I did not feel comfortable with it and at last, I felt like I had to learn Haskell, because XMonad's configuration is done by extending the XMonad programm and compiling the whole thing into an executable and run it.

But none of the above felt quite right and for a while, I hesitated trying a window manager called "awesome", but I can't say that the title is too bold, because it really IS awesome.. in a way. It features several tiled layouts, a floating layout and a fullscreen-only mode, it has vi-like keyboard shortcuts, some things can still be used with a mouse and the statusbar can be filled with several types of widgets(eg. text, graphics, bar graphs) which in turn can come to life by a simple shellscript.

So there's not much to learn to start using awesome(apart from the strange feeling of a tiled desktop for first time users) in all its power and the decision was made rather quickly. Now I have several hundreds of megabytes more free space on my harddisk and a desktop environment even better than my old ion desktop


And it all looks like this:

Die Installation von fail2ban hat sich offenbar schnell rentiert:

# grep postfix fail2ban.log | grep -c Ban
435

Dabei läuft das Ding für Postfix gerade mal ne Woche:

2008-04-03 16:04:04,908 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 85.114.182.3

Und ich finde ja, die Zahl der Attacken hält sich arg in Grenzen, so interessant bin ich halt nicht


Immerhin schwillt die Spam-Mailbox nicht mehr ganz so schnell an...

Need something like top on a Solaris machine which hasn't installed top?

Try this, most active processes should be at the bottom of the list:

while true; do clear; ps -o pcpu,pid,ppid,user,comm -ef | sort -n | grep -v PPID; echo; date; sleep 2; done

lines are sorted by CPU usage which can be found in the first column. The other columns show process id, parent process id, user and the command running like this:

0.0 26012 686 root /usr/local/openssh/sbin/sshd
0.0 26015 26012 root -sh
0.0 26561 1 root vmstat
0.0 27084 637 root sh
0.0 27085 27084 root /bin/ksh
0.0 27086 27085 root sleep
0.0 27094 26015 root grep
0.0 27095 27094 root ps
0.0 27096 27094 root sort
0.1 1 0 root /etc/init
0.1 479 1 root /opt/VRTSob/bin/vxsvc
0.1 522 1 root /usr/lib/netsvc/yp/ypserv
0.1 623 1 root /usr/lib/autofs/automountd
0.1 17621 1 root /usr/sbin/nscd
0.4 3 0 root fsflush

Wed Feb 20 13:15:01 MET 2008

Not the best way, but good enough for a quick estimation.

I've always wanted to get into Linux software RAID setups, but my laptop only has one harddisk and my other machines are still packed up into boxes from the recent move into the new flat.

So I had the idea of using several flash disks in my cardreader, all appearing as separate SCSI devices within Linux, but that failed due to a faulty SMC card, leaving me with only two working "drives" and that doesn't allow for certain RAID types.

Last resort: Install VMWare, create a bunch of disks and start cracking...

Continue reading "Linux Software RAID, hands on introduction"

For quite a while, we've been installing our POWER5 LPARs one at a time by activating it, booting to SMS, fill all the netboot menus and finally selecting an ethernet adapter as the boot/install device.

But there's another way, which doesn't boot quite as fast(eg. it waits 60 seconds for spanning tree to settle), but you just send the command and all the rest goes automagically.

It's called

lpar_netboot

and works like this:

Continue reading "Boot a POWER5 LPAR from the network without going to SMS"

Partitioning an IBM POWER5 machine with an HMC is, most of the time, an easy but tiresome task. And when it comes to reproduce the same partitioning scheme on more than one machine, it just takes to much time doing it the "official" way. I'm putting the word "official" in quotes, because I won't be giving you any advice on advanced voodoo tactics to POWER5 partitioning here, but just a different way of cloning partitioning schemes not shown on IBM courses

Continue reading "Copying POWER5 LPARs"

...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.

Continue reading "Dumping NIM objects to a script"

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

Continue reading "IBM pSeries Power5 management 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..

Continue reading "Solaris Express 06/06 on a Strato rootserver"