Jason Antman’s Blog

I know I’ve been letting my blog die off a bit lately, mainly due to the giant amount of work I’ve been doing. I plan on updating a lot more over the next few weeks.

I happened to get a comment on one of my posts today, so I decided to take a peek at webalizer and see how things are doing. Apparently, I’m getting 300+ hits/day, including a quite nice array of search queries. Unfortunately, due to the way I redid my logging infrastructure, I don’t have any historical data (and it seems like the webalizer history is still broken, as I’m only seeing data for this month). But cool!

Miscellaneous Geek Stuff

For those of you who use KDE and Konsole, you can easily change the title of the Konsole window with the command:

dcop $KONSOLE_DCOP_SESSION renameSession 'NewSessionName'

this is pretty handy if, like me, you end up having a bunch of screen sessions running in different Konsole windows.

Tech HowTos kde, knosone

I just bought myself a new monitor for my MythTV box, as I’ve moved my beautiful Acer AL2416W 24″er to my new desktop. The chosen monitor, based on price, reviews and features, is the Acer X233Hbid. It’s a 23″ 16:9 (not 16:10) monitor that runs at 1920×1080, provides true 1080p, and has an HDMI input (not that I’d ever use a restricted connection). After a few minutes of having it turned on and running, the picture quality is quite nice, even with quite a bit of glare.

However, I have two major complaints within the first ten minutes of unboxing it:

1. No real manual, nor an online copy. The monitor comes only with a Quick Start Guide. There’s no printed full manual. More distressingly, it isn’t even listed in their list of monitor models on their Support site. There’s no manual copy online either. There was a CD provided with the user’s manual on it. However, for a company that sells netbooks with no CD drive, this seems like quite a bad decision. But why, you ask, would I need a manual for my monitor?
2. No VESA mounting instructions One of my main criteria in choosing a monitor was that it allow VESA mounting, as I have my MythTV monitor on a monitor arm (easily adjustable angle so others in the room can see). The Acer X233Hbid has a 100×100mm VESA mounting space on the back. However, in a rare design mistake (unlike my 24″ Acer AL2416W), the monitor stand is two parts – one rectangular column about 4″ long attached to the back of the monitor, and a base with a column which mates with the one on the back of the monitor. Unfortunately, the column part on the back of the monitor came pre-attached, and there was no mention in the manual of VESA mounting or how to remove the column.

Column removal: The part of the monitor base which ships attached to the monitor is a fairly easy removal. Though I was originally worried about breaking something on my beautiful new screen, I found two plastic pieces on either side of the pre-attached part of the base which appeared to be snap-in trim pieces. Prying them off with a screwdriver revealed four screws which hold this piece to the monitor. Not only was removal easy, but the trim pieces snapped back into place for a nice clean look.

Reviews acer, cant fix stupid, monitor, review

I just bought a “new” desktop – I was thinking of doing an insane AMD Phenom II x4 940 (quad-core 3.0GHz) box – but I happened to find a used machine from $WORK; a Dell Precision 470 workstation, dual Xeon Nocona 2.8GHz processors, 4GB RAM (takes up to 16GB). So, I need a DVD of my usual desktop distro (OpenSuSE) for x64. Being that I’m at work (Rutgers Unviersity), I figured the quickest thing would be to find an Internet2 mirror, as Rutgers has 400Gbps peering on NJedgeNet.

Unfortunately, the OpenSuSE Mirror List doesn’t mention which sites have I2 peering. Luckily, the first logical one I tried – the Harvard mirror – was showing an I2/MAGIPE route via traceroute.

If anyone else needs an I2 mirror of OpenSuSE, http://mirrors.med.harvard.edu/opensuse/ seems to do it. My desktop was getting a sustained +/- 160 Mbps transfer rate, and I got the entire 4.3GB DVD image in under 2-1/2 minutes.

Uncategorized internet2, opensuse

At $WORK, my group runs about two dozen servers that provide services for over 60,000 users. They’re a mix of Windows and Linux, with some old Solaris stuff thrown in there. The one thing they have in common is they’re all hand-built, hand-configured, and old. They’ve been around for a while. At the moment, we don’t even have an adequate backup system.

So, being the closest thing to a SysAdmin we have (my official title is still Student Systems Programmer), it’s my job to build a new installation, configuration and backup infrastructure. We’ve already standardized on CentOS as a University-wide distro, and have a local full mirror, so I don’t need to choose a distro. I do, however, have to plan the installation and backup architecture. The main requirements are:

1. Lowest overall time for bare-metal recovery to a working system.
2. Ease of use, as people other than myself will need to administer it (so they should be able to do so from a cheat sheet in the wiki).
3. Repeatability – it should be easy and intuitive to make an almost-exact-copy of a machine.

I started a thread a few days ago on the SAGE mailing list, which you can find here.

At the moment, it looks like the general idea that I’m going with is to use Kickstart to install the systems, using a basic and minimal Kickstart file. Basic package selection (minimalist) with just what’s needed to configure the system with a hostname and network settings for the management VLAN. I’ll then have Kickstart install and configure a configuration management package – I’m leaning towards Puppet over Cfengine and am starting testing. The config management software will handle all of the customization for the system (everything different from the base generic Kickstart install) so it’s all kept under the control of config management from step 1.

The final part is a backup system, mainly for whatever eventually – whether out of human error or simple laziness – ends up out of the config management system’s control. Our previous SA had settled on Zmanda, the paid version of Amanda, which comes with specific plugins for MySQL and MSSQL. I’m also looking at Bacula, mainly because of its’ advanced features, scheduling (especially the new scheduling in Bacula 3) and scalability.

The beauty that I see in having Kickstart do something minimal and then letting Puppet handle the rest is that (especially since we’ve standardized on SunFire X4100’s with identical configurations) I can kickstart and rack up a few spare machines, and to get them up and running all I need to do is power them up (iLOM) and tell Puppet what to make them.

I’m currently starting testing of both Puppet itself and getting Kickstart to start the puppet install and daemon (instructions from David Lutterkort’s blog (Red Hat software engineer)). We’ll see how everything goes…

Projects backup, configuration, kickstart, linux, puppet, recovery, work