Mike’s World

Well, today I finished off the LOTR series, by watching the extras. I do think I need to re-watch the extras in FOTR, because as I watched the other DVDs, I discovered some other goodies. It is kind of touching to see how much this set of movies affected the cast and crew of the movies, as they said good bye to each other and parted ways.

Today I had off work, so I spent the time doing things like paying bills, washing clothes, cleaning the car, etc. I watched the meet the fookers movie, and it was not as good as the first movie. Kind of disappointing.

Solaris 10 FCS has been released, so I am going to download it and get it loaded on my Ultra 60 tonight. I will also get a jumpstart image built for work so I can get it on my work sunblade tomorrow or the next day. I look forward to seeing the final goodies they packed in.

Well, This morning I ran in to an interesting situation. Lets just say, yesterday when I went shopping, I forgot to get TP.

I slept until about 12:00pm, with a little break at 8:00am. Got up, make up some eggs, then headed out to do some running around. I started out going to the Mall of America, to see an about the government display. The NOAA, NASA, Armed Services, and TSA had booths setup. Starting with NOAA, they had a display of the nexrad radar, and a display of river conditions. NASA, had a space shuttle landing tire from a shuttle, as well as a moon rock from Apollo 12, which I thought was interesting. TSA had a display of banned items from airports, as well as a detector that detects explosives.

After the MOA, I went to target to solve my TP problem, then back home to finish off LOTR. I watched the last 40 minutes or so of LOTR:ROTK, as well as the first extras dvd. As I mentioned, I liked TT a bit more for some reason.

Now off to bed. I am taking tomorrow off work, which is a bit unfortunate as two new folks are starting, so I will not be able to say hi until Tuesday.

A cool tutotial on how to build a VCS cluster, from volume creation to HA failover
http://www.pzi.net/VCS-HOWTO

Today I started watching the 3rd LOTR movie, Return of the king. Out of the three, I think I like the two towers the best for some reason, mainly because of the magic they did to produce the CG characters.

I made it about 2.5 hours in to the film before heading over to my friends house, where we watched the first 4 or so episodes of battlestar galactica. For sci-fi films, I got in to ST:TNG the most, because I think they did a good balance of the technology and character aspects of the show. For battlestar, it is almost like watching a soap opera at times.

Today we spent a good 1.5 hours in a DR planning session at work. Our customer has made the scope so large, it looks like most of the team gets to go, and because of this, I am on the list of folks to go. This makes me so happy! My team lead would love for me to stay back, and past DR, one of my team mates got screwed this way, but looks like I am on the track to go. Most people do not like the experience of disaster recovery, but for some reason I do. Just the rush to get a large environment built under time pressures and customer pressures, I find fun for some reason.

Well, Last night was normal Thursday night at a friends house, watching bad movies, socializing and drinking. The movie selections for the evening included AVP, and Three o’clock High. AVP was somewhat good, but that may just be because we made so much fun of it (MST3K style). We even developed a drinking game:
1. Every time someone lights a flair (shooting or breakable flair), have a drink
2. Every time someone breaks one of the “three rules”, have a drink.
3. Every time an A v P fight develops, have a drink.

In my living room I have a nice 72″ HDTV setup. The problem is, i can’t watch it during the day, as in my living room, I have a nice big window behind my recliner.

Today I got my blackout blinds from Just Blinds. They are a bit on the pricey side, but the blinds block 100% of visible and UV light. They look very good, and I look forward to using them this weekend.

I will be the first to admit that I am a Solaris/Sun bigot. They make (somewhat) solid hardware, and a great, stable, fast operating system. I will also mention that IBM makes rock solid RISC hardware, which is why I deduct points for Sun hardware.

Anyways, today I ran across This article defending Solaris in response to this article. The second article is from HP’s Linux Vice-President, and he just bashes Sun all over the place, regarding Sun’s open source strategy, and Sun’s X86 strategy. The first article just tears apart the HP VPs bashing, and I think it was a very good read for the folks that still like Sun, I just had to share it.

BTW, about 5 days and counting until we have Solaris 10 FCS!

Most of today was playing with veritas snapshots and playing with DNS. This morning I started work on a script to clean up and rebuild snapshots after a HDS shadow copy. When the shadow copy is done, snapshot from data from one set of disks is copied on to another, and the original set of snapshot data is lost. Because of this, a clean and rebuild process is needed.

I got about half done with the above, when I was pulled in to a DNS meeting. it turns out that the conversion of the NT domain to an active directory domain failed over the weekend, and DNS is the problem. We had some evil entries in DNS that caused a dynamic update to fail, and we have a stub zone that is not behaving. More work on this problem tomorrow.

Well, the first of my UNIX tips section.
I have been playing with Veritas snapshots to do an off-host backup solution for several large databases. The situation is that I have a production quality disk array which the database uses, and a cheap disk array that is used to house the backup data. The process uses the pre-4.0 vxassist snapshot method, as I have run in to issues with the 4.0 vxsnap process. The snapshots maintain a DCO log which tracks changes. The 4.0 method uses a version 20 of this log, which I do not think is up to par. I ran in to problems with data being written when it should not have been written. The pre-4.0 snapshot method uses a version 0 DCO log, where I have not had this problem.
In this setup, we have prod_dg with proddisk1 as a disk. the volume prod_lv contains the production database. We will create a snapshot, prod_slv, which will be in another disk group, snap_dg, using snapdisk1. the disk groups, and the volume prod_lv is already created. the disk snapdisk1 is mapped to both the production database server and the backup server. disk proddisk1 is only seen by the production server. Both hosts require a veritas volume manager key, as well as a veritas flashsnap key.

Now the goodies.
1. Add a DCO log to the production volume. This is a bitmap type log that tracks changes to the volume.
vxassist -g prod_dg addlog prod_lv logtype=dco

2. Enable fast resync on the production volume. This sets a flag where you can only sync changed data on a snap resync.
vxvol -g prod_dg set fastresync=on prod_lv

3. Join the snapshot disk group to the production disk group.
vxdg join snap_dg prod_dg

4. Create a snapshot of prod_lv, on to snapdisk1. This will create a plex of prod_lv, as well as a disabled DCO log attached to that plex.
vxassist -b -g prod_dg snapstart prod_lv snapdisk1

5. Monitor the sync process.
vxtask list or vxprint -ht -g prod_dg | grep SNAPDONE

6. You now want to make prod_lv quiet.
shutdown database, or put in to hot backup mode.

7. Perform a snapshot split. This will take the plex created by the snapstart, and make it an independent volume.
vxassist -g prod_dg snapshot prod_lv prod_slv

8. You can use prod_lv once again.
startup database, or remove from hot backup mode

9. Split the snapshot disk in to its own disk group, and deport.
vxdg split prod_dg snap_dg prod_slv
vxdg deport snap_dg

10. You can then import, mount and backup prod_slv on the off-host backup server.

To perform a snapshot refresh:
1. Import the snapshot disk group.
vxdg import snap_dg

2. Recover and start the snapshot volume.
vxrecover -g snap_dg -m prod_slv
vxvol -g snap_dg start prod_slv

3. Join the snapshot disk group to the production disk group.
vxdg join snap_dg prod_dg

4. Resync the snapshot volume from the production volume. Because of the DCO log, and fastresync, only changed blocks are copied.
vxassist -g prod_dg snapback prod_slv

5. Monitor the resync.
vxtask list or vxprint -ht -g prod_dg | grep SNAPDONE

6. Once resync is complete, make disks quiet.
Throw oracle in to hot-backup mode

7. Perform a snapshot split.
vxassist -g prod_dg snapshot prod_lv prod_slv

8. You can once again use the disks.
Remove oracle from hot-backup mode

9. Split and deport the snapshot disks.
vxdg split prod_dg snap_dg prod_slv
vxdg deport snap_dg

I do not support the above, but it works for me.