Mike’s World

Well, I am for the most part debt free now, and it feels kind of good. Mid to late last year, with the house and everything, spending went a bit out of control. I make enough, where it was not a big problem, but still annoying. Two things have happened this month.
1. Car paid off. I got a nice new car 3 years ago, and with it I got a 3 year 0% loan. Without this loan, I would have never got the car I wanted, and I would have never had the credit history to get the house I live in now. GMAC, thanks for the credit. I have paid the last payment, and now my car is mine. This is also another $500 a month I do not need to worry about sending to someone. yay!

Today I have sent the final $308.47 off to my credit union (well, transfer). With this, the next statement I get should not have any additional interest. I should be at the point where I can once again pay off the balance in full every month. All in all, I gave the credit union about $500 in interest, but in the grand scheme of things, that is not all that bad.

Last week at work was very busy. I am juggling about 5 projects, and keeping them all in the air is getting to be very interesting.

Last week I did my first automated Linux install. I am impressed with how simple a kickstart install is. I just went through a manual install, then that generated a kickstart config file. Total of 6 linux boxes I need to build, so it will be very interesting.

Unfortunately this weekend was to cold for grilling, but I hope next weekend is warmer.

Not much else going on :-(

Well, nice try Microsoft, but you fell short.
I was looking at windows XP 64 bit, and ran across this, which is info from Microsoft about windows XP 64 bit. Several things I find interesting:

Today I tried something new on the grill, smoking.

Last week I stopped by Angus meats in Maplewood, MN (love the place, support the small shop butcher!) and got a 6oz fillet Mignon, and two brauts. Thursday I had the steak (very good) and today I made up the brauts. I had some mesquite wood chips, so I set up the grill, after soaking them, put them on the coals. The brauts where good, but I think they could have been better. After about 20 minutes, the wood was all used up, so I did not get as much smokiness as I would have liked. I think I will also try hickory next time as well (the store was all out). Overall, the where very tasty, but not much as smokiness as I would have liked.

The fun part is also controlling the temperature of the grill. I attempted to keep it at 350 deg, which is real fun on a Weber kettle with charcoal. The fuel reacts about 3-5 minutes after the vents are adjusted.

This week I have been in training. I have been taking the SA-225 sun training course. The session is designed to quickly get administrators that have worked with Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 up to speed on Solaris 10. For being a early access course (early in development) the class was fairly good. The instructor had done the class 4 times, so he was up to speed on what corrections needed to be integrated in. The class spent quite a bit of time on Solaris Zones as well as Dtrace, which is what I think we will be using the most of.
This is my first Sun Education class, so I hope to get performance tuning in before I head off to lisa.

Well, tonight I got my desktop working in a Solaris zone (Sun java desktop, using Xsun). My system is a ultra 60 with a creator-3d card.

Below is how I got it working:

First of all, on the host operating system (global zone) run ‘/usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -d’ to disable the main X server, and reboot the machine.

Next, i made a zone:
# zonecfg -z bluto-desktop
bluto-desktop: No such zone configured
Use ‘create’ to begin configuring a new zone.
zonecfg:bluto-desktop> create
zonecfg:bluto-desktop> set zonepath=/opt/zones/bluto-desktop # the path to the zone
zonecfg:bluto-desktop> add net
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:net> set physical=hme0 # my network
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:net> set address=192.168.0.12
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:net> end
zonecfg:bluto-desktop> add device
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:device> set match=/dev/mouse # mouse device
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:device> end
zonecfg:bluto-desktop> add device
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:device> set match=/dev/kbd # keyboard device
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:device> end
zonecfg:bluto-desktop> add device
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:device> set match=/dev/pm # power managment
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:device> end
zonecfg:bluto-desktop> add device
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:device> set match=/dev/winlock # window lock device
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:device> end
zonecfg:bluto-desktop> add device
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:device> set match=/dev/sound/0 # sound
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:device> end
zonecfg:bluto-desktop> add device
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:device> set match=/dev/sound/0ctl # sound control
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:device> end
zonecfg:bluto-desktop> add device
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:device> set match=/dev/fbs/ffb0 # framebuffer
zonecfg:bluto-desktop:device> end
zonecfg:bluto-desktop> verify
zonecfg:bluto-desktop> commit
zonecfg:bluto-desktop> exit

Next, I install the zone

# zoneadm -z bluto-desktop install
Preparing to install zone .
Creating list of files to copy from the global zone.
Copying <2583> files to the zone.
Initializing zone product registry.
Determining zone package initialization order.
Preparing to initialize <911> packages on the zone.
Initialized <911> packages on zone.
Zone is initialized.
The file contains a log of the zone installation.

Boot and setup the Solaris install in the zone.

# zoneadm -z bluto-desktop boot

Once the initial system setup is done, halt the zone.

# zoneadm -z bluto-desktop halt or init 0 in the zone.

Now, we need to make some “fake” devices to make the X server and sound work.

# cd /opt/zones/bluto-desktop/dev
# ln -s fbs/ffb0 fb
# ln -s sound/0 audio
# ln -s audioctl sound/0ctl

Now, boot the zone back up
# zoneadm -z bluto-desktop boot

Enable DT:
zone# /usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -e;init 6

Once the zone is reboored, you should get the dtgreet.

The devices above need to point to the /dev entry that points to the device. This is because the Solaris zone tool sets the /dev/whatever entry in the zone to whatever major and minor number the /device entry is for the device on the global zone. Confused? Good. All this meens is that if in the zonecfg config, a match=whatever varible is set to something that is a sym link to another file in /dev. it is not going to work.

This breaks things like /dev/fb, which are kind of needed for Xsun and DT to work. To fix this, go to your zonepath/dev directory and make some links to resolve this:

Issues:
Issue number one is that once you start and stop the desktop zone, the text console of the system is no longer usable. I think this is because the keyboard device is being grabbed, even tho the tty device has it.

All in all, this seems to work somewhat good. Often I have had to reboot my workstation because of an Xwindows issue or something. With this, I can just reboot the zone, which is much quicker. It will also allow me to limit memory, and CPU utilization.

Found this page (http://users.tpg.com.au/adsln4yb/zones.html) with some cool info and very cool scripts about Solaris 10, CPU and memory caps in zones, script to control the FSS, and other goodies.

Check it out!

Yay! Final car payment made it in the mail today. I am so happy I got this thing all payed off.

Well, today we had a striped volume on our A3500 die. This volume, along with another volume makes up an 300gb veritas volume. One of the A3500 disks died, and it happened to be in one of these LUNs. When recovering, rm6 did not come up, so all I had was commandline. Goddie!

First healthcheck:
# /etc/raid/bin/healthck -a

Health Check Summary Information

a3500_upper: LUN - Hot Spare In Use at Drive [4,0]
a3500_lower: Dead LUN at Drive [5,11]

As you see, we have a dead LUN, and a hot spare. My worry is the dead LUN.

Now to find my LUNs

# /etc/raid/bin/raidutil -c c13t4d0 -i
LUNs found on c13t4d0.
LUN 0 RAID 5 138771 MB
LUN 2 RAID 5 138771 MB
LUN 4 RAID 1 34692 MB
LUN 5 RAID 0 138771 MB

Vendor ID Symbios
ProductID StorEdgeA3500FCd
Product Revision 0301
Boot Level 03.01.04.00
Boot Level Date 04/05/01
Firmware Level 03.01.04.75
Firmware Date 04/11/02
Fibre Level 03.01.04.75
raidutil succeeded!

Now, LUN 5 is my striped LUN.

Now to look at my disks
# /etc/raid/bin/drivutil -I c13t4d0

Group Information for a3500_lower

Group No. of RAID No. of Total Remaining
LUNs Level Drives Space(MB) Space(MB)

Hot Spare - - 2 - -
1 1 5 5 138771 0
2 1 5 5 138771 0
3 1 5 5 138771 0
4 1 5 5 138771 0
5 1 1 2 34692 0
6 1 0 4 138771 0

I have to hot spare disks, could come handy.
Raid group 6 is my striped group, contains 4 disks.

# /etc/raid/bin/drivutil -d c13t4d0

Drives in Group for a3500_lower

Group Drive List [Channel,Id]

Hot Spare [4,8]; [5,8];
Group 1: [1,0]; [2,0]; [3,0]; [4,0]; [5,0];
Group 2: [1,1]; [2,1]; [3,1]; [4,1]; [5,1];
Group 3: [1,2]; [2,2]; [3,2]; [4,2]; [5,2];
Group 4: [1,3]; [2,3]; [3,3]; [4,3]; [5,3];
Group 5: [4,9]; [5,9];
Group 6: [4,10]; [5,10]; [4,11]; [5,11];

Group 6 has those 4 disks (including the dead one), and my two hot spare disks.

First, get rid of a hot spare:

# /etc/raid/bin/raidutil -c c13t4d0 -H 48
LUNs found on c13t4d0.
LUN 0 RAID 5 138771 MB
LUN 2 RAID 5 138771 MB
LUN 4 RAID 1 34692 MB
LUN 5 RAID 0 138771 MB

raidutil succeeded!

Now, delete the “bad” lun 5
Delete lun 5
# /etc/raid/bin/raidutil -c c13t4d0 -D 5
LUNs found on c13t4d0.
LUN 0 RAID 5 138771 MB
LUN 2 RAID 5 138771 MB
LUN 4 RAID 1 34692 MB
LUN 5 RAID 0 138771 MB
Deleting LUN 5.
Press Control C to abort.

LUNs successfully deleted

Now remake my striped LUN, using the hot spare instead of the bad disk. Keeping disks in order could lower data loss:
# /etc/raid/bin/raidutil -c c13t4d0 -n 5 -l 0 -s 138771 -g 410,510,411,48
LUNs found on c13t4d0.
LUN 0 RAID 5 138771 MB
LUN 2 RAID 5 138771 MB
LUN 4 RAID 1 34692 MB
Capacity available in drive group: 284204032 blocks (138771 MB).
Creating LUN 5

Registering new logical unit 5 with system.
Formatting logical unit 5 RAID 0 138771 MB
Formatting logical unit 5 RAID 0 138771 MB
LUNs found on c13t4d0.
LUN 0 RAID 5 138771 MB
LUN 2 RAID 5 138771 MB
LUN 4 RAID 1 34692 MB
LUN 5 RAID 0 138771 MB

LUNs successfully created

raidutil succeeded!

Now for veritas
vxdiskadm, remove failed disk, replace failed disk.

Now, vxprint shows:
# vxprint -ht -g sasdg_dg
dg sas_dg default default 32000 1092403203.1591.server

dm saspool1-1 c11t4d8s2 sliced 3839 142082048 NOHOTUSE
dm saspool1-2 c13t4d5s2 sliced 4287 281001216 NOHOTUSE

v saspool1-lv - DISABLED ACTIVE 423077888 SELECT -
+fsgenpl saspool1-lv-01 saspool1-lv DISABLED RECOVER 423078976 CONCAT -
+RW
sd saspool1-1-01 saspool1-lv-01 saspool1-1 0 142082048 0 c11t4d8 ENA
sd saspool1-2-01 saspool1-lv-01 saspool1-2 0 280996928 142082048 c13t4d5 ENA

Well, the bad LUN was the second half, I could get some data back. Now to recover the plex:

# vxmend -o force off saspool1-lv-01
# vxmend on saspool1-lv-01
# vxmend fix clean saspool1-lv-01
# vxvol -g sas_dg start saspool1-lv
# vxprint -ht -g sas_dg
dg sas_dg default default 32000 1092403203.1591.server

dm saspool1-1 c11t4d8s2 sliced 3839 142082048 NOHOTUSE
dm saspool1-2 c13t4d5s2 sliced 4287 281001216 NOHOTUSE

v saspool1-lv - ENABLED ACTIVE 423077888 SELECT -
+fsgenpl saspool1-lv-01 saspool1-lv ENABLED ACTIVE 423078976 CONCAT -
+RW
sd saspool1-1-01 saspool1-lv-01 saspool1-1 0 142082048 0 c11t4d8 ENA
sd saspool1-1-01 saspool1-lv-01 saspool1-1 0 142082048 0 c11t4d8 ENA
sd saspool1-2-01 saspool1-lv-01 saspool1-2 0 280996928 142082048 c13t4d5 ENA

The above vxmend steps work great also if you have lost a SAN disk, and brought it back. Makes a bad plex look good.

fsck moved about 60gb off to lost+found, but overall not bad seeing we could have lost much more data.

For the first time, I over did it. Had to much to drink. I had my first experience of getting totally wasted, and paying for it. Man did it suck.

I was at my friends house last night, doing the normal thing (bad movies, etc) and I had one or two to many captain cokes. When I could not even read the clock, I decided to call it quits. My friend and his wife are very nice to let any of us stay over if we do to much. I do not actually remember falling asleep, but I must have. The next thing I remember after a laser disk being flipped over, is waking up at about 4:30am or so. At that point I was hurting so much, I could not fall back to sleep. No headache or anything, just a very, very sour stomach, and nausea. I made it home, paid my respects to the porcelain gods, and tried to get a bit more of sleep, without luck.

Headed in to work at about 9:30am (some more bowing to the porcelain god, and a fresh shower), with a pit stop to wallgreens to get some Gatorade and Pepito bismol. I made it to work in time for my 10:00am meeting some how. My stomach hurt until about 9:00pm, along with a horse voice and sore muscles.

Something I do not want to experience again any time soon. Man did that suck. And collage students do this every weekend? Bah!