Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Long day

This day seems to never end. I did some birthday party preparations, fixed lots of small bugs, solved many small problems, Netsaint2mrtg goes along very nice. I have made modular support for plugins and disabled ping monitoring, since most of the hosts are on the local network and ping 0 ms anyway. Zillions of bugs are fixed and several design problems corrected.

I have also found out that Windows machines are not particularly interested in doing push installations from Samba shares of machines which disallow TCP and UDP connections to port 445. Fast grep of /etc/services reports some microsoft-ds. :) By the way, Samba should also be allowed with ports 137-139 open.

Education day

Morning started with founding out how to rebuild a hard disk in one of the new IBM xSeries 330 servers. Everything went nice and good. Funny thing though is that IBM uses Windows for Installation disk operating system, and Linux for Support and Repair disk :) The first one gave me a blue screen while I was trying to use for the rescue. :) I also have the impression that Compaq machines are able to rebuild disk from the healthy one without booting from the rescue CD, though I am not sure. It was also strange to find out about dead disk from LEDs on the front panel of the server and not from the logs. cpqarray driver is giving me hard times with logs and console every time there is a problem with the device.

Working on netsaint2mrtg taught me to put “1;” at the end of the files that I will “require” later on. Easy thing to put it, hard to remember though, but perl errors are very descriptive. :) Both the config converter and plugin wrapper are ready now and are running in test environment with about 30 servers and 400 services monitoring. Looks nice.

Then, someone kind enough provided me with some links on Active Directory and Linux and Linux Authentication Using OpenLDAP.

To finish the day, couple of sales peopel tried to convince me that using antivirus from one vendor is way better then using programs from several vendors. Failed though.

MS DFS

MS DFS (Distributed File System) investigations. Final verdict – easily can be migrated to Samba. Major question in the air was push installations working. We could actually do a push installation from Samba share. Next I had an excellent opportunity to appreciate Vim‘s diff mode ([vimdiff|vim -d] file1 file2 … fileN). Vertical split with excellent highlighting saved me a week of time and a bunch of nurves. The nice thing about highlighting is that not only rows are obvious, but also actuall changes in the line. Excellent!

MS Exchange, LDAP GUIs, and Linuxcare CDROMs

I’ve spent a fair deal of time today cleaning up our Exchange server. Few gigs in about hundred thousand messages RIP now and noone noticed anything. Needless to say that disk space wasn’t returned.

Came across nice GUI for LDAP administration called Directory administrator.

Played a bit with Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox. Very nice, but, unfortunately, does not support ext3 filesystem, which we use extensively. Red Hat rescue mode boot disk still rocks in my book.