Do yourself a favour and check out the linux action show at http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/

Bryan and Chris talk about all things Linux and I religiously watch every episode. It’s definitely worth your time

As the title states, you don’t realise how important something is until it’s gone.
What am I talking about? Who or what has disappeared from my life?
It sounds far more sinister than it actually is, however it affects a large chunk of my everyday life.

Air Conditioning…..
The concept of heating or cooling an environment making it more comfortable to live in.
We as humans love our air conditioned houses and offices, however we can survive without it.

IT equipment such as servers, disk storage, networking gear, tend to frown upon the lack of cooling and eventually commit suicide or in some instances shutdown to save themselves from impending doom.
I recently lost most of my A/C capacity in one of my larger server rooms and it has effectively crippled most of the services I look after.

Focusing on your IT infrastructure as much as I do, you may fall into the trap of ignoring your UPS humming away in the corner, or your two large redundant A/C units. Even with maintenance contracts and outside contractors to service the equipment, you may choose uptime over repair time.

My main message, remember that the infrastructure around your gear is just as important as the gear itself. Without electricity and cooling, you may as well pack up and go home.

I’m working on automating and upgrading the Corvus High Performance Computer at my employer eRSA / Uni of Adelaide.
It’s currently running Novell SLES 10, so I’m working on getting it up to SLES 11, which is coming along quite nicely. Part of my upgrade plan is to implement a better installation method along with automating the configuration of the compute nodes in the cluster.

Corvus has 75 compute nodes and a single head node. The compute nodes are SGI Altix XE310′s which are largely a generic supermicro chassis with and intel server thrown inside. The trick is that a single 1U chassis has two physical nodes in it, making it an ultra dense solution. Each node has a standard intel BMC which supports IMPISH.

The existing automated installation system for installing the nodes is the Scali Cluster Manager. Scali has been gobbled up by Platform Computing. This seems to mean big bucks to upgrade our Scali license. As a result I’ve replaced the existing Scali Cluster Manager with the opensource solution from IBM called xCAT.
xCAT is really good and handles the scaling up of the cluster really well. The include post install scripts cover most requirements and writing my own has been fairly straight forward. So now I have a standardised way to install the nodes, I need a way to automate the configuration.

To automate the configuration I’m going to be using Puppet. I created a small test system using some virtualbox guests and it worked great out the box. I’ve bought this book from Apress, which has only recently been released. It’s really good and I’d highly recommend it. http://apress.com/book/view/1590599780

In the end I should have an excellent and scalable way to install and manage the nodes.

My place of employ, eResearch SA has appointed an new Director and I’ve been helping setup the new equipment that was purchased for her. The new MacBook Pro is very shiny with all it’s aluminium bits and has a nice quality feel to it. The magic mouse, which looked a bit weird and was bit confusing to setup at first is a really clever piece of tech. I loved being able to assign virtual buttons to different parts of the mouse. Very clever. Although, my personal opinion is it wouldn’t work that well for gaming without a better sensor when compared to my Razor Boomslang or Diamondback for example.

I also configured my bosses iPhone to sync up with her MacBook. To be honest, my experience with the iTunes / syncing setup with the iPhone has always been via Windows. The integration with the Mac is so easy and smooth with regards to contacts and so.
I also had a look at her iPhone 3Gs and realised just how slow and clunky iOS 4 is on the old 3G. The 3Gs is much smoother.

Makes me almost want to go out and buy a new Mac

I’ve had a mobile me account with Apple for over a year now. I signed up to it shortly after getting my iPhone. I love using the service, even though it may have had a bit of a rocky start when it was launched. My me.com email address is solid, I also love the way they have implemented the gallery, beats the living heck out of the php based gallery2 I was living with (plus I don’t have to manage it and update the code :p). The calendar works great and syncs up with my iPhone.

All in all it covers everything I need to live online. However I was partly annoyed that the only way I could access my me.com iDisk was via a web interface, where I would rather like to be able to mount it as a disk. Not being able to mount my iDisk prompted me to signup for a jungle disk account from Rackspace which has great support for Linux, Windows etc. Turns out that much has changed in the land of the iDisk and with the release of Mac OS X 10.6, iDisk support was bundled into the OS. The mobile me widget / applet for Windows also does the same thing (although how the heck you configure it is beyond me) and allows you to mount the iDisk. What about Linux….!

However after digging around the net, I’ve found a blog post from Chris Danielson here http://tinyurl.com/2anfbpk about mounting an iDisk using the fuse davfs2 module.
I could give this man a carton of beers for the post

So I feel a bit silly not doing more research before jumping onto Jungle Disk, as my iDisk is accessible the way I want it, after all. It’s only costing me about $2.50 a month for the Jungle Disk account, but my me.com disk is already paid for and I’m not using it….
I also had a look at dropbox, which seems like a great service, but appears to be overkill for my needs at the moment.
I really only use my online storage as a backup and an easy way to get to my documents etc when I’m out and about on my iPhone.

So while I have a Jungle Disk, I think I may drop it and stick to my me.com iDisk and save a whole $2 :p

My weekend was great, I managed to accomplish a couple of tasks that needed doing, but still got plenty of time to relax.
 
Friday night I cooked a really good dinner of lamb chops and stir fry vegetables. Came out really nice.
On the lamb I used garlic and kumon seasoning. Kumon and lamb just go together so well.
After dinner I took it easy and watched some NCIS episodes on the xbox. Didn’t stay up to late as I was pretty tired.

Erin didn’t work Saturday which was great as it meant I had her all too myself for the weekend
Saturday morning we popped out and got a replacement fuse for my car, as the cigarette lighter fuse had blown a while ago. Turns out it’s a bit of a mission to get into the fuse box behind the glove compartment in my Fiesta, but I managed to get in and find the correct fuse. Went to Repco and grabbed a replacement one.
Now my iPhone dock works again
I also had a look at Erin’s car, as it needs some new tyres. Looked online and found that it’s probably best to get the new tires from Bob Jane T-Mart. They have some good specials on at the moment.
Erin’s dad also popped around for a coffee and a chat later in the morning.
After his visit I called up Bob Jane T-Mart to see if we could bring the car in to change the tires and the sales person said they weren’t busy. But it seems that by the time we got there, the rush was on. There wasn’t even space to park the car in their car park. So we left the tyres for another weekend.
At about 1:30pm we went to Mitcham Shopping Center to Wallis Cinemas and watched Inception.
It’s a really good movie and I can highly recommend it
Saturday night, Erin and I went out with some friends and their parents from Sydney for dinner. Was originally going to the Coopers Ale House, but due to the rugby being on, we ended up going to the The Beach Pit on Jetty Road in Brighton. The interior of the place was quite nice, nothing amazing though. I ordered a Seafood Platter, which had Baramundi, Salt and Pepper Squid and a prawn skewer with these yummy potato wedges. All I can say it I was expecting something average, but wow the food was good. The Baramundi was up there with some of the best fish I’d ever had, cooked to perfection. Out friends had the baked salmon and that was just awesome.
I can highly recommend the food there.

On Sunday Erin and I spent some time working on the Unit, doing some chores. Cleaned up some of the wood from the yard, popped out to Bunnings Warehouse and bought some bits and pieces and generally reduced the todo list down to a couple things, which is good. We also took our bikes out for a ride which I really enjoyed. I’d forgotten how much fun it was to ride. It was a bit cold, but refreshing.
I installed a new door handle to the spare room, put up a new towel rail and a new toilet roll holder, so lots of DIY for me
I like doing DIY stuff.
Sunday night Erin and I went around to her parents for roast pork and chicken from the webber bbq and lots of other yummy things. Also got to finally crack open my Heineken Mini Keg…. hmmm.

Well it’s Monday morning now, 7:42am. Time for me to get ready for work.
Until next time….

I’ve signed up to Gravatar and added the plugin to my site, so I now have profile pictures on my accounts…. seems like something so simple, hehe.

The new release of virt-manager in Fedora 13 comes with a slew of new features that are designed to simplify the management of your virtual guests. Today I’m going to talk about the storage manager and in particular it’s lvm management.

Virt-manager has a built-in storage manager that makes handling your vm guest storage far simpler.
Yes, we can all use the lvm commands to create our logical volumes for our virtual guests, but the storage manager simplifies this down to a couple of clicks.

For my example, I will be adding a new volume group I created called storage2 which has a physical volume /dev/sdc1.
PLEASE NOTE: It appears that in the current virt-manager release you are not able to add volume groups to the storage manager that already contain logical volumes. You volume group must be completely empty and contain no logical volumes, otherwise you will receive errors with regards to “lvs”.

Here is the layout. I intend to add the new “storage2″ volume group to the storage manager:

Start up virt-manager and select “edit” and ” host details” to bring up the hypervisor options:

Select the storage tab:

Next, select the “Add Pool” button near the bottom left of the window as shown below in red:

Change the storage type to “logical: LVM Volume Group”
Now enter the name of the storage pool. As the volume group is called storage2, I’ll call it storage2. Using the same name as the volume group allows the storage manager to auto detect the lvm.

Now, the storage2 volume group is managed by the storage manage. Clicking the “new volume button” allows you to create new volumes.

You are also able to create new volumes on the fly using the storage manager during the creation of a virtual guest. Simply select the volume under “storage pools” and click the “new volume” button.

Got up this morning and decided to go for breakfast. On the way downstairs in the lift I met up with Ben who is from TPAC, which is the Tasmanian equivalent of eResearch SA. So I checked out from the hotel and went out for breakfast with Ben. We picked a random place and went in. We both realized that it was the Sebel restaurant which is renowned for it’s breakfasts. I can definitely agree with that

After breakfast I went off to QUT in preparation for the start of the second day of the DMF user group. We started out the morning session by connecting, via Goto Meeting, to the DMF user group in the USA that was occurring at the same time as our meeting. Effectively having a joint meeting. Turned out really well as we were able to speak directly with the lead engineer on the DMF project in the US while having Bill the lead developer in the room with us. All in all it was interesting.

Other talks included how the CSIRO use DMF, handling and understanding tape failures etc. All in all it was a good day. I learned many new tips in tricks which I hope to use in my environment back in Adelaide.

We finished up the meeting early as we had gotten through all the presentations and question sessions in excellent time.
After that I got a shared taxi with some of the SGI guys to the airport where we bummed around for about and hour, before getting on the plane back to Adelaide.

All in all it was a really good couple days, but it was great to be home again

View the photos of Brisbane here

Arrived at Brisbane airport, which btw is a really nice airport. Reminds me alot of Melbourne airport, just newer and shiner
I high tailed it to the exit and grabbed a taxi. Fortunately there were plenty of taxis available, so it didn’t have to wait very long. Getting across Brisbane was quite slow going as there is a fair amount of road work going on. Apaprently Brisbane is know for being a pain when it comes to crossing the city. The city itself reminds me alot of Cape Town.

After a 30 min taxi ride, costing $48 (yikes) and wandering around the Queensland University of Technology I managed to find the meeting venue. QUT is pretty big and has multiple levels, so even with a map it’s a bit confusing.

On arriving at the DMF user group I listened to the introductions from other people which was quite interesting. It’s great to get an idea about what other people are running infrastructure wise.

The SGI and LSI presentations were informative and interesting. Bill Kendal who flew out from SGI US, gave a great talk and an in depth look at the future road map for DMF. Some interesting topics were DMF support of HSM aware Lustre in the soon to be available 2.1 release. This caused a stir and triggered many questions. It looks to be a great feature for DMF. However in future discussions it seems that Oracle (who got Lustre out of the Sun deal) have implied that Lustre 2 will be commercial and closed source, however Lustre 1.x will be kept open source, but they won’t contribute anymore code.
Is that a bad thing? I don’t know. Lets be honest when we setup our HPC systems, you probably find that it might get upgraded every year at most.
So is it worth turfing Lustre on the off chance it might not get any code upgrades in the near future? I think not. It’s stable in it’s current incarnation so who cares. Hopefully some smart people from the Open Source community will step up and keep support going for Lustre 1.x. Although, lets bear in mind that any code from Lustre 1.x used in Lustre 2 Commercial / Closed Source, would have the GPL lawyers all over Oracle like monkeys in a banana plantation.

DMF support for standard POSIX filesystems also will be a great feature. No long will DMF be locked to CXFS or XFS!

David Honey from SGI NZ did and interesting talk about a new MAID system being launched soon. It’s a COPAN based system SGI grabbed when the bought the company. Very interesting product. It acts like a VTL (Virtual Tape Library) so to the casual user / system software it looks and acts like a tape library. The COPAN solution effectively works on completely powering down disks when they aren’t in use. The number of disks that are kept spinning is configurable by the user up to a maximum of 50% of the disks. The solution is also ultra dense. For details check this out: http://www.sgi.com/products/storage/maid/300T_TX/

All in all it was a great day and I learned heaps about up and coming tech from LSI and SGI along with hearing the war stories from the other guys at the meeting.

After the meeting I made my way through Brisbane to my hotel, which was quite plush
I was pretty shattered, so it didn’t take long for me to find the comfy king size bed and pass out….