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The Weekend

Filed Under: Life by Simon — Leave a comment
August 1, 2010
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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….

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Gravatars

Filed Under: Uncategorized by Simon — Leave a comment
July 27, 2010
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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.

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Virt-Manager tips and tricks – Manage your volume groups

Filed Under: Sysadmin by Simon — Leave a comment
June 21, 2010
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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.

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DMF user group, End of day 2

Filed Under: Sysadmin by Simon — Leave a comment
May 11, 2010
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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

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DMF user group, End of day 1

Filed Under: Sysadmin by Simon — Leave a comment
May 11, 2010
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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….

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