Lance's Random Ramblings
I was struggeling with an install of ESXi on a cisco 6509 switch where the management and VM LAN connectivity worked just fine but for some reason the SAN NFS VLAN just did not want to communicate with the Nexenta on that VLAn.
After some searching and trial and error I was able to utilise this post http://blogs.egroup-us.com/?p=2453 to get the port-channel and the ports configured correctly. I did not use all the settings from this post but it did remind me to check my port0-channel config.
I am busy working on a contract with a comonay that is implementing a 10G network for their ESX cluster.
We have been using extreme X650 10G copper switches for the core.
Migrating the current servers to the 10G environment was relatively easy and went with minimal issues.
Over the last 2 weeks I have been trying to get a new server to connect to the cluster ahnd have been frustrated. I have been unable to get the server communicating on the management VLAN. the server was configured correctly and so was the switch or so I thought.
It seems that to make this work you need to add the network cards to the vlan in the extreme os as untagged which then allows you to connect the server to vCenter and then once you add your NIC’s to the dv switch you lose connectivity again and have to readd the ports to the management vlan as tagged.
this post is more fo rme to be able to look it up in the future.
This post should have been written quite a while ago as I wanted to start documenting my efforts to learn to program using Ruby. As most of you know I have been trying for a while to teach myself to programe.
I started my efforts with a course in c# at a company in London, the course was just great and the instructor was a fantastic guy. Unfortunately life meant I could not practice at all. I worked for a company for a year that gave me no opportunity to play during the day and having a newborn baby left my wife and I looking more like zombies that real people.
Then things changed the year before last when I Joined Forward as a contractor to help them with their Virtual infrastructure. This company is completly different to anywhere I have ever worked before. Normaly as a contractor you are shoved in a corner and beat with a whip so that they get the most out of you, here at Forward this is definitly not the case.
Forward has some really great intelligent developers who are a pleasure to work with and be part of and that is where I was going with this post.
A short while ago Fred George held one of his famous OO Bootcamp training sessions and I was lucky enough to be invited to join and true to Freds statement he tries to keep the course at a level where you always feel stupid and belive me I felt REALLY stupid. The good thing about feeling stupid was I actually learnt something. You kind of learn to program by accident (quoting Tom Hall).
This is where the Ruby, rBongo, WeBogo bits come in. Fred uses Ruby to illustrate OO programming best practice and to help you understand OO in general a side effect of this is that you start learning ruby syntax and start learning the programming vocabulary needed to accomplish the tasks, having gained some experience with ruby during the course I thought it best to use ruby to continue learning to program.
I have been working on Bongo since it was founded and the other day I was speaking to Alex the project lead and we realised it is almost 10 years now. I have always wanted to contribute more than just packaging the app on the OBS and being available to do testing and such. Alex wrote the PHP binding for the Bongo Store and having seen what some of the guys can do at Forward with Ruby and jQuery I wanted to create a binding for the store in Ruby and create a gem from it thus allowing anyone to create the best REST interface ever.
This is forcing me to learn TCP Sockets win Ruby and other nice things. I will try to document as often as I can what I am upto on this.
My efforts will be on 2 Ruby projects. Initially I will need to work on rBongo which is the ruby binding for the Bongo store I am sure most of the developers at Forward could probably write this in a day or so, hopefully I can convince one or two of them to help out .
My second effort will be on WeBongo the REST webui for the Bongo mail store. I have other ideas for the webui once we have a working solution (using it as a sync destination for Tomboy desktop notes)
Please keep that in mind as I try to get this working.
The Bongo-Project needs to be renamed
Now before you fall of your chair or swallow your phone while reading this let me explain why.
I have been wanting to create this post for sometime now and have been holding off as we are almost ready for our 1.0 release.
The problem I have is that even if we released a new version of the software and it was our 1.0 release I am not sure anyone will be able to find us. I have been doing some digging over the last few months about what actually we are and to be honest I am not convinced we are “Individual” enough. We as a project get lost in the Bongo Project mahem that is People who play bongo’s as instruments.
Right from day one when we started this fork we had a problem with the name, we chose ” Bongo” as a name as an interim measure so that we had something to call ourselves while we thought of a new name. This has obviously not happend and I would like to kick this discussion off before we are ready for 1.0 so we have time to get it all done so we can release both to the outside world at the same time.
Now I know that this is not something lightly taken on and also it would mean quite a bit of work on the part of the limited Dev’s we have to change the code as well as then changing the website and our images and stuff.
I am now thinking I will spend £30.00 on a prize for the winning name. So now I need to find out what the community think and if there is apetite for this.
I have created a poll on my site for some active feedback
let me know I really want to know
This will be put on hold untill further notice
Creating a Two Node Mysql Cluster On Ubuntu With DRBD
To create this cluster you will need 2 ubuntu node servers installed as follows.
I am creating this cluster inside of vMware so I created 2 VM’s with:
1GB RAM
1 10GB hdd for the root (/) partition.
1 20GB hdd for the database store.
I downloaded the ubuntu 9.10 server iso and presented this to the VM’s and started the install.
This is by no means an in depth install instruction.
I have just captured screenshots to show what I did.
So here we go with the install of the machines.
You should see this screen on booting the VM. Select the language you want to use.
Then push the F3 key to select your keyboard.
Then use the up and down arrows to select the install ubuntu server option and push the Enter key.
Then select your install language using the up and down keys.
Then select your Country
Then Enter the hostname for the system
We then need to partition the disks.
I selected the guided – use entire disk option as these are new servers.
Then select the first disk Which is 10GB here. We are only formatting the system disk as we need to make some changes to the other disk before we format it later on in this series.
Selecting this option lets Ubuntu manage the system partition in the default manner.
You will then be asked if you really want to write the changes to the disk. As these are new servers you select YES.
Now we create a new User that will be used to access the server to administrate it. Enter the Full name e.g. “John Doe”
After you select continue you will be asked to select or type a username.
Select continue after you are happy with the username. And you will be prompted for a password.
Enter a new password and select the continue option. You will then be asked to enter the password again.
After entering the password again select the continue option. You will then be asked if you want to encrypt your home drive. As this will be a server I selected No.
You will then be asked if you need to add a proxy address to access the internet. In some businesses this is a required solution for me it was not necessary. Select Continue when finished.
You will be asked to enable updates for the server. The choice is yours. I prefer to automatically install security updates.
The next screen is related to the software patterns that you would like to install.
I moved the red bar down and used the space par to select the openssh server. The reason for this is to allow us access t othe console of the server via an ssh terminal.
Once you select continue the install will take place. After a while the following screen will come up that shows the install is complete and that the server will now reboot.
This is the last task for the install process We will move on to the configuration of the server once it has rebooted.
I have for some time now been wondering how many people actually use Bongo.
The reason for this is that we have had images available for a while and I am still non the wiser as to how many people actually use them.
I faithfully spend hours and hours building packages and getting them out the door but have no markers to see if they are being used.
While reading the docs for the ESVA appliance (http://www.global-domination.org/esva) I noticed that they have a cronjob that downloads a file and immediately deletes it. This allows for roughly seeing who is using their appliance .
They have documentation that tells people how to remove the cronjob which effectively turns off this tool.
I propose that the Bongo project perhaps use something similar to allow us to know how many people use the products we produce. it would be nice to know how many people are using Bong while the Web-UI is not working and then once we release something if that number increases and at what rate.
I am really interested in ideas as to how we can achieve this with or without having some kind of phone home too.
Please leave a comment on this post if you like, or send an e-mail to the user or devel list or even come and have your say on the IRC channel.
I have also added a simple poll on the left
Thanks in advance
I have just upgraded to 11.2 from ubuntu 9.10 on my IBM / Lenovo T61 laptop. ( I will post a better blog about that later)
What I wanted to mention here is that the current vMware workstation 6.5.3 does not want to run on my system.
I have found this post http://k—–k.blogspot.com/2009/09/install-vmware-workstation-653-on.html
Which has steps for compiling the modules yourself but by the look of things is based on 32bit openSUSE.
I will see if I can get it working here on my 64bit machine
I have great news about the images on the rPath system.
I have been able to get Bongo 0.6.1 to build on the rPath system with a json patch from Alex.
I have promoted it to the QA and RELEASE repo’s so it should be available for you guys.
Please test and let me know if you have any issues.
You can find the images here
I have been trying to get the latest 0.6.1 release of Bongo onto the rPath images. This unfortunately has not been possible due to our reliance on a newer version of Python than what is available on the rPath system.
This is a sad moment as I have been doing that for quite some time now and will not be able to continue.
So for those that have images which contain Bongo on a rPath system please use either the Fedora, Suse or Gentoo packages that we have created.
Thanks to everyone who has helped me over the years and especially Stu Gott who was instrumental in moving the images forward.
If rPath eventually support python 2.6 I will revisit the images on their platform.
I have been working on the images in the Suse Studio environment as I mentioned in my blog post here.
I started the investigations to find that our RPM repository was in need of a bit of work. I wanted to create a new repository in my own name that would allow me to build these RPMs for the project.
Thinking about the delivery of the RPM’s I thought it best to open a repository with a generic name namely “bongo-project”. This would allow more than one person to work on the repository, but for the repository to keep its identity.
Once the repository was setup I realized that I had to learn RPM packaging as I had been so used to the Conary way of packaging that it was almost second nature.
After quite a long time I have been able to get consistent builds from the OBS which have produced RPM’s for a number of OS’s.
Now cam the part that I really to do from the start Create images.
All in all it has been a painless effort as the interface is easy to use and intuitive. I only had to ask for help a few times to find out that the error was mine and not the studio’s. I have created images for the following
These images are all x86 (32bit) and do not have any web interface (well we ripped it out remember)
The only downside at the moment is that they have not created the marketplace yet so any images created will be deleted after a while. This left me with a dilemma, how do I publish the images?
My solution…..
To create a subdomain on my own website for the bongo downloads.
The link is Http://bongo.haigmail.com
Here you will find a crude yet cute website with links to the bongo tar.gz files. I was impressed with the size of the images about 150mb each which I think is quite good.
For those of you on the rPath images as promised I will be creating one more update to that image set unless there are enough of you that want it. I have a problem in that Bongo does not work on Python 2.4 which is the deployed version on the rPath system. rPath is not the only OS affected CentOS 5 and RHEL 5 are also affected by this. I have asked the guys to look at why it is failing and to see if they could get it working as soon as I can build it I will.
I would really like to know who of you are using the rPath images as I have no idea how many of you there are. Please post a response here if you do.