Posts

Posted on

Home repairs, third edition

As a continuation to my other home repairs (part 1, part 2) this summer was no different. This year it was 2 major projects, the first was to repair the chimney, and the second was a new roof. First some pics of the chimney:

The finish of the chimney is a parge look for now. I will probably paint it some time later. The chimney cap was a poured concrete one as the original had completely deteriorated.

 

Next up is the roof, as you can see in the picture above, or not, there are black streaks going through it. So before it got bad, I replaced with with 30 year dimensional shingles..

 

 

All told it was around another $10,000 in repairs. Totaling over $30,000 in the last 3 years.

Posted on

Moving VM’s between hosts

About a year ago I purchased a 1U IBM X3550 server to run VMware vSphere 5 on. While it was cool to have a server that had dual quad procs and 8 gig of ram in it, the noise it put off was too much for my family room. (Just think of half a dozen 1 inch fans running at 15,000RPM almost constantly.) Recently I have been spending more time in the family room and the noise has gotten to a level that it is almost impossible to do anything in the room with out hearing it. (Like watch tv, a movie, play a game, etc.) So I started looking at my favorite used hardware site, geeks.com, for a new “server”. Well it finally arrived today, an HP XW8600 workstation. It is another dual quad proc, however it has 16GB of ram, and 12 SATA ports and a larger case, and the best of all, almost absolutely quiet.

So with it installed, I needed to start moving the VM’s from the IBM Server to the HP Server. In an enterprise environment, this usually isn’t a problem as you usually have a shared storage (SAN) that each of the hosts connect to. Well in my little home lab I don’t have shared storage. I did try to use COMSTAR in Solaris 10 to export a “Disk” as an iSCSI target. While this would work, it was going to take forever to transfer 1TB of VM’s from one server to a VM running on my Mac and back to the new server.

So a googling I went, and what I found was a way easier way to copy the VM’s over. ovftool, which runs on Windows, Linux and Mac. What it does is allow you to export and import OVF files to a VMware host. The side benefit of that is that you can export from one and import to another all on one line.

So I downloaded the Mac version and started coping. The basic syntax is like this:


./ovftool -ds=TargetDataStoreName vi://root@sourcevSphereHost/SourceVM vi://root@destvSphereHost

So if one of my VM’s is called mtdew, and I had it thin provisioned on the source host and wanted it the same on the destination host, and my datastore is called “vmwareraid” I would run this:

./ovftool -ds=vmwareraid -dm=thin vi://root@ibmx3550/mtdew vi://root@hpxw8600

where ibmx3550 is the source server and hpxw8600 is the destination server. If you don’t specify the “-dm=thin” then when it is copied over, it will become a “thick” disk, aka us the entire space allocated when created. (I.E. a 50GB disk that only has 10GB in use would still use 50GB if the -dm=thin is not used.)

There are some gotchas that you will have to look out for:

  1. Network configs, I had one VM that had multiple internal network’s defined. Those were not defined on the new server, so there is a “mapping” that you have to do. I decided I didn’t need them on the new server so I just deleted them before I copied it over.
  2. VM’s must be in a powered off state. I tried them in a “paused” state and it did not want to run right.
  3. It takes time, depending on the speed of the network, disk, etc, it will take a lot of time to do this, and the VM’s have to be down while it happens. So definitely not a way to move “production” vm’s unless you have a maintenance window.
  4. It will show % complete as it goes, which is cool, but the way it does it is weird. It will show the % at like 11 or 12 and then I turn my head and all of the sudden it says it is completed.
  5. I did have some issues with a vm that I am not sure what happened to it, but when I try to copy it, I get an error: “Error: vim.fault.FileNotFound”… It may be due to me renaming something on the vm at some point in the past.

Hope this helps some other “home lab user”…

 

 

Posted on

LDAP and BER size

I recently came across a unique problem that didn’t “stand” out until I got to thinking about a couple of different situations that I had tested this in. So the scenario is that I needed to create a static group of unique members in LDAP (Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition 6.3.1 and/or Oracle Directory Server Enterprise Edition 11.1.5.0) that has a extremely huge amount of members in it. So I created the LDIF file with all 60,000+ uids in it and proceeded to run an ldapadd against the server with the file. Well it immediately would come back with:

adding cn=testgroup,ou=group,dc=sungeek,dc=net

However, when looking in the LDAP, the group never showed up. Also when you look at the access log on the server you would see something similar to this:

[07/Aug/2012:21:22:39 -0400] conn=3 op=-1 msgId=-1 – closing from 127.0.0.1:48160 – B1 – Client request contains an ASN.1 BER tag that is corrupt or connection aborted

Now some times, depending on the versions of LDAP server and ldapadd programs, I got a “broken pipe” right after the adding output.

As you can see from the output in the error log it is not very descriptive on what the actual error is. I know I spent about 6 hours looking in to it to figure out what was actually the problem. Well this morning I was poking around the cn=config docs and found this:

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19528-01/820-2495/nsslapd-maxbersize-5dsconf/index.html

What this document shows is the attribute nsslapd-maxbersize, which is:

Defines the maximum size in bytes allowed for an incoming message. This limits the size of LDAP requests that can be handled by Directory Server. Limiting the size of requests prevents some kinds of denial of service attacks.

The limit applies to the total size of the LDAP request. For example, if the request is to add an entry, and the entry in the request is larger than two megabytes, then the add request is denied. Care should be taken when changing this attribute.

So by DEFAULT it is set to 2MB. Well my LDIF file was over 3.5MB in size. Which means that it was too big for the addition. To change it, do an ldapmodify with this ldif:

dn: cn=config
changetype:modify
replace:nsslapd-maxbersize
nsslapd-maxbersize: ########

I changed mine to 6MB, or 6291456, to hopefully cover any sizable additions in the future. Once done I restarted the directory server and tested again, and everything was good. According to the docs, the max size you can make this attribute is 2GB in size, and a size of 0 means default to 2MB, or 2097152. I think Oracle needs to make the error that is in the access log a little more descriptive, like “hey your query/add is too big yo”.

Hope this helps some one..

 

 

Posted on

X-Plane 10 and the bugs I hate

Right after Microsoft said they would quit development on Flight Simulator, I started looking for a new sim to fly. One that came up was Austin Meyer’s X-Plane. Some key factors were that it ran natively on Windows, MacOS and Linux. Since I switched to using a MacOS Desktop, this was awesome as I didn’t have to keep booting in to Windows to use MS Flight Sim. So I purchased version 9 of it a couple of years or more ago. While it lacked several features that MS Flight Simulator had and I had become used to (I.e. a pretty nice ATC, lots of AI traffic, nice graphics, etc) it did have it’s own pluses, like running a little smoother and a little easier customizable.

One of the “big” things about X-Plane9 was that a full install was nearly 80GB in size. One of the big things I hated was that there was nearly to no airport buildings at the airports, unless you got a third party download where some one had recreated it. Granted this was cool as it allowed people to create some awesome replications (I did one for Morgantown, WV and Waynesburg, PA). But alas, for over 80GB of install you would have thought there would be the basic airport buildings or at least the terminals in it.. So while I still played with X-Plane, I found myself going back to MS Flight Sim just for the buildings and the ATC (sounds hokey, but it seemed “more real”).

So they finally released a new version of X-Plane, version 10 this year. The screenshots on the internet looked almost photo realistic. So I downloaded the demo, and it had one airport (KSEA) and it had buildings and all. So I was happy to see they had done that. There was also promise of a better ATC, which from some quick playing with the demo was better… So I spent the $80 and bought the full game. and about 6 hours later, I had another 80GB of X-Plane 10 installed (so now I have over 160GB just for version 9 and 10). This is where my “fun” left.

So it seams that the only airport that has the terminal and buildings (that I have been to so far in the game) is the KSEA. Every other airport is just the tarmac, runways, apron, and taxiways, no buildings what so ever. Another “peeve” is the AI traffic. It makes no difference where you are (little municipal airport to a international one) it seems like there will always be a 747, a little single or dual engine prop and what ever plane you are flying, and a 747 in the sky. I don’t know how many times I have changed to a new airport and the AI planes spawn directly on top or under me. It is hilarious to see a Boeing 747 try to taxi around KMGW and try to take off on a 5,000 ft runway.

Another stupid bug with the AI traffic is that I can go and file my flight plan (with the some times working ATC) and then start taxing to the runway. Every single time I have done this, there is already 2 planes holding at the runway, however one AI plane is ALWAYS half on the runway and half on the taxi way. This causes problems as it never freaking moves. So when another AI plane tries to land, it is told to go around because of the AI half on the runway. I sat at KJFK one day for over 20 minutes waiting for it to take off and it never did. I finally “drove” through it and took off. This of course pisses the ATC off and it constantly keeps telling you to taxi back to the runway. So much that the only way to stop it is to change the COM channel.

Since I am on a rant about the ATC as well, might as well mention that some ATC’s in some airports are on channels that you can not turn too. That makes it awesome to try to do anything. In addition the ATC never seems to tell you the frequency you are handed off to, which makes it impossible to do a full hand of to any other ATC.

I have also found that if you go to file a flight plan once you have taken off and screw up entering something in the route box, it will completely crash the application and you have to restart the entire program. Which I am not sure what changed between version 9 and 10, but version 10 takes forever to load. My machine is not a slow one either, with dual quad Xeon 2.8GHz processors, 10Gb of ram and a 3GB/s SATA drive with the application on it.

So until there is some more patches to fix some of these I will be going back to X-Plane version 9 and MS Flight SimX.

Posted on

How R-Studio for Mac saved my ass

I have an external Seagate Firewire 800 drive that I use on my Mac Pro that has over 700GB of VMware images on it. Pretty much anything I work on I have an image on there, everything from a Windows XP client to Microsoft Exchange servers, and Solaris, Linux and the such. I have had the drive for a couple of years and it has always been rock solid and fast too. (I bought it when Windows 7 screwed up my internal drives.)

Well today I  was wanting to run a VM off of that drive to test something, and noticed that the drive did not appear on my Desktop. Weird, it as plugged in, the light was flashing, but no icon. Hmm, where the hell did it go? So I unplugged it and plugged it back in. Still no go. So i tried switching power supplies, still no go. Then if I left it sit for a while I would get the error that it could not use the drive, or that it needed initialized. Holy crap, that isn’t good.

I popped up the command prompt, diskutil would list that there was a drive there, but no partitions on it. The gui Disk Utility would see the disk, and again no partitions and wouldn’t let me do anything with it. gpt wouldn’t let me read it. So I thought to my self, did Windows 7 screw the disk up again (it was working the other day when I had booted in to windows, but forgot to unplug it before doing so 🙁 ). So I booted in to Windows 7, it could see the drive but said it was unformatted. Double shit. So back to MacOSX, I went out searching for some data recovery programs. The first one was Data Rescue 3 while the graphics were gimmicky it didn’t even look like the demo version could even see 1 file on the drive. So I uninstalled it and started looking for another program.

In the past I have used the R-Studio for NTFS & FAT and both have worked wonders. I did a google search, and they now have a Mac version.  Now we are talking! So I downloaded the demo, and with in about 2 minutes of starting it, it showed me the entire disk and all the files that were on it. But since it was a demo it would only restore 10 files under 64kb.. So I bought it for $79.99. 2 minutes after buying it, it was busy restoring the files to another external 2TB USB drive. 6 hours later, 100% of my files were restored from the dead firewire drive, and my VM started up just like nothing had happen.  Needless to say it saved me hundreds of hours of reinstalling and setting up my VM environment. Now I just need to go get another drive to make a backup of this one.

 

So if you are ever needing to restore MacOS, HSFS, NTFS, FAT, UFS, EXT file systems, definitely check out r-tools technology and their R-Studio products. http://www.r-tt.com/  For $79.99 it was more than worth it!