Unix Revolution

Being able to play audio files on my computer is a seriously big deal to me.  My first Apple purchase was a mac book pro which the sole purpose was to rip and catalog my audio collection.  (which subsequently I had to repeat the entire process because it defaulted to using .m4p <apple store> and .m4a <I think...> anyhow I was unable to easily playback those file types on my other systems - which was a Sun blade running Solaris and a few Linux systems)  I digress... I have always been a HUGE fan of XMMS.  Even since 2001 when they seemed to have the only player worth mentioning for Solaris.  Fortunately not much has changed with XMMS in 10 years (it looks almost identical, if I recall the original) and unfortunately a lot has changed with my music demands.  XMMS still uses a pretty basic method cataloging your collection, whereas the "modern" audio players seemingly use some type of database to store the metadata of your collection.  Certainly it's not the e

I decided to watch my Fedora 16 box boot and I noticed that some iSCSI processes were failing.  Well, I don't need iSCSI anyhow - so, I may as well disable it.  Easy enough. After I disabled the iSCSI bit, I wanted to see what other stuff was running and of course I was surprised when I found there were only 8 or so processes for runlevel 5.  I've discovered something I need to become more familiar with (systemd and systemctl).  For now... here's what I found. [root@neo ~]# who -r           run-level 5  2011-12-30 16:24 [root@neo ~]# chkconfig --list | grep 5:on Note: This output shows SysV services only and does not include native       systemd services. SysV configuration data might be overridden by native       systemd configuration. autofs         0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off iscsi           0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:on 6:off iscsid          0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:on 6:off netfs           0:off 1:off 2:

I have a Quad-Core i7 (details below) running Fedora 16.  16 gig is a bit overkill, but I have a need to run numerous VM's simultaneously and I don't feel like running out memory.  Besides, the memory was $80 a piece. Now.. time will tell if this will be an unstable configuration ,but since the Corsair packaging clearly states "STABLE - RELIABLE - COMPATIBLE": I'm sure I have nothing to fear! [root@neo ~]# cat /proc/cpuinfo | tail -25 processor : 7 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 42 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2760QM CPU @ 2.40GHz stepping : 7 cpu MHz : 800.000 cache size : 6144 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 8 core id : 3 cpu cores : 4 apicid : 7 initial apicid : 7 fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 13 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon p

I am chalking this up to a coincidence, but RHEL 6.2 x86_64 seems dog-slow on vSphere 4 using the paravirtualized I/O.  I'm going to play around some, but I wonder if it is due to the fact that we use iSCSI? Ugg...  Perhaps I'll have to run all my RHEL using RHEV to virtualize?  ;-) Migrating to the LSI Logic (SAS) controller did not seem to help.  Perhaps the issue is more fundamental to the core infrastructure and RHEL is the only one with tools good enough to report it.  The saga continues...

Issue: [root@rhevipa ~]# ipa user-find admin ipa: ERROR: No credentials cache found Resolution [root@rhevipa log]# kinit admin Password for admin@AREA51.PRIVATE:  [root@rhevipa log]# ipa user-find admin -------------- 1 user matched --------------   User login: admin   Last name: Administrator   Home directory: /home/admin   Login shell: /bin/bash   UID: 1115000000   GID: 1115000000   Account disabled: False   Keytab: True   Password: True ---------------------------- Number of entries returned 1 ---------------------------- As I was attempting to do some user administration with my new IPA system, I was suddenly stuck... I had forgotten that you need to initialize your Kerberos session. 

Sometimes I want to test a webserver from the command line (and I don't care about text-based web browsers...) jradtke@neo $ telnet www.google.com 80 Trying 74.125.113.99... Connected to www.google.com. Escape character is '^]'. GET / HTTP/1.1  <ENTER> <ENTER> HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 19:55:54 GMT Expires: -1 Cache-Control: private, max-age=0 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=5feb7c6c81e07ef5:FF=0:TM=1324842954:LM=1324842954:S=BoqS5Zgx_IcAHrmZ; expires=Tue, 24-Dec-2013 19:55:54 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com Set-Cookie: NID=54=AE6K0oH_BkcxU2SZruHKJmo20c-8ZhgQ10RrQuSBl3sfolWglMZCsXDByaHJOx39bDM1zHJZz22POzHwld7iMJP-fpEOQg6k5StziJHsl04auDT3Xxm5eHBD_HDK7VkZ; expires=Mon, 25-Jun-2012 19:55:54 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com; HttpOnly P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more info." Server: gws X-

I wish you could download the Red Hat docs in an ISO, or a tarball.... instead of this... # wget --recursive -A.pdf http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/

A how-to for connecting to a VPN server running on Mac OSX Server using L2TP. HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PolicyAgent + DWORD (32-bit)   AssumeUDPEncapsulationContextOnSendRule  I set mine to '2' (NAT on both sides) Setup the VPN connection on the Windows 7 client Properties | Security Type of VPN: Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol with IPsec (L2TP/IPSec) Click Advanced Settings  update "Use preshared key for authentication" Data Encryption I selected "Optional encryption (connect even if no encryption) Feel free to attempt to not use some of the options, but the above works with Windows 7 client and OS X VPN L2TP server.

VMware Workstation 8 has been somewhat of a challenge for me on my current laptop using Fedora 16 x86_64.  Installing 8.0.0 required some hand-built patch that someone published, and 8.0.1 seems to lock up my display manager to the point where CTRL-ALT-Backspace is the only way out of the situation (followed by forcefully taking ownership of the VM, etc..) I decided to see if KVM would work any better.  It was no love-fest either.  But, it is working and free... ;-) I created an LVM volume and mounted it as /var/lib/libvirt prior to installing the Virtualization packages via yum.  Using the Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) I created the Windows 7 VM and essentially left all the defaults.  I was unable to get the floppy added to my machine and subsequently added a 2nd CD-ROM to install the VirtIO drivers during the install. Some items I found to be positives: The virbr0 (NAT) network was able to utilize my wireless or my Ethernet connection, without ANY intervention on my part.  

Summary: I have wanted to build a kickstart environment which hosted a "rescue CD" or LiveCD to allow you to boot over the network after you blew your stuff up and needed to repair a few things.  Today I have worked through a method of doing so, with the help of the people who published a succinct script with the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor.  (the script will be at the bottom of this post - if I have somehow not followed the GPL, please let me know and I will correct whatever is necessary) NOTE/Warning: The boot will fail due the initrd being too large (645mb).  I'm not sure how to proceed.  This procedure worked for RHEVh, because it is quite a bit smaller.  Hopefully I can report back with progress on this? :-$ Procedure: download your LiveCD image to /export/isos/RESCUE/Fedora-16-i686-Live-Desktop.iso # cd /var/tmp # vi livecd-iso-to-pxeboot (populate the file with the script shown below) # chmod 754 ./livecd-iso-to-pxeboot # ./livecd-iso-

I think it may still need a bit of work on Fedora's implementation of Grub 2, but it is tolerable.  I still like the manual updates of the older grub.  The thing that had irritated me the most, was probably the simplest to remedy - the boot splash screen, or menu screen.  (spalsh.xpm.gz previously).  The grub 2 implementation removes a lot of the complexity of changing that image also. You no longer have to:  ensure it's a certain size, has a certain color pallete, has the layers flattened, then run some conversion on the image.  In hindsight - the old method really kind of sucked. Here is the /etc/default/grub that I am currently using: #grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg #grub2-mkfont --output=/boot/grub2/unicode.pf2 /usr/share/fonts/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf GRUB_TIMEOUT=5 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="Fedora" GRUB_DEFAULT=saved GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.lvm.lv=vg_neo/lv_swap rd.md=0 rd.dm=0  KEYTABLE=us quiet SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 rhgb rd.luks=0 rd.lvm.l

At some point you may end up getting a message from your Red Hat Network Satellite regarding the Database utilization. So - you can take a look for yourself and then extend the Tablespace -bash-3.2$ db-control report Tablespace                  Size    Used   Avail   Use% DATA_TBS                    4.8G    4.1G  701.2M    86% SYSAUX                      500M  172.3M  327.6M    34% SYSTEM                      400M  253.1M  146.8M    63% TEMP_TBS                   1000M      0B   1000M     0% UNDO_TBS                   1000M  886.3M  113.6M    89% USERS                       128M     64K  127.9M     0% -bash-3.2$ db-control extend DATA_TBS

I have recently built a Red Hat Network Satellite system on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 x86_64 and Satellite 5.4.1 with the embedded database (Oracle DB - not sure which version). Also noteworthy is the fact that this Virtual Machine is running on VMware vSphere 4.1.0 using the LSI Logic Parallel SCSI controller.  Anyhow - I have built this type of system numerous times previously and this particular one is running rather poorly.  At the time I am writing this, I am still unsure what is causing the issues(s). 1.)  processes are taking more time that I am accustomed to (I sound like a typical user now?) 2.)  I/O wait on this host seems to be relatively high most of the time Now - while I am attempting to troubleshoot, I am running a satellite-sync of one of my RHN channels.  The software has all been downloaded, and at this point I believe it is simply being catalogued and inserted into the Satellite DB. I have plenty of memory dedicated to this system,  I also assigned 2 CPUs to