Eyyy,
I was looking around my table today when i realized that i run 3 different platforms on my computers.
My workstation at home runs Fedora.
My private laptop runs Mac OS X.
My work laptop runs Windows Vista.
I like to use multiple platforms. I think i am more open-minded towards computing platforms when i choose a OS for project X or Y.
Just felt like telling the world how leet i am! 
Bgrds,
Finnzi
Was reading up on something regarding CentOS/RHEL and found this page
It has some nice explanations on some Apache 2.2 configuration variables….
Laters,
Finnzi
BAH!
I thought i had seen all the license hell one could see….but noooooooooooooooooooooooo…
A company i’m doing IT for bought a Timekeeping application. No problem. We bought a one user license to start with since the company we bought it from told us that it was nooo problem to add users later.
Yeah…about that. Few days later i was asking for more users. Sure! they said…..after banging my head against the table i ended up with buying a Pervasive PSQL Server V10, found out that i also had to buy a multi-user license from the makers of the Timekeeping application (which they never told me, i guess when i asked about what i needed i was not clear enough!:).
Well…the application it self is good and the support people are friendly so it was not end of the world for me……
Anyone knows some freeware backup application that allows live backups of Pervasive PSQL servers ;)?
Bgrds,
Finnzi
Howdy,
Was browsing the Red Hat website earlier and saw an ad that showed how you could replace a RAC with a RHCS setup (active/standby).
Customers that request a setup of an Oracle RAC cluster probably do not understand all of the work that goes into designing, implementing and working with it on a daily basis. They do not understand the redundancy setup. They just want close to 100% uptime (99.999%+) and are willing to pay for it.
I have done work on both sides. I have been around a Oracle RAC setup, and i have done some RHCS installations.
Both setups have a number of things that could be better, but both give a fairly good redundancy.
RHCS is a active/standby setup. The good part here is that you could have 2 nodes, one active for database X, and the other one active for database Y. Node 1 goes down, node 2 checks, and if it does not respond it fences the other node (fencing could be: rebooting the node through a iLO, RSA, shutting down the FC ports the node uses, etc). If fencing succeeds the node that is still alive takes over the resources. This takes about 1-2 minutes. You can have a lot of nodes in a RHCS cluster, and you can pretty much cluster anything.
1-2 minutes you say…..Having a database failover to a new machine, running consistency checks for the databases and be online in 2 minutes. 2 minutes to failover is a pretty impressive job. Sure, some transactions could have failed, but your DBA has been paged, the database is back up and running and if your applications are written correctly they should continue to run.
Oracle RAC runs each database on both nodes. That would be a active-active setup. That is also pretty impressive. Both nodes run the same databases, active sessions are failed over to the other node if a failure occurs. You can even add nodes to your RAC cluster to scale with the load on your databases. RAC could help you achieve 100% uptime and crazy performance if needed.
What i think that is missing from a RAC setup is fencing. RAC does not reboot node X/Y if it detects a problem. The nodes are supposed to withdraw them selfs, do not get me wrong, so far i have not had any problems with this setup. However i would feel a lot better if RAC would have fencing methods, and could reboot a node that is dubious…If the node is not working as expected, it should be rebooted and removed from the cluster without syncing data down to disks etc. I am pretty sure the people at Oracle are very intelligent and have no doubts that they know what they are doing. I am just a very “careful” person and i think the RHCS does a bit better when it detects a failure.
RHCS is a very advanced tool, and when used correctly with a redundant SAN configuration you can achieve 99.999% uptime (around 5 minutes of downtime per year). If you do not need to scale your Oracle databases to 2+ nodes in a active-active configuration choose RHCS over RAC. It saves you a whole lot of money, and is very well supported. Management is (from my perspective) a lot easier and adding new databases, storage etc is no issue.
I bet i sound like a Red Hat sales person, but with my experience i would choose RHCS over RAC (when i would not need the performance of a RAC cluster) anytime. It is a lot cheaper, very easy to manage and is very well supported by the Red Hat support team.
Respect to the RHCS team, you rock!…..It’s because of you i sleep with out fear every night :)!
Laters,
Finnzi
Howdy,
I have been in a dilemma, trying to choose a good backup solution for this project i am working on. Previously i was using BackupExec there but i am looking at alternatives right now.
Obviously one of the reasons is that BackupExec costs a arm and a leg. I decided to look at Bacula and found it to be VERY good. However i found a huge problem (not in the software, more in the management part) and that is that i might not be around to do the management of Bacula. That’s why i am also looking at Arkeia. Arkeia has a very neat web interface that anyone that has done a restore/backup could work his way through. All settings are fairly obvious after 10 minutes of browsing. Now i just have to wait for the official offer from the Arkeia sales department to see if it fits my budget.
Bacula however seems to be a bit more advanced, if i was looking for a backup software to use for my own personal project or in a environment of linux administrators i would choose it over many commercial solutions if i had a tight budget. It’s easy to administer for anyone that is used to CLI environments and the tape format used is well documented. I am sure i will use this piece of software sometime in the not-so-distant future.
Bah…i will let you know how much the Arkeia sales department quotes me for the Net Backup software.
Laters,
Finnzi
Howdy,
My summer vacation started last monday and i went to Neskaupstadur (My birthplace) with my son on tuesday. So far it has been pretty good, i am redesigning the server environment for my fathers company, moving it to a fully virtualized environment and hoping to get recovery time in a total server failure down to 15-30 minutes….pretty good for a 25 man shop :)….virtual machines rule!
On tuesday i bought a iPod nano and did some video converting of some very legal TV shows i legally downloaded from the “internets” so i could watch them on the extremly small screen of the iPod…it is good enought for the 55 minute flight from Reykjavik to Egilsstadir.
Tomorrow the IBM x3500 server arrives and i can start the installation & configuration of the new server. Hopefully no issues arrise. In the whole redesign i am planning on to replace the current commercial backup software with Bacula, a open-source project that seems to do everything i would need to do for a sweet backup…it even seems to be able to do tiered storage! ….this software rocks!
The mail server is currently running debian testing (yeah yeah, i know….i should not be running debian, or even debian testing for that matter in a production enviroment, i am a hardcore Red Hat person!) and will be replaced with a nice CentOS 5 virtual machine…
Then there are two Windows 2003 servers, one domain controller which acts as a print & file server also, and another server that runs some misc software.
Well….i am getting pretty damn tired here …Laters!
Finnzi
Howdy,
Yet another Offspring album is out!
I have been listening to the punk rock/skate punk genre since 1995 or so. Offspring has always been one of the better onces, i would say the top 5 with Blink 182, NoFX, Greenday and well, they do not call them self punk rockers but i really think P.U.S.A made some songs sound punk :).
But the new Offspring album did not disappoint me, of course they have made some developments in the “Offspring sound” and i hear few “less-punky” songs there which i liked. But overall those guys keep it real!….bling on the sound!
Bleh, Just wanted to say all hail Offspring 
Laters,
Finnzi
YE!!
Finally the Satellite server has gone open source! (link)
YE!!
We will be able to manage our CentOS/Fedora installations through the awesome Satellite product shortly!. Sadly it is still dependant on the bloody Oracle backend, but the rumor is that there is work starting on porting it to PostgreSQL!!
This is one of the great things about RedHat…..And i find it AWESOME to see they are saying CentOS is going to be supported! I feel like RedHat is admitting the CentOS is, and will be, a good project for servers that do not need support, and RedHat is admitting that RHEL users are going to be mixing RHEL & CentOS in the datacenter.
Great day!
Last night i upgraded a SVC cluster that i am administering with great success. I’ve never had as good experience with the SVC as with any other storage product. Kudos to IBM for making such a great hardware/software combination!
Laters,
Finnzi
This is one of the posts i’m going to be hated for …
Why on earth do people bash Microsoft as much as they do? I keep hearing this: Microsoft sux!…..Why i ask? Because they made product X and it stinks!
Ironically most of those people are employed to administer just that product. So…Microsoft sucks? Did you check out some of the alternatives? Did they not suck? Why do you not just ask your employer to use that instead then?
People often forget that it is because of Microsoft we live our lives as we do today. Linux people might argue, but i am pretty darn sure that if there was no Microsoft, Linux and other operating systems would not have advanced as much as they have today. Do not get me wrong, i am a linux user, administrator, advocate. But without Microsoft we would not be where we are today.
Apple is another company that would not be where it is today if it was not for Microsoft. Sure these companys are competing on some level, and i will surely argue that MacOS X is a very advanced operating system. But Microsoft has a very good directory server, a very good operating system and a very large userbase. That userbase is just about 90% or more of all desktop workstations in the world. Why would we be using Windows, or why would companies be programming for Windows if it sucks so much?
I will argue that Linux is a very good operating system, and my job is really all about linux services, but i would never want to support as many linux workstations as my company is support Windows workstations. Never ever.
Why? While i can have a nice workstation running linux, running all the programs i would need, Joe User is not capable of that. Try to connect a random device to a linux box and have Joe User configure it…..
While i will keep pushing linux on the server side, i will not push linux on workstation as of now. Hopefully i will someday, but as of now, Microsoft, the root of all evil (or so i am told everyday) is doing a fine job on that side….argue all you want, but 90% of the corporate world will argue against you ;).
Just my 2 cents …
Best regards,
Finnzi
Howdy,
Long time no posting!
A lot has happened since last post! :)…..I’ve just installed two new DS4000 boxes at work and have been using the VDisk migration feature of the IBM SVC to migrate LUN’s to them. It is frigging sweet to be able to migrate 30TB’s of data during the daytime …and yet the pricetag is not so horrible :).
I also bought a new laptop since the last post, went with a 13.3″ Black Macbook with 4GB of RAM. I wanted a small laptop, yet in the 1000-1500$ range, so the Lenovo Thinkpad X300 was out of the question ;)….MSI & Acer machines were out of the question due to my stupid believes …*giggle*.
Next week i will hopefully be getting two new SVC nodes i will be adding to our IBM SVC cluster for added performance and reliability (New IOGroup).
I’m a bit biased so do not take my word for it, but ask anyone who has implemented a SVC solution as a storage solution, this product is flipping awesome Every software upgrade, or any upgrade at all that i know of are all online, the multipath software that comes with the solution is one of the best i have ever seen, and if you have IBM Totalstorage Productivity Center to monitor the SVC nodes you can get amazing amount of data to determine the status of your SAN enviroment.
Bleh….enough rambling about the awesomeness of the SVC :)….
I’m off to watch some TV…laters!
Finnzi