After a number of attempts at starting a blog, this time I am going to succeed. Why? I don’t know, just a change in my rational on life I guess. I will probably mostly post on System Administration topics, hints, tips, gotchas, etc. I might post about my family or other person things from time to time too. So, ENJOY.

I assist a company that looks after many networking and a few windows and VMware machines. I had setup a Nagios instance that was doing all the monitoring, but was a little cumbersome to manage and others who are not quite so Nagios literate needed to make changes as well, and so we had setup NagiosQL, which was working OK, but not quite what we wanted. After a short discussion we decided to change to Zenoss. Because I was using NagiosQL and we had everything sorted into various groups, I was able to write a bunch of SQL that grabbed all the needed bits that I could pass to zendisc to easily add all the hosts. Read more

A blog to vent, discuss or otherwise anything to do with devops, system administration/operations family or anything else I feel like at the time. NB: The views here are my own and having nothing to do with my employer.

I recently had a clustered OVM 2.2 system that had suffered from a catastrophic power failure across all nodes. This ended up corrupting several of the BerkelyDBs that ovs-agent keeps in /etc/ovs-agent/db and /OVS/.ovs-agent/db. On starting ovs-agent, I was getting errors like: “2012-02-15 21:56:24” INFO=> ha_set_shutdown_mode: inform master agent, leave shutdown mode. “2012-02-15 21:56:54” ERROR=> ha_set_shutdown_mode: failed. =>errcode=00001, errmsg=CDS accquire lock /etc/ovs-agent/db/ataskaux.lock timeout. locker process is 16953. StackTrace: File “/opt/ovs-agent-2.3/OVSXHA.py”, line 488, in ha_set_shutdown_mode rs = sp.set_shutdown_mode(“,”.join(my_ips), False) File “/opt/ovs-agent-2.3/OVSServerProxy.py”, line 65, in __getattr__ if not OVSAsyncTaskAux.in_asyncenv(): File “/opt/ovs-agent-2.3/OVSAsyncTaskAux.py”, line 143, in in_asyncenv taskid = get_asynctaskid() File “/opt/ovs-agent-2.3/OVSAsyncTaskAux.py”, line 151, in get_asynctaskid cds = CDS(‘ataskaux’) File “/opt/ovs-agent-2.3/OVSCDS.py”, line 119, in __init__ raise CDSLockTimeout(ERR_CDS_LOCK_TIMOUT, { Also when trying to start virtual machines, I would get the following error: Read more

One of our clients had been running OVM 2.2 for several months after we set them up. They are running a database VM and a couple of application VMs. After they heard of the release of OVM 3.0 they were really keen on getting that installed. I put them off for as long as I could to ensure stability, but I couldn’t hold them off any longer, and I have just completed the migration. Read more