I work with several clients and often we are using different version of tools at different times. While I’m endeavouring to move my development processes to use docker containers I still do a lot of development locally on my Mac. I’m still running Mac OS (or is that OS X??), and so I use brew to install many of my tools. What I’ve struggled with in the past is installing certain versions of the many tools. e.g. terraform or ansible can often be stuck until someone has a chance to port breaking changes between versions. Recently while on-boarding someone into a team, I went out and tried to find a way to do the install. Everything I tried didn’t work. It seems it was never the intention and so the packaging doesn’t really support it. Read more

As many people know I usually use a GNU Linux desktop environment, and have for a few years. I have previously had to use Windows during stints at large Engineering orgs, but most of the time, I was able to setup a second computer with Linux on it for day-to-day tasks. I’ve also used macOS/OS X a few times in the last few years, and I’ve got pretty frustrated with it. Recently I had a lot of trouble with my daily work-horse (Dell E5530), where Dell actually took it away for a few weeks. I needed something quick and $employer was able to help me out. The best laptop available was 2015 MacBook Pro. Read more

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

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