Darryl Hoytt's Personal Blog

I was having issues creating an entry for the "Snakeice House of Beats" radio Blog and then went into MySQL on that server and discovered some issues with the MySQL tables that I then repaired. I went ahead and created that entry after the repairs and all looks fine as this post also shows since its shares the same MySQL instance and code base!

I have a new 24 port switch I will be placing into my environment tonight along with another 24 port switch I picked up and have been using with another two other 8 port switches so there may be some outages but my overall LAN and network speed to you should improve.

Well I placed Solaris 11 x86 on one off My Supermicro systems for now to see what's different and this also gets any version of Solaris back up in my environment after a long absence. Previously I had this system running ESXi 4.1 and a few virtual machines.

Now with Solaris 11 x86 I will get an opportunity to deploy Oracle's version of vitualization "Zones".

Looks like a lot changed in Solaris 11, plus I realized after talking to some administrators who play with Solaris full time I needed to stick my fingers back in on a more regular basis to re-familiarize myself. I think I will throw Solaris 10 up somewhere as well maybe as a virtual guest on VMWare or Solaris Zones or are they Solaris Containers?

My Adatptec 7902 SCSI RAID card is throwing out some errors but my drives were recognized just fine. I may suppress those errors if I find they are meaningless as I suspect. I added additional drivers for the SCSI RAID during install that installed fine so will see how things play out.

Stay tuned the promised changes to the web sites is still going albeit slowly and my entire lab/computer room is changing along with other major adjustments in life so you will see changes in bursts!

Posted from my new Solaris 11 x86 system's desktop.

Well after some freaky months of numerous issues coupled with having to spend money on other projects I finally have my systems at the proper foundation hardware & base OS roles and assignments moving forward!

The main issue that I had was that the SAS RAID daughter cards initially didn't quite work the way I wanted even with the specialty connector's that I ordered for my Intel S5000XAL motherboards. I initially ordered these because they were quite a bit less expensive than the internal cards plus the information out there was sketchy for this motherboard and I incorrectly thought the external daughter cards also had internal connectors and I was wrong.  I also ended up with some faulty SAS drives so that combination didn't help.

I updated and downgraded the SAS daughter card firmware several times but with that combination of bad drives & incompatible SAS daughter cards & specialty customized cables I connected externally then ran internally there were way too many issues!

I finally ended up buying the internal SAS daughter board cards and they didn't work with the drives so I really thought I was against it. Next step I purchased another SAS RAID card for another system and tested the drives and the drives didn't respond to that SAS controller either.

I finally brought in two new Dell systems 1850 & 1950 which has SAS and I confirmed that the drives I had were bad by trying to use them in the Dell 1950 SAS drive bays. I then took one of the known good drives off of the 1950 and tested with the internal SAS controller cards on my custom system with the S500XAL motherboards and they worked just fine.

So now I have the two identical systems with the S5000XAL motherboards in custom 2U cases and the two Dells systems in my environment which are 1u.

I will use one Dell system for my web server for now and the other for my management server running Open source application monitoring software, backups and software in that genre. The two custom built identical systems with my Intel S5000XAL motherboards will run VMware. I will then load Solaris x86 on either my former web server or another VMware system I have already in my environment and the other will be my duplicate web server.

I have other systems that will play a flex role and I will use for tests and filling in holes in the environment and/or development.

I was working on some new pages on my site and then my site went down. I had to troubleshoot the issue and found that it was my switch that comes into my entire environment from the WAN that then goes to my routers. I had to fire up Wireshark to see that the responses were being rejected until I bypassed the switch to each router. still the switch would act as if it was working and then finally after the last power recycle of switch not even the connectivity activity lights came back on.

While the switch was connected the routers started cycling to show a status of WAN disconnected so that was another clue. Oh well time I slapped another switch in its place and I'm fully back up once again. I'll have to upgrade in that area once again which I was already looking at but wanted to look into other upgrades in the environment first.

Either way back up and serving web pages and streams once again!

In the background on my others servers I'm working on a completely new look for the site with a new CMS\Blog platform! Seems that my current platform has been somewhat bogged down in the development area and the others are taking nice stride forward and will give me the functionality to really craft my site it seems more to my liking. I think that the pieces and parts will be more but the customization that I'm running into is great but I just need to get up to speed on it!

I will be able to have more forms more interaction and that should make it more user friendly with more to do and integrate with other sites you may use.

Stay tuned!

Looks like "systemd/systemctl" are taking over from System V service controls in Linux. Fedora 16 this is the default manager for controlling the services on Linux. I was attempting to use "chkconfig" and it kept forwarding the request to "systemctl" so I was finally forced to look at the man pages and the Fedora page and so far I like what I see except the assigning of start levels takes too many keystrokes and too long to check status.

Not completely sold on "systemd" but I will work with it and see how it does for now it seems to be working just fine.

Here are some helpful links:

Fedora SysVinit to Systemd Cheatsheet
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SysVinit_to_Systemd_Cheatsheet

Fedora Systemd Page
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Systemd

I performed a fresh install on my boot disk of Fedora 16 moving from Fedora 13 after using the "linux noprobe" to see my devices on the HP DL580 smart array as mentioned in my previous post. Once I had Fedora 16 properly installed and updated now was the time to bring in the other drives I didn't want the installation to touch into use.

I didn't have to perform  "vgimport". When I ran the "vgdisplay -v" command to find what the current state of LVM and names the volume groups and logical volumes were already imported so all I had to do was enter them into "/etc/fstab/" and mount the directories.

After mounting "/home" and the other directories in "init level 3"  I entered "init level 5" to start the desktop and after trying to login into my users I created on the system I get the error "call to lnusertemp failed (temporary directories full ?).Check your installation".


I restarted the system in "single-user mode" and well "/tmp" or the mountpoint it was connected to "/" wasn't full and the permissions were wide open. I looked at a few more items and checked log files then decided to  copy the files from the "/home" created by the system which I had renamed to "/home.orig" before mounting my old logical volume to the newly created "/home" and still couldn't login.

After rebooting again into single-user-mode, I then looked at the permissions of the user directories in /home and noticed that the numeric values were being used and not the user names. I then looked in "/etc/passwd" (#cat /etc/passwd |grep <username>) and of course the numeric values in the new "/etc/passwd" didn't match the numeric values from my previous install.

to correct the issue I performed the chown command for each user's directory:
#chown  -R <username>:<username> /home/<user-directory>/

Now "ls -al /home/<user-directory>/" shows the  user name instead of the numeric value and I can login just fine into each user on the system.

Who is making the decisions about what to include in the Fedora distributions? I have noticed Ever since at least Fedora 10 and maybe sooner you have had to jump through various hoops to get SCSI and RAID controllers to operate properly.

 Does the Fedora project have a lot of people unaware of the enterprise part of computing as far as the hardware layer is concerned?  I'm trying to do a simple base installation on an HP DL580 with a smart array and I have tried the suggestions on Fedora's kernel issue page @ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_kernel_problems but still I'm unable to get Fedora 16 to recognize the RADI/SCSI controller on my DL580. Every other Distribution I have tried without any alterations to the boot parameters recognize the devices without fail and also pick up on the current  custom  LVM partitioning I have setup so I can preserve the data on those partitions to save me having to restore after boot!

I really have been a Fedora fan since its inception and Red Hat going back to the really early versions in early to mid '90's but I really don't want to have to insert or exclude certain kernel drivers or parameters for fresh install all of the time when other distributions of Linux like Ubuntu & Centos, see the devices in question right away without any further action from myself! I have other things to worry about like rebuilding my web sites, studying up on new software/hardware, fishing, etc.., don't make me have to jump through hoops just to see standard hardware other Linux distro plans for!

Time to expand my horizons and check out the other Linux distributions to save my precious time which is the reason I  have always used  Fedora it used to save me time hunting down drivers/software etc..!

*****************************UPDATE***************************************

Okay after blowing off some steam I did finally get the Fedora 16 install to recognize my Smart Array on my DL580 by sspeciffying the following as boot options during the install: "linux noprobe acpi=noirq askmethod". I then selected SmartArray2 and presto I can see my drives!

Credit due to old post on Linux forums though I do recall doing this before I had not recalled it until seeing this post: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/cannot-install-scsi-driver-for-compaq-smart-array-in-fedora-core-v-438887/

I did this after installing Centos and looking around it for a while. I just really like the glob of software that I get with Fedora. I have discovered so many helpful programs with Fedora its addictive and hard to give up even with some of the install issues I have had to work around with what seems to be a devalued view of some SCSI/RAID/SAS controller cards or maybe I'm missing the maintainers vision. I will still be playing with Centos since it mirrors so enterprise Red Hat so closely which I see in the work place so much but without the cost. I will also play further with Ubuntu & OpenSUSE to get familiar with those distributions software they package with.