July 8, 2013
by dhoytt
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XCP Enviornment Now HA With HA-Lizard

I wanted to have some sort of failover for my XCP 1.6 virtual environment prior to going to that full time with backups and restore procedures in place plus some failover capability using HA-Lizard. I got a great indication I’m heading in the correct direction when a couple of hours ago I started shutting down the VM’s on my XCP system and they kept restarting.

A big duh I had implemented HA-Lizard Saturday evening verified settings and was enabled on my shared pool on XCP and all VM’s residing on those servers within those pools. So as I shutdown each VM gracefully from the OS I noticed that each time it restarted.

I went on the CLI of my Master XCP server in the pool and did the following to finally shutdown first the HA-Lizard environment and then the XCP environment until later when I make more additions and have time to work on it:

Go to the XCP Master Server Console
#service ha-lizard status –>> verified HA-Lizard running
#service ha-lizard stop –>> Stopped HA-Lizard service but HA-Lizard watchdog service restarted HA-Lizard service
#service ha-lizard status –>> verified HA-Lizard HA service running after started by HA-Lizard watchdog service
#service ha-lizard -w stop –>> Stops HA-Lizard watchdog service and HA-Lizard HA service
#service ha-lizard -w status –>> Verify HA-Lizard watchdog service stopped
#service ha-lizard status –>> Verify HA-Lizard HA service stopped
Shutdown each VM from OS and they now stayed shutdown.
Placed XCP servers in maintenance mode and then shut them down.

I also noticed that before I shutdown the HA-Lizard services if I went to place the XCP host master server or slave server in maintenance mode I was notified it would migrate my VM guest OS’! How sweet is that!

This HA-Lizard XCP combination may be just what I have been looking for a truly Open Source virtual HA environment !

July 6, 2013
by dhoytt
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Fedora 19 Installed on XCP 1.6

Well I just wanted to install Fedora 19 and didn’t want to move hardware around right now plus I need to move some web/game server functions to virtual systems again anyway so I built an Fedora 19 guest system on one of my XCP 1.6 nodes to play with for a bit.

They didn’t change much on the Anaconda Fedora install, you can still only select one group of packages i.e “Web”, “Infrastructure”, “Gnome Desktop”, Cinnamon Desktop”, “KDE Desktop”, etc.. Someone sincerely believes that limiting us to the selections they feel are necessary to your environment for a simple UI (User Interface) install is a ok. So now you have to take the time to build a kickstart or manually install the packages you wanted after initial install. Not very time efficient when you just want to do a quick UI install as opposed to installing a group of systems using kickstart.

They also kept the the partitioning User Interface clumsy and illogical, at least to me it is. I like the way the let you select the disk or LUN’s to use but when you go to partition its a mess. Looks like they want you to declare your mount points before you have even created the volume groups and decided which disks will belong to what volume groups!

Once in the partition screen you can use the drop down to create an LVM volume group but you have to already have to have a mount point selected and in my case that mount point belonged to another disk and volume group. I was able to get it to work but you have to temporarily assign the highlighted mount point to the new volume group, create your new mount point making it about 1mb and then switch the mount points around later and adjust the sizes. Then you have to make sure you double-check to insure when you highlight the mount point it shows the proper size and volume group designation! Then the interface kept dying on me so I decided to add the extra disks and volume groups manually after the initial install along with the extra software packages I want.

After everything is selected you hit click install and then it asks you for a “root” password and to create a regular system user and that password while you watch it start the process of installing packages below. That is way to bizarre and backwards. This should come before you hit install.

I love change and there has to be change. We are conditioned that way as humans to survive because if we didn’t change and adapt in a world that hurtles around the sun and has winds, water and other elements that change the environment we do not survive.. Digressing here but in the Linux world for some reason we have lost something, its almost as if the people developing this are former MS Windows people bent on taking away options and hiding things. I understand the need for more acceptance to keep this going but taking away options and ASSuming everyone wants to dumb down options is the wrong way to go.

Anyway got it installed had to do a bunch of manual stuff no problem just extra time plus it was able to pickup my proper timezone here in Fedora 19 as opposed to Fedora 18 so some progress. Plus after all of these years of using Linux since the early/mid ’90’s I still love it and its my OS of choice but my old friend BSD is a peeking around the corner!

July 4, 2013
by dhoytt
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Site Back And Running After Brief Power Surge

Well I overloaded the circuit with te number of systems I had on it and didn’t have my UPS on so it took down my site and support systems. I had some of my new systems I had built plus new disk arrays and the power went off.

Well I moved my desktops systems off of the server circuit and will make a few more adjustments like that plus hopefully hook back up my UPS that blew its voltage regulator. I should have went with a 40 amp circuit instead of a 20 amp but of course had less powerful systems then. I also will not have this many systes once my new setup is completed the old systems will be shutdown!

June 14, 2013
by dhoytt
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My Photo Gallery Site & Online Chess is Restored Once Again

Restored my Photo Gallery Site (http://www.dhoytt.com/gallery3/) again by restoring the database and cleaning it up once again. Hope to have some new content soon.

I also restored the Site’s Online Chess Club @ http://www.dhoytt.com/da_hoytt_games_blog/chess/chess_club.html.

I hope to get my new drives into my disk arrays soon!

June 8, 2013
by dhoytt
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Cleaned Up MySQL On Server

I did some cleanup of MySQL last night and this morning. Basically the forum database based on phpBB was out of control and had grown huge along with the MySQL files in /var/lib/mysql/ for that database along with the “ibdata1” file and log files also in that directory.

I ended up taking the following steps:

Cleared some file space since I was @ 100% by uninstalling some unneeded packages
Insured that all the databases were error free:
- “mysqlcheck –repair –all-databases
Dumped the databases to another directory in my home directory where I keep backup files using “Webmin”.
Dropped all of the databases
Stopped MySQL using “systemctl”:
- “systemctl stop mysqld.service”
Copied the ibdata1 file and accompanying log files to my backup directory just in case I needed to recreate the environment.
Restarted MySQL service:
- “systemctl start mysqld.service”
Restored all of the individual database schemas using MySQL Workbench not having anything to do with phpBB forums
Decided I would try to keep the current database schema for the phpBB forums but since I had done little decided it would be a waste of time.
- Dropped the forum phpBB database again after I had restored it and it continued to take up lots of space and there were no tools I found in phpBB to prune the database
- Stopped MySQL
  - “systemctl stop mysqld.service”
- This time deleted/var/lib/ibdata1 and associated log files
- Started MySQL
  - “systemctl start mysqld.service”
Reinstalled phpBB using my current customized config files but with new database I created.

April 10, 2013
by dhoytt
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Favorite Rose Bush in Full Bloom Early

Well one of my rose bushes with long stem red roses is in ful bloom already this year and looking great! This is my favorite rose bush because it blooms the whole year is not a hybrid so thus it smells as great as it looks! My other rose bushes have one or two flowers and I anticipate them bloomimg very soon but none are usually as nice looking as this bush!

March 31, 2013
by dhoytt
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Getting the Flower Garden Ready For 2013 & Vegetable Garden Mostly Planted

Well I trimmed up the existing flowers, roses and pulled weeds from the front flower beds, planted some new rose bushes and also planted most of my vegetable garden this weekend. I almost forgot I also pulled a bunch of weeds from the narrow corridor behind the house Now I just have a bit of touch up on all the garden beds plus some clean-up and pressure washing of the concrete in the back and toss a few more items then I start inside of the house & garage!

This year in the vegetable garden so far I have planted, jalapeno peppers, habanera peppers, Portugal hot peppers, green, red & orange bell peppers, beef steak tomatoes, yellow pear tomatoes, red cherry tomatoes, pumpkin, yellow straight squash, zucchini squash, red okra, green okra, black beauty egg plants, collard greens, black eyed peas, cucumbers, lettuce salad mix of seeds, snap peas, bush beans and some items I am sure I have forgotten. I just hope it will be a productive year after last year letting the raspberry & grape vines over run everything!

As far as the flower garden I added some nice variety of roses since I’m tired of doing different annuals each year. I added a Black Baccara rose bush, a White Honey rose bush and a Twilight rose bush that has dark violet hues. The Black Baccara will have red buds with heavy black tinting, while the White Honey will have a snow white looking flower along with the Twilight nice additions to the gardens with my other pink, red and orange roses!

A few pictures show below show current progress but once everything is in full bloom watch out vegetable & flower gardens will be rocking this year!

March 30, 2013
by dhoytt
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Lightning and Thunder Show in Sacramento

Silly me I really thought that someone was outside taking pictures when it was a good old fashion lightning storm outside the windows and now the thunder is starting to boom as well!

I hope this blows over so that I can finish my yard tomorrow even though they predict rain tomorrow!

Another update really to come on the yard as I get it into shape but for tonight will look at the lightning & thunder storm hoping for a respite tomorrow!

March 24, 2013
by dhoytt
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2013 Vegetable Garden Laid Out

Well I have several truckloads of compost rototilled into the soil for my vegetable gardens in the backyard. Placed some already nicely composed compost from the Horse Association off of Longview drive here in Sacramento along with compost from my normal outlet Longer’s landscape.

I had to really break up the roots from the raspberry and grape vines I let run wild last year that really compacted the clay soil in one garden. In the other garden I had to break up the roots from the neighbor’s trees and some mint plants roots that were running wild and deep.

After the initial rototilling to break up the soil I mixed in the two different types of compost and now the soil is very aerated and looking and feeling rich. I can’t wait to see what the results will be. I plan on placing some mulch on top of the soil this year too to slow water evaporation.

I also put back the initial placements of my drip system back in place and made some repairs for damaged attachments.

February 26, 2013
by dhoytt
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Cleaned up Some Issues on Site Web Server

There were some system administration issues with some files on the web server filling up some partitions. I cleared up those issues and everything seems a bit better at this time. Bear with me as I am doing some major hardware upgrades behind the scenes that will make things ultimately perform better in the long run.

After those hardware updates I have slated some additional software/application updates as well as some settings and software to load web pages much faster and ever more updates!

I also had some issues with the music streaming that I have corrected but will find the root cause later. I recently updated the software so hopefully that did not have a hand in the issues.

More to come!!