In the last week my wife and I have both experienced excellent customer service. All too often you only hear about a company when they do something bad (see all my fail posts). I just want to be sure to give kudos to both of these companies. BornFree: My wife ordered some BornFree Spouts as we start transitioning our son to sippy cups. She said about 5 minutes after she hit the order button she realized she should have ordered more.
Citrix has released the beta for the next version of XenServer code named “Midnight Ride”. I’m looking forward to the enhanced snapshots (memory+disk), and memory over commit for lab environments. Get access to the beta program here
I know I’ve mentioned how much I love the sysstat package before. I use sar regularly to help with performance diagnostics (Analyzing Linux System Performance And Finding Bottle Necks, CPU Performance Analysis In Linux, Baseline Analysis Is Important, CPU Performance Analysis In Linux Revisited). I wrote this little Nagios plugin to collect the performance metrics that sar collects. I use this plugin with Zenoss and I set any performance thresholds there, more important to me was collecting the information for historical graphing.
If you hadn’t already guessed I am a big fan of the Xen hypervisor. Lately I have been using the Citrix XenServer release because it makes it quite palatable for my co-workers. One annoyance that I do have about XenServer is the requirement that you license it (with a free license) every year. If you fail to license it the GUI stops working. Now I hate relying on GUIs but the fact of the matter is others in my team expect to have a working GUI when they need to do something.
Have you ever had a machine that was a bit flaky? You know those ones that occasionally crash and don’t write anything useful into the log file. Sometimes you can capture those messages with netconsole. Just revisiting a small walk-through I wrote a while back. Remote kernel logging with netconsole for fun and profit
I like to have as little run in dom0 as possible. However some things you really need checked from dom0, like the status of your raid perhaps. Just some quick instructions on getting Nagios NRPE running in XenServer. Install EPEL repository and disable it by default (remember we don’t want to accidentally install unnecessary packages) wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/$(uname -i)/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm rpm -hiv epel-release*.rpm sed -i ’s/enabled=1/enabled=0/g’ /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo Install nrpe and configure it to start on boot yum install –enablerepo=epel nrpe chkconfig nrpe on Modify the firewall to allow NRPE connections.
Python has become my language of choice for automation and general scripting. Its nice to have an editor that makes things easier when your doing things. Its also nice to use an editor that you can find just about anywhere. I have customized my vim to make doing things in python much quicker and this is an old post where I talk about some of the modifications. Vim customization for python
This is just an old entry that I thought was interesting, and it appears its still relevant. Like a broken record, “economic times are rough”, what better way to boost your revenue than to exploit your customers. What better way to suppress a competitor than to increase a competitors infrastructure costs (with little visibility to boot). I did some repeated lookups this morning and got similar results. Backdoor Corporate Sabotage With DNS
Another day, another flashback. I don’t know about you but at times I have had some very odd and uncomfortable requests from vendors. It’s not wholly uncommon for them to want to log into your system to diagnose an issue for themselves. Or perhaps for whatever reason your manager says hey give this random outside person access to some important box. As a SA you get used to extremely odd requests and figure out how to just solve the problem.
Matt Simmons is trying to dust off some old articles he think some people may have missed. So I figure why not. A while back I talked about how to move a website (read DNS sucks , you need a reverse proxy). In fact I have talked about reverse proxies a few times since I tend to find them so useful. At any rate, this article stemmed from the first hand experience that opened my eyes to how bad DNS infrastructure really was.