RHEL4 Kernel – PowerPath – OCFS2 upgrade procedure
We have been working on a project for a customer to upgrade the kernel, PowerPath, OCFS2 and other operating system patches. The project was interesting as no single source of information existed on the appropriate process.
The procedure issue comes in because OCFS2 relies on seeing the disks which PowerPath presents. PowerPath and OCFS2 are reliant on a particular kernel version to work properly. With all of the inter-dependencies, which should be done and in what order was the question. To top it off, this was also running a RHEL cluster and another instance running Oracle RAC.
Ohio LinuxFest 2008
MNX Solutions will be sponsoring the sixth annual Ohio LinuxFest, which will be held on October 10-11 2008 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in downtown Columbus, Ohio. The Ohio LinuxFest welcomes Free and Open Source Software professionals, enthusiasts, and anyone who wants to take part in the event. Read more
Red Hat, Fedora openssh security compromise
Many of you may have already read the news, but for those of you that have not here is a recap. But first, let me state that we have tested all of our customer’s servers, and none have been compromised.
An email was sent to the fedora-announce mailing list, it started with, “Last week we discovered that some Fedora servers were illegally accessed. The intrusion into the servers was quickly discovered, and the servers were taken offline.”
Network Solutions down, Under Attack [resolved]
Many of our customers have servers located with Softlayer. According to this thread (softlayer account required):
“There’s an ongoing attack directed to Network Solutions from a number of providers. Currently the attacker is spoofing the source addresses making it quite difficult to track down. As such Network Solutions requested that we [Softlayer] block all outbound traffic to their netblock until further notice. They have also blocked all of our IP space inbound to their network at their provider’s edge.”
Extracting files from rpm and deb packages
We ran into an issue where an init script was missing and we needed to restore the file. The backup (of course) did not include the file we needed. We had to download the package, extract the contents, and move the init script back into place. Below are the commands used:
DEB:
$ dpkg-deb -x <package.deb> /restore/dir
RPM:
$ rpm2cpio <package.rpm> | cpio -idv
IXOS HDSK Migration
MNX Solutions works on many UNIX based systems, one of which is IXOS (now called OpenText).
We needed to migrate from WORM (9.1GB) media to a hard disk based configuration for performance, scalability and disaster recovery purposes. Below is the high level procedure I used during the migration to migrate from WORM to HDSK, on IXOS EconServer 5.5C..
Zimbra – Pop before smtp authentication howto
We had a client with 3000+ named users, and each of them were configured without authentication for smtp relaying, the qmail/vpopmail system they were migrating from had “pop before smtp” authentication. Well, we wanted to have as little disruption as possible for the migration so we needed to enable this same feature in Zimbra.
It is still planned to cutover the clients to SMTP Authentication, but this allows for a somewhat smoother transition.
Retrieve Ensim MySQL root password
You can display the current root password for mysql (if the host is running ensim), by using the following command.
# ensim-python -c "import sys;sys.path.append(\"/usr/lib/opcenter/mysql\");import mysqlbe;print mysqlbe.read_mysqlpass()"
cPanel / Fantastico Deluxe install doesn't do anything.
We ran into an issue when installing Fantastico. After clicking the installation button, everything seemed to download just fine, but every time you go back to the Fantastico link it says it is not installed.
It turns out, Fantastico uses wget to download files. wget is called with the ‘-P’ option, which is not honored in the recent version of wget. In order to get around this, I found the following post useful: http://www.netenberg.com/forum/index.php?topic=5430.0
Netdump, figuring out what caused that system crash
We have all been there before. Your server crashed, nothing indicates what happened. You check /var/log/messages and all you see is.. well.. nothing. With no sign of what happened, or indication of why it happened you are left to.. wait until it happens again.
On Red Hat based systems, you have an answer. NetDump (diskdump may work as well, more on that another time). Below we will explore the steps required to setup and test netdump.