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.

(more…)

Share This

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.”

(more…)

Share This

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

Share This

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..

(more…)

Share This

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.

(more…)

Share This

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

(more…)

Share This

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.

(more…)

Share This