Jack asked me yesterday about the ISA video card in the background, by my TV.
Home sweet home! Click the image for a larger version if you want to read the PCB.
I found it when at the Broadbeach Markets, in Gold Coast, Brisbane, Australia one year at a random stall, I don’t normally collect much in the way of trinkets, but this is one of the few that I have. :-)
Sorry for another marketing sales interruption, but I’ve listed the remaining items of furniture from my flat onto Trademe this evening.
It includes some good stuff like a great computer desk, chair, bed, dining table and other items, if you’re in Auckland or know somebody in Auckland who needs better furniture, please point them towards it. :-)
I’m trying to get rid of anything sizable before I head to Wellington, once down there I’ll be going through all my computer gear and having a final sell off of everything I no longer require.
Naturally selling the furniture is the number 1 priority. ;-)
You can view my listings here.
My file server virtual machine passed the 2TB limit a couple months ago, which forced me to get around to upgrading it to RHEL 6 and moving from MSDOS to GPT based partitions, as the MSDOS partitioning table doesn’t support more than 2TB partitions.
I recently had to boost it up by another 1 TB to counter growing disk usage and got stuck trying to resize the physical volume – the trusty old fdisk command doesn’t support GPT partitions, with most documentation resources directing you to use parted instead.
The problem with parted, is that the developers have tried to be clever and made parted filesystem aware, so it will perform filesystem operations as well as block partition operations. Secondly, parted writes changes whilst you’re making them rather than letting you discard or write the final results of your changes to the partition table.
This breaks really badly for my LVM physical volume partitions – as you can see below, parted has a resize command, but when used against an LVM volume it is unable to recognize it as a known type and fails with the very helpful “Error: Could not detect file system“.
Naturally this didn’t put parted into my good books for the evening – doing a search of the documentation didn’t really clarify whether doing the old fdisk way or deleting and re-creating partitions at the same start and end positions was safe or not, but the documentation suggested that this is a destructive process. Seeing as I really didn’t feel like have to pull 2TB of data off backup, I chose caution and decided not to test that poorly documented behavior.
The other suggested option is to just add an additional partition and add it to LVM – whilst there’s no technical reason against this method, it really offended my OCD and the desire to keep my server’s partitioning table simple and logical – I don’t want lots of weirdly sized partitions littering the server from every time I’ve had to upsize the virtual machine!
Whilst cursing parted, I wondered whether there was a tool just like fdisk, but for GPT partition tables. Linux geeks do like to poke fun at fdisk for having a somewhat obscure user interface and basic feature set, but once you learn it, it’s a powerful tool with excellent documentation and it’s simplicity leads it to being able to perform a number of very tricky tasks, as long as the admin knows what they’re doing.
Doing some research lead me to gdisk, which as the name suggests, is a GPT capable clone of fdisk, providing a very similar user interface and functionality.
Whilst it’s not part of RHEL’s core package set, it is available in the EPEL repositories, hopefully these are acceptable to your environment:
Once installed, it was a pretty simple process of loading gdisk and deleting the partition before expanding to the new size:
Most important is to verify that the start sector hasn’t changed between deleting the old partition and adding the new one – as long as these are the same and the partition is the same size or larger than the old one, everything will be OK.
Save and apply the changes:
On my RHEL 6 KVM virtio VM, I wasn’t able to get the OS to recognize the new partition size, even after running partprobe, so I had to reboot the VM.
Once rebooted, it was a simple case of issuing pvresize and pvdisplay to confirm the new physical volume size – from there, I can then expand LVM logical volumes as desired.
Note that pvresize is a bit annoying in that it won’t show any unallocated space – what is means by free PE, is free physical extents, disk that the LVM physical volume already occupies but which isn’t allocated to logical volumes yet. Until you run pvresize, you won’t see any change to the size of the volume.
So far gdisk looks pretty good, I suspect it will become a standard on my own Linux servers, but not being in the base RHEL repositories will limit usage a bit on commercial and client systems, which often have very locked down and limited package sets.
The fact that I need a partition table at all with my virtual machines is a bit of a pain, it would be much nicer if I could just turn the whole /dev/vda drive into a LVM physical volume and then boot the VM from an LVM partition inside the volume.
As things currently stand, it’s necessary to have a non-LVM /boot partition, so I have to create one small conventional partition for boot and a second partition consuming all remaining disk for actual data.
Let’s play spot the difference:
[root@localhost ~]# /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_disk -w 20 -c 10 -p /home
DISK OK – free space: /home 111715 MB (4% inode=99%);| /home=2498209MB;2609905;2609915;0;2609925
[root@localhost ~]# /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_disk -w 20% -c 10% -p /home
DISK CRITICAL – free space: /home 111715 MB (4% inode=99%);| /home=2498209MB;2087940;2348932;0;2609925
Make sure you that you define your units of disk or add % to your Nagios checks otherwise you might suddenly find yourself running to add more disk….
As mentioned in my previous post, we’re moving to AU so selling off everything – there’s a few more items up for sale now:
Particularly important is selling our furniture, so if you know anyone in Auckland who might be interested in some good second-hand furniture, please forward this through to them. :-)
There will be a bit more stuff to list once I get to Wellington at the end of August as well, feel free to contact me directly if you’re interested in bulk amounts of new-condition Cat6 patch leads or rackmount PDUs, if I can do direct sales it’s way nicer than paying Trademe fees.
I’ll also be selling my 1997 Toyota Starlet around the 1st of September, so if you’re after a great car and have a budget around $4,500, get in touch with me and we can talk. :-) Can even possibly deliver it to where ever you are in NZ.
So it’s official, Lisa and I are heading off from NZ for a while to try our luck over in that other small island nation across the Tasman.
The idea is that we’ll spend a couple years in AU and from there, either do further overseas adventure or end up returning back to NZ – presuming of course that we manage to escape AU at all. ;-)
Whilst part of the lure is naturally AU’s strong economy and plentiful IT jobs, the real drive is to have a bit of a change of lifestyle and for me personally, to get involved in some more challenging and exciting projects.
We haven’t decided on the exact city yet, it’s most likely going to be Melbourne, but keeping options open and considering other locations such as Sydney, depending what interesting challenges are around.
We’ve both given work our notice and finish on the 24th of August, with a departure date from Auckland of the 26th of August. That’s only 3 weeks now, so starting some pretty frantic efforts of selling off all our stuff, trying to line up work in AU and organizing a million+ other details and things to be done.
At this stage it’s looking like I’ll end up spending 1-2 weeks in Wellington before flying to AU for a week or two aiming to line up some job opportunities, however still trying to figure out the details. We’re mostly focused on sorting out some work for myself, it’s much easier to live on just my IT salary than just Lisa’s writers salary. ;-)
I have a number of job types I could go for, but will probably aim for a Linux/Open Source engineering or consulting role in a senior space, I’ve been getting a bit bored with my current role simply due to the low challenge level of work, so really need something that pushes me into new challenges – and I don’t even want to *see* a desktop computer ever again. ;-)
If you know of any employers seeking staff or some good contracts for this sort of work, send me an email and I’ll send through my CV. :-)
Meanwhile, I’m selling almost all of my stuff before I go – check out my Trademe auctions, there’s anything from computers, components, cushions, furniture, cables and more, most of the smaller items I’ll ship anywhere in NZ.
Once I get to Wellington I expect I’ll list a few more items as well, I want to clear out what I have left at my parents some more as well, there’s a lot that’s ended up there since I moved to Auckland last year, and I probably don’t need to store a toaster for the next several years or a small data center worth of Cat6 patch leads.
Ideally my dream apartment in AU is going to have a laptop and a router on the floor with nothing else in the room, but I suspect that Lisa will want a few more comforts than just this, so maybe I’ll have to compromise a little….
I’ll do another blog post once I’ve confirmed dates for our initial trip over to AU and hopefully I’ll be able to confirm “final move” dates not long after that. :-)
Sometimes I need to connect directly to the console of my virtual machines, typically this is usually when working with development or experimental VMs where SSH/RDP/VNC isn’t working for whatever reason, or when I’m installing a new OS entirely.
To view virtual machines using libvirt (by both KVM or Xen), you use the virt-viewer command, this launches a window and establishes a VNC or SPICE connection into the virtual machine.
Historically I’ve just run this by SSHing into the virtual machine host and then using X11 forwarding to display the virtual machine window on my laptop. However this performs really badly on slow connections, particularly 3G where it’s almost unusable due to the design of X11 forwarding not being particularly efficient.
However virt-viewer has the capability to run locally and connect to a remote server, either directly to the libvirt daemon, or via an SSH tunnel. To do the latter, the following command will work for KVM (qemu) based hypervisors:
virt-viewer --connect qemu+ssh://user@host.example.com/system vmnamehere
With the above, you’ll have to enter your SSH password twice – first to establish the connection to the hypervisor and secondly to establish a tunnel to the VM’s VNC/SPICE session – you’ll probably quickly decide to get some SSH keys/certs setup to prevent annoyance. ;-)
This performs way faster than X11 forwarding, plus the UI of virt-manager stays much more responsive, including grabbing/ungrabbing of the local keyboard/mouse, even if the connection or server is lagging badly.
If you’re using Xen with libvirt, the following should work (I haven’t tested this, but based on the man page and some common sense):
virt-viewer --connect xen+ssh://user@host.example.com/ vmnamehere
If you wanted to open up the right ports on your server’s firewall and are sending all traffic via a secure connection (eg VPN), you can drop the +ssh and use –direct to connect directly to the hypervisor and VM without port forwarding via SSH.
A number of friends are always quite interested in how my personal IT infrastructure is put together, so I’m going to try and do one post a week ranging from physical environments, desktop, applications, server environments, monitoring and architecture.
Hopefully this is of interest to some readers – I’ll be upfront and advise that not everything is perfect in this setup, like any large environment there’s always ongoing upgrade projects, considering my environment is larger than some small ISPs it’s not surprising that there’s areas of poor design or legacy components, however I’ll try to be honest about these deficiencies and where I’m working to make improvements.
If you have questions or things you’d like to know my solution for, feel free to comment on any of the posts in this series. :-)
Today I’m examining my physical infrastructure, including my workstation and my servers.
After my move to Auckland, it’s changed a lot since last year and is now based around my laptop and gaming desktop primarily.
All the geekery, all the time
This is probably my most effective setup yet, the table was an excellent investment at about $100 off Trademe, with enough space for 2 workstations plus accessories in a really comfortable and accessible form factor.
My laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad X201i, with an Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB RAM, 120GB SSD and a 9-cell battery for long run time. It was running Fedora, but I recently shifted to Debian so I could upskill on the Debian variations some more, particularly around packaging.
I tend to dock it and use the external LCD mostly when at home, but it’s quite comfortable to use directly and I often do when out and about for work – I just find it’s easier to work on projects with the larger keyboard & screen so it usually lives on the dock when I’m coding.
This machine gets utterly hammered, I run this laptop 24×7, typically have to reboot about once every month or so, usually from issues resulting with a system crash from docking or suspend/resume – something I blame the crappy Lenovo BIOS for.
I have an older desktop running Windows XP for gaming, it’s a bit dated now with only a Core 2 Duo and 3GB RAM – kind of due for a replacement, but it still runs the games I want quite acceptably, so there’s been little pressure to replace – plus since I only really use it about once a week, it’s not high on my investment list compared to my laptop and servers.
Naturally, there are the IBM Model M keyboards for both systems, I love these keyboards more than anything (yes Lisa, more than anything <3 ) and I’m really going to be sad when I have to work in an office with other people again whom don’t share my love for loud clicky keyboards.
The desk is a bit messy ATM with several phones and routers lying about for some projects I’ve been working on, I’ll go through stages of extreme OCD tidiness to surrendering to the chaos… fundamentally I just have too much junk to go on it, so trying to downsize the amount of stuff I have. ;-)
Of course this is just my workstations – there’s a whole lot going on in the background with my two physical servers where the real stuff happens.
A couple years back, I had a lab with 2x 42U racks which I really miss. These days I’m running everything on two physical machines running Xen and KVM virtualisation for all services – it was just so expensive and difficult having the racks, I’d consider doing it again if I brought a house, but when renting it’s far better to be as mobile as possible.
The primary server is my colocation box which runs in a New Zealand data center owned by my current employer:
Forever Alone :'( [thanks to my colleagues for that]
It’s a vendor box as it enabled me to have 3 yrs onsite NBD repair support for it, these days I have a complete hardware spare onsite since it’s too old to be supported by IBM any longer.
To provide security isolation and easier management, services are spread across a number of Xen virtual machines based on type and risk of attack, this machine runs around 8 virtual machines performing different publicly facing services including running my mail servers, web servers, VoIP, IM and more.
For anything not public-facing or critical production, there’s my secondary server, which is a “whitebox” custom build running a RHEL/CentOS/JethroHybrid with KVM for virtualisation, running from home.
Whilst I run this server 24×7, it’s not critical for daily life, so I’m able to shut it down for a day or so when moving house or internet providers and not lose my ability to function – having said that, an outage for more than a couple days does get annoying fast….
Mmmmmm my beautiful monolith
This attractive black monolith packs a quad core Phenom II CPU, custom cooler, 2x SATA controllers, 16GB RAM, 12x 1TB hard drives in full tower Lian Li case. (slightly out-of-date spec list)
I’m running RHEL with KVM on this server which allows me to run not just my internal production Linux servers, but also other platforms including Windows for development and testing purposes.
It exists to run a number of internal production services, file shares and all my development environment, including virtual Linux and Windows servers, virtual network appliances and other test systems.
These days it’s getting a bit loaded, I’m using about 1 CPU core for RAID and disk encryption and usually 2 cores for the regular VM operation, leaving about 1 core free for load fluctuations. At some point I’ll have to upgrade, in which case I’ll replace the M/B with a new one to take 32GB RAM and a hex-core processor (or maybe octo-core by then?).
To avoid nasty sudden poweroff issues, there’s an APC UPS keeping things running and a cheap LCD and ancient crappy PS/2 keyboard attached as a local console when needed.
It’s a pretty large full tower machine, so I except to be leaving it in NZ when I move overseas for a while as it’s just too hard to ship and try and move around with it – if I end up staying overseas for longer than originally planned, I may need to consider replacing both physical servers with a single colocated rackmount box to drop running costs and to solve the EOL status of the IBM xseries.
The little black box on the bookshelf with antennas is my Mikrotik Routerboard 493G, which provides wifi and wired networking for my flat, with a GigE connection into the server which does all the internet firewalling and routing.
Other than the Mikrotik, I don’t have much in the way of production networking equipment – all my other kit is purely development only and not always connected and a lot of the development kit I now run as VMs anyway.
Hopefully this is of some interest, I’ll aim to do one post a week about my infrastructure in different areas, so add to your RSS reader for future updates. :-)
Occasionally I have to touch Microsoft software, thankfully most of our customers have their licenses entered into the Volume Licensing Service Center these days which makes finding the install media a lot easier than rummaging through CD wallets in the office.
The volume license center isn’t perfect by a long shot but for the most part it’s a pretty effective way of getting keys and software downloads for purchased software [1], with the glaring exception of a major defect with the download functionality:
So close, yet so far
The download interface helpfully gives you some advice to use a download manager – because lets face it, browser downloaders suck universally – Firefox, Chrome and IE all have poor quality download functionality.
However by download manager, Microsoft actually mean “some Microsoft application you should download and run to download the file”. I’ve *never* had a good experience with vendor download managers, not to mention the fact I’m wanting to download this file to a GUI-less Linux KVM host, so this option is right out.
The next logical option is to download with the browser and just grab the download URL – however as shown above, clicking the download button won’t provide a real URL it instead runs a bit of javascript which then directs the browser to the actual download URL.
It’s not uncommon behavior, but it’s damn annoying – browsers know how to download a file, you don’t need javascript to make it happen and it breaks the ability to copy and paste the link directly into a download manager.
When annoying companies use javascript to obfuscate the download URL, the next trick is to start the download with the browser, then go to the download window and copy the real URL out from there.
However, this still fails:
Thou shalt not pass!
Looks like Microsoft is doing some clever checks, possibly with cookies, user agent and IP, or some combination of all of above and refuses the download manager you’ve chosen. >:-(
With a bit of digging around it would be possible to make a solution to work around this, but it’s a major PITA that they do all this pointless obfuscation and I don’t know if I do enough downloads from there to justify the effort to find and make a proper solution to work around Microsoft’s failings.
What really annoys me, is that I’ve already BROUGHT the product and you need a license key in order to EVEN USE IT after you’ve downloaded – it’s not like someone else is going to figure out the randomly generated download path for my session, download the ISO and somehow get a free copy of Windows Server….
I can go to The Pirate Bay and download Microsoft ISOs in a matter of minutes, there’s no point trying to restrict the download ability of your paying customers, the ISOs are already shared – usually pre-hacked to remove activation.
The result is needing to download the ISO over a DSL line to my workstation and upload it back over that same DSL line (oh god the slowness) to get it to the customer’s server, something which is extremely annoying and wasteful for my data cap.
I wish Microsoft would just make their ISO archive available for download off FTP already. :-(
[1] As a side note, I really, really wish I could just buy MS software online via this center and be done without having to deal with NZ’s resellers who don’t add any value, just overhead to purchasing this stuff.
I recently signed up with IRD’s (New Zealand’s Tax Department) online Kiwisaver service, so I could view the status of my payments and balance of New Zealand’s voluntary superannuation scheme.
The user sign up form is pretty depressing (and no, not just because it’s about signing up to tax rather than cool stuff):
The 70s called, they want your security consultants back.
My first concern is passwords being limited to a maximum of 10 characters, it’s way too short for many good passwords (or even better, passphrases), any system should take at least 255 chars without complain.
Secondly, the “forgotten password phrase” is the most stupid thing I’ve ever seen, it’s basically a second password field – if you forget your password, you can contact them and give them this second password…. except that if you’re stupid enough to forget the first password, how the hell are you going to remember a secondary normally never-used password?
I’d also love to know how secure the secondary password phrase requirements are, because since it gives you access into the account, the security is no stronger than whatever you put in here – and how likely are users to choose something good and secure as their “backup phrase”?
This is some pretty simple security concepts and I’m a bit dismayed that IRD managed to get these so wrong – at least it shouldn’t be hard to correct….