Laen Aggregated

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol
..An open protocol for messaging systems.

Some implementations of AMQP:

• Apache QPID
• RabbitMQ

• OpenAMQ

  And some more information about it:

• http://www.amqp.org/

Solaris patching is, frankly, a pain.

Patch Check Advanced makes it less painful—even pleasant.

It’ll automatically download the patch list from Sun, correlate it against what you have on your system, and present you with a list of what needs to happen. You can tell it to install all recommended patches, all security patches, or all the patches that don’t require a reboot (saving those for special occasions).

Extremely cool tool.

X4100s have a pretty cool integrated lights-out management card, but it doesn’t have an easily integrate with Conserver.

To fix, I created an expect script named “ilom-connect” like this:

#!/usr/bin/expect -f
expect { 
"(yes/no)?"    {exp_send "yesr"; exp_continue; }
"password: " {exp_send "r"; }
}
expect "\-> "
send "cd /SP/consoler"
send "startr"
expect "(y/n)?"
exp_send "yr"

console x4100 {
include sun-ilom;
exec ssh -l admin x4100-m;
type exec;
initcmd "/usr/local/sbin/ilom-connect";
}

I spent the weekend loading Nexenta on my two home PCs.

Nexenta is basically Ubuntu on an OpenSolaris kernel.  This gives you all the awesomenes of Ubuntu (apt-get, gnome, kde, GNU tools), with all the awesomeness of OpenSolaris (zones, ZFS, DTrace).

Some cool things:

• The opensolaris packages are available via apt-get.  I wanted to set up some zones, so I did an “apt-get install sunwzoner sunwzoneu”.


• “zoneadm -z zone1 install” fires off debootstrap and creates a Nexenta Zone.


• The install is super-easy.  Just boot off the CD and answer a few questions.

I really hate Linux Software RAID.  I hate it so much that I don’t use it.  This meant that my home storage was more or less unprotected, which sucks.  I don’t have anything irreplacable on these servers, but still, it’s good form to RAID.

Creating a mirror is as easy as:

1. zpool create -m /storage zstorage mirror c1d0p0 c2d0p0

   Adding another mirrorset to this pool is as easy as:

2. zpool add zstorage mirror c3d0p0 c4d0p0

   ..Which gives me 560GB of RAID10 storage with two commands.   Now I have room for a complete nightly backup of my laptop, including incrementals (thanks, ZFS snapshots!), plus a backup of my “every photo I’ve ever taken” directory.

So, I wanted to play with a python package, but I didn’t want to install it into my primary python distribution tree just yet. I couldn’t find out how to override “site-packages”, though.

Finally, I found this:

Create a file called “setup.cfg” in the directory that has your “setup.py”. In it, put:
[install]
install_lib = /var/tmp/test-blort/lib
install_scripts = /var/tmp/test-blort/bin

Run your setup.py, and away you go.

Okay, valuable things when learning ruby:

• ri – This is like “perldoc”. Use it to view the live ruby documentation.
• irb – Interactive Ruby. This is like the perl debugger.
• IRB Tab Completion—Use this to view every available method on every object.
• gems – A packaging system and source code repository (kinda like CPAN)

• RubyGems

If you get this CUPS error, it may mean that you don’t have write permission to your CUPS spool directory (/var/spool/cups, by default).

Here’s the build flags I used for building a 64-bit GCC for Solaris 9 (using Sun’s Forte C compiler). This uses the GNU binutils ld and as.

export GCC_EXEC_PREFIX=
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=

 cd build;
        test -d gcc-4.0.2 || gtar -jxvf ../src/gcc-4.0.2.tar.bz2
        test -d objdir && rm -rf objdir 
        mkdir objdir
        cd objdir
                CC="cc -xarch=v9" ../gcc-4.0.2/configure  
                        --prefix=/apps/gcc/4.0.2 
                        --enable-languages=c,c++ 
                        --with-ld=/apps/binutils/stable/bin/ld 
                        --with-as=/apps/binutils/stable//bin/as 
                        --enable-threads=posix 
                        --disable-shared 
                        --enable-multilib
                while ! gmake -j16 bootstrap MAKE=gmake BOOT_CFLAGS="-g -O2 -m64"; do
                        true;
                done

Since this isn’t documented anywhere in the ruby install docs that I can find… If you want your Ruby build to have openssl support, you’ll need to compile with—with-openssl-dir=, pointing at your OpenSSL build.

It seems kind of basic, but it doesn’t show up in a ./configure—help, and it’s not anywhere in the docs that I can find.

Okay, just upgraded from Wordpress 1.2.2 to 1.5-cvs.

Gotchas:

• upgrade.php/upgrade-functions.php bug
• Links no longer show up on the sidebar. I hacked together a get_links_sidebar function that spits out a block in the right format. Usage: < ?php get_links_sidebar(); ? >

• Styles are now themes. Get yer themes at WP-Themes.info.

The trick to sysadminning is doing the most with the least amount of home-written code. That’s how you make it a fun challenge. Anyone can brute force a problem. The skill—and the fun—is in solving it with style.

Sysadmin Thought Challenge— Here’s a theoretical problem. How do you solve it?
“Let’s say you have 500 machines, and 5000 users. How do you do authentication?”

Why not take it a step farther? Heck, set up challenges, and provide the machines (UMLs) to do them.